Sam Parr and a co-host show how AI voice agents can answer phones and qualify leads for small businesses. They built one on bland.ai for their recruiting company that takes calls, gathers requirements, and hands warmed leads to salespeople. The agents could replace call centers and work for restaurants, plumbers, and HVAC companies.
I think there are gonna be a bunch of interesting voice services for everything from restaurants to HVAC companies to dental reception that are just like, answer the phone. I think that's one of the ideas we had. And it could be informational, like, we are open from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Um, or a lead generation business where I'm like, well, like my plumbing broke and like, are you available tomorrow at 3:00 PM?
I'm a huge believer in this. Huge. Like this simple idea. So, you know, like when the, when the internet came out, it was like, oh, it's going to be so crazy. But like one of the obvious things was like, hey, every restaurant just kind of needs their menu online. Like you should put your, you should put your restaurant exists where it's located and then put your menu up there even as a PDF. That's still like value add for you. It's like it became where every business needed a website. And now what I think it's going to have is that every business needs an agent. And so what's the agent for most small businesses? So like, I called pest control cuz we always get a bunch of like mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason. And try calling pest control. Nobody ever picks up the damn phone. And because there's usually, it's usually run by like, it's like Mike's Pest Control and Mike's out in the field doing things all day controlling the pest, actually doing work. And so he doesn't pick up the phone. And so then you leave a message and you're like, you, and then, but you call 10 of 'em because you're not sure if Mike's gonna get back to you. So then it becomes whoever gets back to you first. Mike loses a business because Mike doesn't pick up the phone. Mike also is not going to hire somebody to just sit there and wait for the 3 phone calls a day that he's going to get. It just wouldn't make sense. But now you go and I built one of these in our like AI, uh, like weekly tutoring session that I have basically. I was like, I want to build one of these. So we have the same problem for our, our offshore recruiting business. So we own an offshore recruiting business called Somewhere. It's like you can fire, you can find amazing talent. They're just somewhere out in the world. You just have to find them. So what Somewhere does, they find you elite talent. Now the big problem, if you go to somewhere.com, it's like you say, okay, I'm looking for a designer, or I need somebody who could do, who get me leads for my marketing business or my real estate business, or I need somebody to do data entry, right? So you have all these jobs. Now the button on the site is basically like, you wanna start hiring? Fill out this form. So you fill out the form and then it's like, awesome, we will get back to you soon. Or it's like, schedule a call. Here's the call tomorrow or 2 days from now. And no matter how many sales agents we have, a call tomorrow is not as good as talk to me right now about what I need. Because right now is when I'm interested. Right now is when I'm on your website. Right now is when I'm not thinking about other variations of how I might solve this problem. And you have an opportunity to sell me. And so, Sam, I don't know if you've seen this, but like, check out bland.ai. This is, this is the one I built.
If the answer is, have you seen this? Assume it's no.
And my mind is being blown by all this stuff, but basically it lets you build a phone agent for yourself. So I went on here and I built a phone agent. So I built a guy who can answer the phone so that when somebody goes to somewhere and they want to, they want to hire somebody, it'll be like, awesome. What are you hiring for? Have you ever hired overseas? And you're like, yeah, I have. It's like, cool. Um, tell me what you're looking for in a couple, you know, a couple sentences. Oh, great. It sounds like what you're looking for is somebody who could be a developer for your Shopify store. Our, our normal budget for that is $2,000 a month. Would that work for you? Or are you looking for something a little bit more, a little bit less? And then it answers it. It basically does the intake, the initial sales call. For you. And it's like, no problem. We've hired this month for 85 other Shopify brands who are looking for Shopify developers. You're in good hands. Uh, we do this all the time. We will, uh, I'm going to start looking for candidates now. I'm going to email you tomorrow with 3 candidates. How does that sound? And the person's like, great. I guess I can just like wait for that to happen or it'll pull from our existing database and be like, here's an example resume. This is the type of person we'd be looking for. Would this person fit your needs? Yes or no? So then the human salesperson will come into work and see a ticket that's like, the AI agent did the initial sales call and found the customer's requirements and kind of already warmed the sale up and told the customer what they needed to know, the things you repeat every time on the phone. And now you could follow up with a more bespoke answer for that person. That's the future that I see. I wasn't able to fully build that. I did like a prototype of it, but that's what I think websites, even like ours, which is an internet business, should have. Which means that every plumbing and pest control and restaurant, they're going to have their version of that.
This is 100% way better than having a call center, or it might, or it will be when it, as long, so long as it works as good. But this is absolutely the way to go.
All right. If you liked that clip, there's a full conversation with a lot more just like that. Just follow my finger. It is right here.
