 Hey, good afternoon everybody time story. I'm with Liz Trotter our guest today is Paul Dumas, and this is smart business moves Coming from his penthouse suite in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina I wish the weather was as nice as it is right there That is what it looks like. Yeah, very nice. Oh, it's not too bad today. The Sun's shining God, it was a wonderful weekend. I felt bad all the Memorial Dayers coming in on this weekend It was like 56 degrees Saturday morning. Yeah, have fun at the beach Where are you Paul? I'm literally sitting in my office in Murl's, England, South Carolina, which is about I don't know 1215 miles south of the airport in Myrtle Beach So the skyline behind me is about I don't know 18 20 miles north of me He's just a couple hours up the road from from me, Liz I think door-to-door when I went down there it was about 82 miles door-to-door So it's not too bad. It was a beautiful drive So what are we talking about today? Well, well actually before we talk about what we're talking about. Maybe we should talk about who is Who's on the call today? This is your first time on smart business moves. Isn't it Paul? No, we did one Several weeks ago where we were talking about just how scary is AI gonna be. Oh, yeah What am I thinking? Yeah And today we were talking about maybe taking it to the next level and maybe get a little bit further into the week So what what we can do? Oh My gosh, that was only a few weeks ago. My memory is shot Oh, I could be wrong. It may have been three months ago for all I remember, but it was it was this year It was this year. I don't know and and really now that you say that it was not that long ago Really, we're we're heavy into the AI weeds there and it was it hasn't been that long since AI's been a big thing. So Yeah, and it changes every week. It seems like Oh Absolutely, we'll have to see It's fun though. I Just got the thing from Bard Saying hey sign up One one thing that we do on smart business moves from time to time when we think about it is share piece of information that we think might be useful and Paul one of the things that we we track from time to time is a thing that Department of Labor dies called a jolt's report and it's job openings and Lts job openings and can't remember Anyway Today today is that Wednesday? don't report and There were some surprised people it was Yeah Just at a high level These are the 2023 numbers and it was over. These are these are in thousand So it was like 10 and a half million job openings in January It went down below 10 million almost 10 million, but it was going down. It went down to 9.7 million in March Pop back up again in April and everybody was expecting it to continue to trend down. So You know, we thought that there were going to be more You know fewer open jobs Implying that you know, there might be more more people in the job market This is this is not good news for those of us who are looking to to hire people because they're more open jobs in the market now then There has been over the last two months What what happened? What what is what's being attributed? I? Haven't heard I haven't been able to I just just just caught the headline that the jolt's number went back up So I wanted to pull this up, but the economists weren't expecting this There's a big thing going on about you know or is the Fed going to continue to raise interest rates And this is another reason for them to continue to do that to Slow the economy they want to see this job openings number go down Because as long as as long as that number is high Employers are going to keep paying more and more to compete with you know trying to fill them, which will make inflation worse John is saying I'm survey. I don't know what that means Survey says yeah, what do you mean Shawn? He was given he was given the definition of the jolt as a job openings a labor job openings a labor turnover Yeah, labor turnover jolt's report. Thank you Shawn. Good job for bacon Good job. Good job. Let's all something on Facebook where he's got a graduation going on his household. He's got a Eighth grader who's graduating today Which is kind of cool. Yeah There the graduations are such a bigger deal now I have a friend that Actually, it's my daughter's best friend and Her daughter was in a cap and gown graduating from preschool Little tiny cap and gown It was on the the cap was pretty big and then the gown was trailing on the ground Well, I guess anything you could do to make the kids like school better I'm all for it go for it my youngest son Richard graduates from high school Friday And he's going to He's got a really sweet deal there. Yeah, he's he's going to NC State in the fall Congratulations Isn't he going on a full scholarship to indeed he is Can I can I brag just a minute there's a scholarship that NC State has it's called the Park Scholarship and it's you know, basically a leadership-type scholarship and 3,500 kids apply to it and they award 40 of them and he was one of the 40 I had to go through a bunch of interviews and it was kind of a intensive thing, but it was it was cool and I love it. He's a great person to win it too. I mean he's super smart kid Super super bright. Yeah, I think that's exciting More time He's more of an adult he can he can carry him, you know, we should have him do smart business moves He's actually better conversationalist than I am by far knows more stuff too He's actually been an adult the entire time. I've known him He has always been very mature All right, so we digress thank you for indulging us Paul You know I've been been having some discussions with Paul He's kind of a wealth of knowledge on a number of things from a from a digital marketing standpoint But with how AI has become a more relevant thing Recently or at least certainly getting a lot more attention He's been doing a lot of research and figuring out a lot of stuff and has some insight in terms of What digital marketing and SEO is going to look like and what websites are going to look like in the future and how all that's going to work and He's got a crystal ball Share with us a little bit in terms of Some things that we might need to be thinking about now in order to be prepared for the changes that are coming down the road Cool Tell us tell us And of course it's being recorded. So when I'm wrong half the time, but that's okay Oh, yeah, well, we'll have you back in a year. We'll be loud takes Well, we were talking about I Don't even remember where it was. I should have looked it up But last month or last couple weeks, you know, Bill Gates was doing a symposia where they were He predicted that within five years sites like Google and Amazon would be obsolete because AI He's gonna take over everything whether that's true or not. We'll see but his vision was that everybody would basically be able to Customize their own personal AI assistants that would go out into The electric globe or whatever you want to call it the internet and would filter all the information to be customized for you So why would I ever have to go to Amazon.com if I want something the AI tool be able to find it There may be, you know a monochrome of truth to that and so what we have to do is think about okay We have all been told of the years that our website is kind of the first impression of our our business, right? Yeah, you got to do what you got to do to get people to see your website Whether it's running ads online or social media things or search engine optimization I don't see that 100% going away But what's gonna happen is with AI and we're gonna have another channel that we're gonna have to pay attention to of where We can get eyeballs where we can get visitors to our our information our website essentially You know because say ten years ago People were just excited because hey, I can have a website I could go in and run some ads and we knew that people were looking for instance for house cleaners and pick a city city it was a what and where type paradigm it was easy and Not everybody was doing it yet. So if you knew what you're doing you could get to the top pretty easily and then Smartphones came around and suddenly everything became Geo tag everybody knows where we are at all times. I mean, I'm sitting here with a tablet. I've got my phone The internet knows where I am usually more specifically than I know myself so then instead of looking for what and where we just could look for stuff near me and Siri and all these little tools would go well, we know where near me is because we know exactly where you are We've been track again whether you like it or not Still it was the internet though You were still going to a place a website or a Yelp listing or a Facebook page There was something tangible you're going to where you had an opportunity to impress that person with Whatever information or functionality and you could have a dynamic this and all that With AI when it starts to take over search There's it's going to create in my opinion the need for almost two different Not websites, but two different sides of the same coin in terms of the information that you present So think of your website like this you have the user experience, which is what you have now You know most of us business owners we have a website that's your user experience if it's a residence of cleaning service to your site as Yeah, 10 to 15 pages. You got a pretty home page to say we're the best meeting business here Give us a call Then you've got your services with your checklist and you've got a reviews page Maybe you haven't about us page and the police work here page that kind of thing that's all the user experience we all try and make it as pretty as possible as informative as possible and Make it worse the average visitor to your site can get the information they need within 60 to 120 seconds Then they're going to lose interest and go somewhere else and we we got to do it in you know It succinct ways of presenting the information to impress them to get them to pick up the phone That's perfectly fine. You're always going to need that on some level It's like designing a beautiful brochure or designing a beautiful informative business card You're always going to have to have that out there so that people can go and it becomes a credibility statement You're it's like having your billboard on every highway in your area. We don't do that. So our website becomes that But with AI we're also going to have to have enough content on our site So that we can be the answer to everybody's AI questions So right now, let's think of a just a typical cleaning business website For instance, maybe they have a frequently asked question section and maybe they have somewhere between 15 to 30 questions You know who provides the cleaning supplies. Well, unless you specifically Requested that we use a particular product. We provide all the supplies Some cleaning services may use the homeowner's vacuum to keep Cross-declination all that but the answer to that question may be 50 words, right? And that's the user experience Let's be succinct to the point We don't want our users coming to our website and having to read encyclopedia Britannica just to get an answer That's the user experience, but then how do we make that question be an answer To AI and you have to be as possible. So perhaps As I would envision it you almost have to behind the scenes Database of current information base That instead of having a 50 word answer to that question Maybe you have to have a 500 or a thousand word answer to that question incorporates Not only do we provide the cleaning products But please remember that we also clean in these areas and then that engine can digest all that information And you become the authority For that question and then imagine having to multiply that question towards how many different ways can people look for you online? And if you're talking to a device that's AI based How many hundreds if not thousands of variations of questions are people going to ask where you really really want to be the answer? And so in the short term we've been experimenting with some techniques Let's um for the sake of simple simplification Most websites out there use WordPress. It's just a software program that sites they're built on It's the most popular one in the world doesn't make it the best one, but it's the most popular one So let's assume in WordPress and you could actually add functionality through either like a glossary or a Knowledge base a knowledge base a lot of software companies use knowledge bases where you go into a page And there's a search bar at the top and you search and it gives you a list of articles on different topics. That's The knowledge base is a fancy word for like a help desk type thing of documents Most cleaning services right now don't have the need for that level of information But maybe in the future in the very near future you want to have either a simple little glossary or a simple knowledge base so that Right now maybe you're an eco-friendly cleaning service and you use Natural green products well in the future you may want to actually list all those products and Have paragraphs describing why they are work the best and if there's a material data safety sheet on it Then go ahead and include a copy of that You just want to have it be as robust as possible But that information almost has to be hidden from the user experience because no user for your website cares that much about Reading all that information they're not going to come into your site and spend three hours reading everything But if I'm asking my AI tool, hey, I need to find a house cleaner that Uses eco-friendly products so that my kid with asthma doesn't get sick every time you come here Having a little content on your site is structured in such a way The AI can see it. Maybe even google can see it. So it does help with traditional SEO But it doesn't affect the user experience. And that's what we're talking about is How do you structure all of this information where you know the the age old iceberg metaphor the tip of the iceberg above the Water is your user experience and everything below the water It's just an idea of information about your business so that all these AI engines Can come in and see that you're an authority in everything And the challenge is going to be how do we predict what information needs to be in there? so right now we're literally just trying to Build as much information as possible because we don't know how people are going to search in a year Right now they don't know how to do it, but they're going to get good so with all that information that you know an FAQ being several you know hundreds of words as opposed to you know tens of words AI engines would be crawling that and somebody would be asking a question of an AI engine and It would be providing an answer based on your information But would it actually result in you getting a prospective client or would they just be taking information off your website and And giving it to the person asking the question Yes, no, let's say it depends on what the intent of the the person asking the question User intent is a huge part of all of this it always has been So for instance in google People a lot of times as part of an SEO campaign will do blogging and the idea is let's expand how many keywords our site can be found for So you'll see blogs out there that have you know 10 tips for hiring a professional cleaning service or Use this easy guide for cleaning a stainless steel sink. What does that have to do with this cat hair from a sofa? I have what does that have to do with getting a customer almost nothing but It that content allows your site to be found for more variations of keywords Maybe somebody else picks up on a blog article and they Share it on their social media or they link to it from their blog and suddenly you're getting an SEO benefit without even knowing it and When somebody is doing blogging for SEO usually they don't care if they're their Customers are reading those articles. They only care if google is seeing those articles And a lot of this content is going to be the same way if the user intent is to learn more about cleaning a sink Then we don't really care But if the intent is find me a cleaning service that meets x y z criteria Then yes, absolutely It can lead to a customer because the next question when they present Hey, this company meets the criteria for what you just asked. Okay. Can you call them? Please or what's their phone number? You know the next step is the user is going to have Be led just intrinsically to Okay, that's the one I want. Let's contact them that entity that business And the question becomes do they even ever see your website in that process or not? Again going back to that that bill gates conversation He seems to think that nobody's ever going to look at a website again. Eventually. They're just going to get information from their ai Assistant and they're going to trust that ai assistance is not going to mislead them that We don't know a lot about whether that's going to actually become information I mean there's no shortage of articles out now Saying that these ai engines are really good at giving incorrect information and making it sound good But surely that's going to be fixed at some point. I would think so the way Everything is set up now like if I write this really great article on how to You know remove cat hair from a sofa if maybe it ranks number one on the first page in google People click on it. I get seo value if And especially if they're reading the whole article and spending a lot more time on my website I presume I presume that to be true and If chat gbt just basically reads that article and gives them a three paragraph answer from my article I get no value out of that, right? No, not really because Again, it comes back to intent if we're trying to do seo, which is at its core Hey, can I rank better on google when somebody looks for house cleaners near me and you'll target that area Vlogs can serve a purpose because whether that link or that activity comes from halfway around the world or not It just increases your overall popularity in the google algorithm with seo Transitioning towards including ai the approach we've been taking for our clients when we do seo is Trying to localize the content far more than ever like in the blog. So instead of just saying You know, here's a guide to spring cleaning the article may be 10 reasons why hiring company a for your spring cleaning in charleston, south, carolina Is your best bet that kind of thing so that you still get the same idea answering the same kind of Tips for spring cleaning but trying to localize it so that in the future when the ai starts Is asking hey does anybody have any spring cleaning specials in charleston? Then maybe that article plays into the part of the answer to that question because the ai sees that Well, here's two thousand words about spring cleaning and this company is a house cleaner in charleston Let's make them the answer We don't know with 100 certainty that that's how they're going to integrate barn, which is google's ai competitor to chat gpt into Google search algorithm, but it's not a stretch the thing that that's what they're going to do. They're basically First and foremost, I we probably should define what these things are in terms of ai it's ai is only as smart as the data that it consumes And when chat gpt was first launched they came out and said listen, there's a cutoff. I think it was like november 1st 20 2021 2021 that sounds right So if you ask who the president was today, you didn't know because the data was cut off And then you also have these national groups, you know, like The most most popular headline i've seen is like universal music group that owns 50 of the music rights in this in the world Blocking the ai engines from accessing their catalog and pulling information because they felt there were some copyright issues there And there may very well be certainly not a lawyer The supreme court's going to have a fun 20 years talking about what ai's going to do, but not my problem But the ai engine is basically They call it a natural language, you know, it it consumes all Of this content so that it can and its core creatively plagiarize back a good answer doesn't make it a true answer but they consume the information They are prompted by some user. I mean when you go to chat dbt you type in Please give me this and the better the prompt is the better the results of what you get But all it is is a creative way to be able to give you an answer that is Fluid in english or whatever language you're trying to do where i'll use in english where we use chat dbt here So it it's really just a language machine Um, i'm no data scientist a computer scientist, but in some way calling an ai It's almost a misnomer because we also we've all seen the science fiction movies where ai gets smarter This don't go intuition in this system It's a language model if you knew every single word in english language and had access to every novel And every copy of life magazine time magazine the medical journals and you were asked a question You probably could give an articulate answer back That's what this is. It's a language model that can give an articulate answer to just about any question because it's consumed You know the the sum of human knowledge with some restrictions So what we have to do is make sure With our website and the content and all that that we want to make sure we have enough content to hopefully be an answer To whatever people are asking Because once this gets rolled out and fully integrated into all these searches Um You got to be the answer to the question the challenge today is we don't know what all the questions are We can guess, you know, some of them are obvious, but some of them are going to become less obvious Because like even think back to 0708 when siri started taking over and people started talking to siri You can see all these news clips. Oh, I asked siri this got this goofy answer But we're a lot more sophisticated in talking to our devices now than we've ever been and as we get more sophisticated in engaging with these ai language models The quality of the information we get back is going to be Equally better because we're simply better at using the tool And so in six months in a year in five years, we're going to have way more insight into How do I become the answer? You know today there's some tangible things you can do Um, there are services out there We can submit your business to make sure that you're in the siri database the amazon Alexa database You know all these different things so that you can be in It's like the old days go, you know 10 years ago. Let me go get my free yelp listing So the least if somebody searching yelp, I'm in the list Those services already exist for things like Alexa and Google you're already in there by virtue of being at google, but siri there's gonna be I would assume some methodology to be able to submit your information to these ai engines so that They're aware you exist in google's case You probably won't have to because google all they have to do is flip a switch and their bar system can Read the google index and then suddenly it knows everything that google.com knows but It comes back to structuring the content and trying to have some sort of a plan some sort of an intelligence going into the information that's on you know that is online about your business and balancing the user experience with Boy if I could just have an encyclopedia about my business and You know even down to the procedures nobody wants to put their quality control checklist on the website for a customer to see creates issues and Just nobody does it but maybe in the behind the scenes stuff You do want to put that into it for the ai to see sure You know it goes back to like the product you use and the material data sheets all this stuff Nobody puts that stuff on their website because they know their consumer doesn't want they don't care They don't want to read this but maybe for the eye they do I'm sorry, and it's just way too much Right, they can do this. It's just No, it's not what i'm looking for Go ahead. Well, if they're asking questions and ai is reading this and they're you know, give me a cleaning company near me that uses Green cleaning products that can claim my home on saturday that will Send a three person team because I want them out of my house quickly It kind of filters down the whole sales process too I would think that you're going to get less bad leads because the ones that are coming to you You're exactly what they're looking for Yes, as long as you have the information where basically that lead is going to qualify or disqualify themselves before you even know they exist Yeah, so your clothes you might you might Not get an overwhelming amount of leads, but the ones that you're getting off of that would probably have a very high close rate They're probably Sold before they contact you know Yeah, theoretically that that absolutely would make sense I mean, let's say today the average cleaning service that they're doing everything right maybe they close 25 of all their leads because 20 percent of them are tire kickers 20 percent of them you hire somebody else before you can get them on the phone You know all this What if instead of closing 25 percent of all leads you start closing 40 percent of all leads even if your Number of total number of leads go down goes down 20 percent Your net growth is still going to be there if you get pre-qualified. We've been trying to do it for years With hiring. How do you pre-qualify a hiring candidate so that I don't have to waste an hour on a zoom meeting just to find out You're not you don't qualify for the job, you know We've all been doing that so what if we can do the similar type process where The information that you present about your business is basically honing in and defining the sweet spot of who your customers are I was talking to somebody the other day they were saying that Please please make sure in any content you do in any ads you do Don't mention apartment cleaning because they live in a college town They know that they don't ever want to go out to do a 500 square foot apartment So that's a little bit, you know, so if you can if you can hone in on what the sweet spot is for your market You know and actually I would say the sweet spot is you know the homeowner with the 2000-3000 square foot home that They're probably still working not retired. They probably have kids that are a little older But they're still at home, you know, you can identify who the sweet spot of your client is but also depending on your market Like for instance, if I'm in South Carolina, people a lot of times here look for maid services If I'm in Texas, they're looking for house cleaners. If I'm in the pacific northwest people look for home cleaning services It's all the same thing, but you have to know the nuances of that For the specific market just because there's slight language changes We know offense to all of us in the south, but if you were to get dropped in seattle, all of us would be laughed at As soon as we open their mouth, I don't consider myself having an accent But I have family from wisconsin when I get on the phone with them. They laugh at me. Oh, man. You sound like a hit. You're okay Fair enough. That's hot dude. We have some experience with that paul. We, um Centralized a call center here in charleston and we were supporting some companies in the northwest and the accent was a Very yeah One of one of many Well, there was an article last week on something that forbs or forts or something like that that they did a study Some university did a study that people with a deep southern accent Earned less money over their lifetime just because of intrinsic biases in society I was like, okay, I can You know, I can see that's why before everything got shipped overseas all the call centers were in kansas because that was considered non-descript accent world, you know You go to witch talk kansas 20 years ago and the whole city was just a series of call centers so Here's one Are you aware are there any products out there that will Like just real-time phone conversation will change The tone of my voice and my accent to make it more Appealing to whatever demographic or part of the country. I'm talking to There are voice modulators, but I don't know that they're necessarily Integrated into a telephone service. Of course on here I could have a voice modulator on my microphone that even before it gets into the streaming service Would change it So there but it's all it's all two step types You can change the pitch and stuff like that But actually the the cadence and in the accent to make it sound like You know, I'm from boston or make it sound like I don't know. There may be some novelty apps to do that I just That's a million dollar idea that I just put out here. I don't know if it's a real world You know, I don't know if it's real world There's no need because ai Can make the calls itself It doesn't Ai the call it can have all the information and ai can answer the questions better than you can Would it would it would it be smart enough to answer it in a certain accent that would be most appealing to Yes That'd be an interesting concept being able to geo locate or geo target a voice response Based on where you are If I've got a customer in a southeast My voice is different than the north last The accent It's almost like incorporating and there's something called neuro linguistic programming integrating that into a digital operator Which would be an interesting concept boy talking about getting off topic, but That uh, that would be interesting One of the things that I'm wondering is won't it be nice When we get a new client And we can just ask ai based on everything that that person has posted anywhere every everywhere Of course, you know, the they'll have the prompts will be there for us. The prompts are going to be easy in a while Um, tell us what they care about in their home Tell us what to clean What are the top 10 things that we should count on or that we should focus on in mrs. Johnson's home They're gonna know that ai's gonna know it's gonna be able to tell us This is what they care about. This is the things that they buy these are This is how you should clean mrs. Johnson's home The irony is the irony is that the better the technology gets for compiling that type of a profile it's running concurrent with Especially in europe, but we follow it the concerns over privacy where they're actually blocking the sophisticated tools from even being able to do that So as we get more sophisticated with being able to Answer that type of a question We're running up against more and more laws that prevent you when there's i'm not here to say which way it's right If I could unplug from the internet sometimes I'd be thrilled, you know, but The internet knows way more about us than we'd ever care to admit and we just kind of go through life hoping it doesn't matter But we are we're we're Looking like it made central and looking at all the communications that we we have with with customers to see if we can use ai to customize More constructions for a home or identify if they're at risk or a lot of different things, but You know the idea I mean we do We do like two-way texting and an email and stuff like that. So we we we we capture a ton of information Just through maintaining that relationship. We're just trying to see Can we use that information to Better identify what they are what they really want and come up with a better Scope of work than what we would get if we just ask them Well the other thing that you could do and the technology is already here To build it it's sophisticated, but if you could get a profile for a customer of what they like don't like There are there is technology already here that it would build a dynamic web page Like a landing page for that user That focuses on what They're interested in The e-commerce folks, you know the big like zappos with their shoes and things like that Where if they have a profile of You know you log in And you know what you bought the best example I have is I use me shopping for the lion fuck up in the carolinas And there's an app and you can save all kinds of money But what they do is they present deals based on your previous 12 months of shopping experience To try and get you to go back into the store instead of going to the competitor That technology already exists. It's just you have to get access to the information and so The knowledge of the small business or local business is getting that kind of consumer information It's to be able to you know, you know last six months they've hired three Things because they're finicky Would it be nice to kind of soft pedal that leads you don't have the headache I mean there's always or if someone fired the last one because they forgot to clean the top of the refrigerator Would it be nice to know that so that you could go ahead and put that on their customer record and whatever you do Don't forget to clean the top of the refrigerator But you don't always have access to that level of data It's not like facebook is questioning all their members about their peccadillos when it comes to cleaning a house It'd be nice if they did but It's just a matter of how do you get that level of information? And I know it may essentially you've got the feedback system where you can analyze that But you got to get the information before You connect on so the it's just You know the whole sales process the idea of sending out a Template to to prospects a marketing campaign You know eventually those are all going to be customized. Everybody's going to get a different template based on What information they've given you what Pages they've been to on your website You know the stuff that the data you've collected on them. You'll give them more of a customized Pitch than than what we currently capable are doing It may be literally as simple as this if you have tracked a user on your website And you see this particular user spent 45 seconds on your cleaning checklist in only 15 seconds on Your pricing page Then you know in the quote to make sure to give them as comprehensive of a checklist as possible because that's what they're using To justify the expense of the service or if somebody comes to your home page And the only thing they do is go to the quote page then they probably don't care too much about the specifics They're more price sensitive And so you decide maybe your follow-up email to them includes a first time promotion To get them to buy into the program You know, it's exactly what you're talking about but in a tangible sense Just look at their the user journey through your business and your website And based based on certain criteria of how long they spent in different sections You can tailor that follow-up email to that experience That guarantee is someone who spends 60 seconds looking at your cleaning checklist is more concerned with the details than someone who just jumps to the get a quote page And that's just one example, but there's a lot of different ways of segmenting that information on your site You know, and maybe someone maybe you do have a list of the products you use to provide services And someone spends three minutes reading through that then maybe you have an email follow-up to them That said hey, did you know that our general purpose cleaner is xyz? And here's three reasons why we chose that product and it's great Oh one that your your service sales process is almost selling the product You chose to use to help close the service side of it So yeah, I can see a value certainly in being able to parse that information out of something as simple as like google analytics, you know There'd be valuable there'd be value there You know paul, you know dawn's got a question that kind of fits into this She's asking are we able to use ai to handle sales calls? Today i'm not aware of anything that does that in the sense that we're talking about but i it's coming And I know we've touched on this in other conversations tom, but There's going to be a time where someone whether it's at and t or comcast or call rail one of these big phone companies is going to have a digital operator that answers the phone and You won't be able to tell you're not talking to a human because you can engage with it You can ask questions and it'll have access to the answers and it can make It can be trained in how it guides the conversation It can be trained as a sales person that is effective now how effective is going to depend on how well we train that tool You know if all it is is giving a price because you integrate into a price System that's not making a sale. That's collecting people who are price conscious And suddenly you've got a hundred customers that are all price conscious and they're constantly shopping around So it's all going to come down all of these engines doesn't matter what it is They're only as good as the information that we use to train it So if you know you can break down your sales process and you know that there's five six steps In the average buying decision or if you know exactly at one point Someone the light bulb goes off and they've decided to say yes And you can document and articulate that process and then train an ai engine To duplicate it then theoretically speaking you can have a consistent sales process where you don't have the human nature of Oh, I've got a sales person. They're really good But about every three weeks their sales go down because they're tired of making phone calls and tired of saying the same thing over and over again You know once you perfect it then there should be no inconsistencies at all in that process because it's going to Be able to address any concern and it's going to be consistent. There won't be the human nature of Oh, wow, I made no sales today, but then I woke up this morning and I stubbed my toe and I got Notification of my insurance premium going up. So I'm just having a bad day So I'm not going to be as effective on the sales, you know on the phone today With ai obviously if you train it right there is none of that um So I think it's coming, but it's not here yet and there's not You know In six months are all three of us going to be doing this show But none of us are going to be here because it's going to be a digital avatar of us having a conversation Your personal ai avatar is going to have a conversation with mine. Maybe but it's not there yet That's what we're working towards Just get a digital version of me so I can just sit on the beach all day and nobody's going to know the difference Oh my god, you know And when you when you when you ask the question in context in context of sales In the home services business sales is pretty much what they refer to is like inbound sales Prospects are reaching out to you and saying hey, I'm interested in getting my home claim. Can you tell me, you know More can you give me give me a quote? um Business to business sales a lot of it's what they call outbound sales It's like cold calling and it's digital. It's a lot of stuff. They get lists of prospects and Do all kinds of things to try to Proactively convince people. I mean we saw made central, you know part of that's outbound where we just you know No people have cleaning businesses that would benefit by having made central and We send them emails and call them and do different things that's called outbound sales There are ai tools out there that build lists and I would suspect the day is coming when they're going to have the ability To do that with consumers and they'll look at your social media feed. They'll look at your buying habits They'll look at all kinds of stuff to determine that you know This person is pretty much giving us all the indications that they'd really groove on a house cleaning service Maybe they look at at google reviews and find out that you gave your house current house cleaning company a one-star review Next thing, you know, you're showing up on some type of outbound marketing list for a competitor The I mean those tools They might be out there now, you know, there's some some some ai list building tools, which are pretty interesting Well, that's absolutely true and the way I would see it. Let's let's use made central outbound sales as a tool I mean, it's a very robust complicated 100 moving part program. You could use an outbound ai To sell that service, but I think in the short term What you're going to actually tangibly be selling is probably getting people to sign up For some sort of an introductory webinar type thing. You're not going to be selling the software You're going to be selling an opportunity to learn more about the software and keeping it simple To go back to the residential cleaning business You're probably not going to be selling residential cleaning services in the short term You're probably going to be selling an opportunity to get a customized cleaning quote And what you're trying to do is set a time to be able to connect with a human being Whether it's through a webinar or zooming or just even scheduling a phone call So that you're outbound sales team and the residential cleaning the biggest complaint I hear consistently is I can call somebody a hundred times and never answer the phone that whoever is doing the follow-up sales in a cleaning business That's the worst job, you know, just banging your head against the window trying to get a hold of people Well, if you can automate that through AI And have some sort of a script that the AI can follow You know, oh somebody answered a I can kick in. Hey, thank you for requesting a quote from company a I'd be happy to answer any questions you have and and give you a question and let the AI Do that process so the sales staff staff can just come in at the end to do the final close it's kind of like the old In the old days you go buy a new car and somewhere towards the end of the mix If you actually made it that far you talk to a manager The salesman would evaporate and suddenly the heavy weight would come in or if you've ever done It's not as popular anymore, but the old timeshare things, you know and The AI is going to be the front line sales process And then if you if you make it through certain criteria Then you get to talk to the human being and that human being all they are is a closer They're not a sales person anymore. They're just a closer And I can see some serious benefit to that and using AI to do that so that even if you're buying lists and doing robo dialing with AI And you talk to You know, you make a thousand phone calls a day to just homeowners in your market Out of those thousand people, maybe four people are qualified to actually get a quote and those are the four people in your sales staff It's talk to you. Yeah. Okay. That's fine because you can buy those lists And you can do most of that technology to exist today It's just a matter of how do you integrate with AI so that it can be more effective Yeah, and today's world and software we're on the main central world the the initial contact is called a sales development rep or an sdr And they're working the lists and you know, they're in linkedin. They're in social media They're doing emails and making phone calls yada yada yada Catch somebody. Hey got this awesome piece of software You want to know more about it and if they're able to convince somebody? Yes, they pass out off to the county executive a sales engineer somebody else to actually Sell the software their whole job is to get people on the top of the sales funnel And AI could do a lot of that More probably they can't even be on just parsing the data to figure out who would be And could they eventually do that for home services? Yeah, maybe The challenges can be what what sources are we able to pull information from? You know the rules going to change right now It's kind of the wild west out there if you can get to it on the internet. It's fair game Yeah, and that that may change. We'll see There's a lot of high level of discussions about that kind of thing going on A lot of discussions about is AI the end of civilization as we know it or we all you know It's just going to be the terminator I also saw a a reddit thread where Everybody on this thread a ton of people were like, oh, please Everybody's making a big to do about nothing. This is just a flash in the pan like what I was shocked to see that Thousands of people that are just like Eh, this is nothing How is How is this nothing? Yeah, that that's kind of surprising too at this stage you you always You always have that in every major Paradigm shift has that but this seems to be pretty It's pretty obvious. This is going to be the biggest technological leap in my lifetime at least I don't think there's any doubt about that at all This is bigger than the vcr. We just have to figure out how best to use it This is bigger than the microwave. I would say it's on par with television and satellite How about the phone? Yeah The cell phone and the cell phone is Yeah Radio is a pretty big deal at the time Back in the day Telegraph in the day Oh We're kind of getting towards the top of the hour here Your wealth of knowledge about ai for for sure, but that's just the tip of the iceberg you're Have a broad scope of knowledge in a lot of areas and You've incorporated that into a business and you've spent a lot of time working in the residential cleaning industry You want to take a minute and just just talk about you know your business and the services you provide Oh, sure. Um, well, I'm owner of a company called marketing for cleaners We specialize in any kind of internet marketing anything from website design and redesign to search engine optimization A lot of online advertising through link google ads being at social media things like that But that's the nuts and bolts of what we do, but our approach is really just a consultative We understand Business and we understand the inner workings of things So how can we use our services to complement what you're already doing? It's a little bit of a different process because a lot of times you'll work with companies whether it's a vendor that does I don't pick anything That you almost have to change how you do business just to be able to incorporate them in and we try and work Within the confines of how you already do a business And we've been fortunate over the last 15 years. We've got quite a bit of experience talking to business owners all over the country Probably the biggest fallacy everybody thinks I'm super smart about cleaning businesses and it's not so much that It's just I listen when people talk and I've worked with Whether they're a startup or you know sending 80 people into the field every day I I learned from People like you so that I can then turn around and incorporate that into what I'm sharing with the next person I get to talk to So I've been very fortunate to be able to to connect with a wonderful group I mean the the residential cleaning industry the business owners that that run You know the small medium and large shops around the country By and large, it's just a a wonderful group of people So getting to talk to them is the favorite part of my job all the dirty stuff behind the scenes I'm trying to get other people to do so that I can have these kinds of conversations because it's just fun I truly enjoy learning about Someone's business and all the little nuances of how they do What they do and then being able to kind of share some ways that we can help someone grow and be able You know, it there's a little bit of ego involved If somebody calls me and say wow, I just had 40 leads this week for the first time ever great that you know awesome that makes me feel good it's It's being able to You know the passion that a business owner has You can't get that energy anywhere else and I like Being able to share that with multiple people around the country. It's just it's fun for me and You know, I'm an older guy And I don't do this because I need to put food on the table necessarily been doing a long time I have a wonderful staff that supports me So whether I show up and work on any given day the work gets done So I'm happy to you know to be privileged enough to do that But I do this kind of stuff because I generally enjoy it. It's fun for me and You know for for you know, just about any market, you know in in the u.s. That's out there It's it's it's not hard to find You know website developer near me And if you look at their portfolio, maybe they did a website for a restaurant or a law firm or something like that Are there advantages? I mean, I'm assuming that there are nuances between Building a website that converts for a law firm versus a house cleaning business Are there advantages working with a With a company to do your seo or to build a website that actually has residential cleaning industry experience Well, obviously I'm biased, but I would say absolutely and I could reference back to what something I said 20 minutes ago is Is your local seo design company whatever That works with a pizza restaurant a law firm in a doctor's office in an accounting firm and a carpet cleaner Are they going to know the difference between? Hey, you're in the south made central's the number are made Services the number one keyword. Oh, you're in the midwest and their house cleaners is your number one keyword In the pacific northwest for whatever reason people look for home cleaning There's things you pick up from sheer experience that of course the user experience that we've talked about a lot today understanding What people You know when somebody comes to a website what makes them decide to pick up the phone And there's little subtle things that you could do to guide that experience You almost if you're if a website's well designed It takes you on a journey to a place that you as the business owner want them to go When we design a website for a residential cleaning service The first thing you need to see is what we do where we do and we're the best And here's what we want you to do either fill out a form or call if you can't convey all of that instantly in a pleasing way And we didn't invent this concept I mean nine out of ten cleaning services on their homepage The first thing you see is smiling people and I get a quote button. It's not rocket science, but The more experience you have doing it the easier it is to streamline that process You don't have to do a bunch of ab comparisons because you know what works And then also just knowing what content to put on there, you know Why do people choose because on let's be honest if you don't know The industry if you're just coming into it as a homeowner looking for a cleaning service In your mind the services have been commoditized so much that it's very difficult for you to distinguish between a good one and a bad one That's why so many people are willing to go and hire somebody for ten dollars an hour and pay cash They don't understand why that's a poor decision So you have to be able to integrate with some nuance Those types of things into a design the other part of it is just the psychology of it Um, I'm fortunate enough to work, you know Within a subset of all cleaning owners where most of them aren't trying to just get as many customers as possible They're trying to they want to be the premium service in their market They're happy to be a little more expensive than the competition because they are happy to have loyal customers Who are more concerned with quality over price? And there's certain ways to present that on a website with the quality of the photography the Attitude that you use to describe services You know, do you provide the premier cleaning services or do you provide affordable cleaning services? There's a huge difference in the kind of clientele you would build based on choosing one word I'm gonna I'm gonna we are like out of time here But I wanted to ask you something real quick paul Um at the top it says get more reviews. Can you just really quickly? What is that? I think people will be really interested to hear about that Okay, so there's no shortage of software tools out there and if you use main central It can actually be built into their system But to get more reviews on the sites that you want whether it's google yelp facebook next door you name it You have to ask people and you have to ask everybody Because human nature is if you're getting the service you expect you don't ever give a compliment The only reviews if you don't ask everybody the reviews you tend to get are the people who want to complain Right, let's go to our favorite fast food restaurant pick one anyone and you go in there for lunch once a week If you get the sandwich and fries that you expect to get do you ever ask for the manager go? Hey, good job today No, you just take your food But if there's a problem with it do you ask for the manager? Absolutely People are more likely to complain than the compliments So if you're going to have a good reputation online you better manage it And the best way to manage it is to ask everybody for a review and even with a good tool that Facilitates that process of asking everybody for a review You're still only going to see four or five six percent You know people will will take the time to do it But you that difference can make all the difference in the world because the best way to combat a bad review is to get five good ones Kind of bury it right tools out there that facilitate doing that I've I've taken the url to to your website marketing for cleaners.com. I've dropped it in chat if Anyone in our audience wants to know more about your business or you know have a conversation with you I presume they just hit you up through your website. Yeah, there's a big orange button somewhere out there that says free consultation That's my personal calendar right there. They can take a schedule Talk about wanting to do any uh Making it simple for people. What do you want people to do you want an appointment? Hey, there's my little face He's got some time on thursday tomorrow tomorrow Paul this was uh, this is really good information. I I I love You know having these discussions It's fun to talk about the ai and like the different ways to look at it, right? It's it's not the same old conversation The only advice I would give is don't let it scare you But don't put your head in the sand either Just engage so that you're you're aware of what's going on and you can be prepared to adjust because It's changing every day Look at this as an opportunity You know, it's things are a lot different now than they were 10 years ago Things are going to be a lot different two years from now than they are at the moment, but uh You know information is power and we're you know sharing information here that We need to be incorporating our thought processes people like paul are out there doing some really cool stuff and You know it's it's it's coming. Let's just uh Keep our ear to the ground and be ready to uh put this uh new technology to work when it's available And it's gonna be fun. Look at this fun. It's changed. It's exciting exciting Yeah, so we're gonna call it a wrap for today. Um Next Wednesday you'll be here before we know it So we'll be back next Wednesday five o'clock eastern until then everybody take care. Bye. Bye. Bye y'all. Thanks paul