Are you ready for AI-powered Outbound Sales? with AJ Cassata at Revenue Boost

In this episode, Gene Hammett interviews AJ Cassata, founder of Revenue Boost, about AI-driven lead generation in B2B marketing. AJ emphasizes the collaborative use of AI in sales, warns against full outsourcing, and explains his "10-80-10 rule." He discusses the effectiveness of outbound strategies like cold emailing and LinkedIn messaging, stressing the importance of personalization and audience segmentation. AJ recommends tools like Clay.com for automating outreach and concludes with key factors for successful campaigns, urging listeners to embrace AI while maintaining human oversight and persistence. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 1:15 The Power of AI in Sales 2:57 Challenges in B2B Sales 5:10 Email vs. LinkedIn Effectiveness 8:35 Standing Out on LinkedIn 11:24 Leveraging AI for Personalization 14:18 Common Mistakes in AI Outbound 17:13 The Future of AI in Outbound 20:33 Enhancing Sales with AI 21:57 Key Takeaways for CEOs AI in Modern Sales — Collaboration Over Automation Gene speaks with AJ Cassata, founder of Revenue Boost, about using AI in B2B outbound sales. AJ explains that AI should be treated as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement for human judgment. He cautions against fully outsourcing sales and marketing to AI due to its tendency to "hallucinate" or generate inaccuracies. AJ introduces his "10-80-10 rule," where humans control strategy and final review while AI handles execution at scale. Why Outbound Sales Still Works AJ breaks down why outbound sales, cold email, cold calling, and LinkedIn outreach remain a highly effective and cost-efficient lead generation channel. He emphasizes the importance of testing different approaches and targeting specific industries or companies to generate high-quality leads. The conversation compares email and LinkedIn outreach, noting LinkedIn's higher response rates but lower scalability versus email's broader reach and lower engagement. Personalization, Empathy, and Common Mistakes The discussion turns to practical outreach tactics, with AJ stressing the importance of deep personalization through prospect research and industry understanding. He advises focusing messaging on the prospect's needs rather than promoting services. AJ outlines common AI-powered outbound mistakes, including low outreach volume, generic messaging, and poor audience segmentation, reinforcing that tailored messaging is critical for resonance. Tools, Strategy, and Keys to Success AJ highlights tools like Clay.com that support AI-driven lead research and personalized outreach. He discusses AI's evolving role in sales, particularly for tasks like scheduling and qualification, while underscoring the continued need for human oversight. As the episode concludes, AJ shares five key drivers of outbound success: list quality, messaging, offer strength, outreach volume, and email deliverability. He encourages leaders to experiment, iterate, and remain patient when leveraging AI-powered outbound strategies to grow their sales pipeline. Key Takeaways AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement. AI delivers the best results when paired with human strategy, oversight, and decision-making rather than fully automating sales and marketing functions. Outbound sales remains a high-ROI growth channel. Cold email, cold calling, and LinkedIn outreach continue to produce quality leads at a lower cost compared to many inbound or paid marketing channels. Strategy should follow the 10-80-10 rule. CEOs should stay involved in setting direction and reviewing outcomes while leveraging AI for scalable execution in the middle. Personalization drives performance. Outreach that demonstrates understanding of a prospect's business and challenges consistently outperforms generic, AI-generated messaging. Volume and focus both matter. Effective outbound requires sufficient outreach volume paired with clear segmentation and targeted messaging to avoid diminishing returns. Technology enables scale, not shortcuts. Tools like AI-powered research and personalization platforms can accelerate outbound efforts, but poor inputs still lead to poor results. Human oversight reduces AI risk. AI can hallucinate or make incorrect assumptions, making review and refinement essential before deployment. Five factors determine outbound success. List quality, messaging clarity, offer strength, outreach volume, and email deliverability must all work together for consistent results. Iteration beats perfection. Sustainable outbound success comes from continuous testing, learning, and refinement rather than one-time campaign execution. Leadership mindset matters. CEOs who embrace AI experimentation while maintaining accountability and patience are better positioned to build predictable, scalable pipelines. Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at training.coreelevation.com https://training.coreelevation.com/ to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance. Explore More: training.coreelevation.com https://training.coreelevation.com/ Listen to the Full Episode: Growth Think Tank Podcast https://growththinktank.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I look at it as a collaborator, not an employee. So almost like someone that you work with on your team, but not something that you just say, hey, go do this thing and like good luck. Right? I think it's dangerous to fully outsource something 100% to AI, because we all know that it makes mistakes and hallucinates. Sometimes it'll do the most complex things for me really well, but then it'll mess up two plus two equals four. Right? So it's always going hallucinates. And you always need to have a human involved at some point. Like I like to come in at the beginning and the end. So I call it the 108010 rule where like the first 10% I'm there to help kind of set the stage and guide AI what I want it to do. And then it does that middle part. And then I come in at the end and usually like most of the time, not always, there's definitely times where it's, it's first attempt is pretty good. But most of the time when I'm editing whatever AI is doing for me,

• 0:45Speaker 00

  there's something to fix or something to change. Right? So at least in the current, you know, in the current day and age, it's, it needs that human, human touch.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Welcome to Growth Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hammond. I help leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today, we're going to talk about AI powered outbound sales. AI is the topic of the decade. And you may have been consuming different types of AI use cases, considering using them in their business. But I don't know what you know about sales. I'm getting started in this process. I'm not, I'm not going to say I'm the expert, but I am fairly well experienced in AI tools.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  And we've got a private GPT for our book, How to Have Tough Conversations, absolutely free. If you want to get a download of that, just let us know. But you know, we are using AI in different ways to better serve our clients. We're using AI to boost the business in different ways. And if you're curious about AI powered outbound sales, today's episode is for you. We have AJ Kasada with Revenue Boost. And AJ, their company really focuses on B to B marketing and really. How to use AI empowered way to collaborate with your current appointment setters or SDRs to get results. So if you're curious about that, please tune in today and you will learn some insights from AJ.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  AJ's had over 600 campaigns that he's run around this and I do want to disclose this upfront. I did not charge him to be here. This is not sponsored. I was just curious about it and I thought you might be curious too. So that's the reason he is a guest today. It may sound like it's a pitch to you in some way, but I'm not vouching for AJ, but I do feel like he's got some insight to share with you. And if you are curious, you can check him out at Revenue Boost. He gives his email later. That being said, you're going to have to listen to the whole thing to be able to get that email. My name is Gene Hammett. I'm a CEO coach. We do coaching and leadership development for mostly fast growth companies.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And in some fast growth companies, CEOs typically feel like they're have to work harder or they feel like they're always behind. They feel like they're pulling people and it isn't the best way to scale your company. And what we found is there's some things missing that you have to go back and rebuild. Because once you find that product market fit and you start running with it, you forget about some of the foundational elements that help you create a company that runs without you. Now, if I've got your attention, you want to go a little bit deeper, go to the next training that we have on this. Just go to training.coreelevation.com. You can sign up to learn how to build a business that runs without you. And if you are the most valuable person in your business, you definitely want to be there.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  If you're making decisions, if you feel like you're the bottleneck of the company, you definitely want to check out this training. It's absolutely free and it will help you become a better leader as well. Just go to training.coreelevation.com. With all that being said, today's interview with AJ about AI-powered outbound sales is just for you. Take it away AJ. AJ, how are you?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Hey Gene, I'm doing great, man. How are you? Thanks for having me on.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I am excited to talk to you. We're going to be diving into AI-powered outbound. Before we go any further, tell us about what you're up to with your company Revenue Boost.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So Revenue Boost is a B2B marketing agency. We typically work with B2B SaaS companies, consulting companies, agencies, and we help them with generating leads and filling their sales pipeline, typically through outbound, which is what we're going to talk about today. So we just run campaigns on behalf of our clients, do a little bit of consulting as well.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  And by now, I think I've probably worked on like 600 or 700 different outbound campaigns. So I've learned quite a lot and excited to share all of that with your audience so that they can try it themselves if they want to get started or if they're already running some campaigns that aren't really producing the best leads for them.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think that anybody who's in a B2B sales should be looking at this. And today, hopefully we'll pull out of you some of the big insights you've had over these 600, 700 campaigns. Where do you want to start? Like if you were a CEO, we're talking to CEOs, because that's who's listening in here, about AI-powered outbound, what would you say?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So I would just say, first, you know, probably a lot of people are asking, like, should I do this? Is it working? You know, I hear this a lot. I receive a lot of really bad cold emails, like, does this even still work, right? So if you're even just considering, you know, whether it's a worthy channel for you or not, I would just say the first thing is like, definitely test it, because it is a great channel. It still works. It's pretty timeless. It's like always been around, right? Before there was cold email, there was just cold calling and door knocking, right? And then even direct mail. So it's one of those channels that I think will never go away. And it was always just a very, once you can crack it, it's a very reliable and consistent source of leads for you. I think,

• 6:01Speaker 00

  at the same time, it's just very low cost and low risk to test out. So, you know, compared to some other marketing channels, which could have a pretty high barrier to entry, like if you're running paid ads. What I love about this is you can test it out for pretty cheap, right? You could just run campaigns for a month, a couple of months. And of course, you can hire an agency for you, or you can do it yourself and really just spend a few hundred bucks a month on software tools if you were to take the time to actually do it and learn it. So if you're trying to like break into a new market, or launch a new product, or an offer, or test something out, you could definitely test it for a pretty low budget and then scale later. So, yeah, it's just such a powerful channel. For some of our clients, it's their number one source of, uh, source of lead. And it's so targeted too. So if you're also trying to maybe move up market or just work with a certain industry that just doesn't really come to you organically.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Um, that's also a great use case for it because you could just, you're really like, essentially what you're doing is you're building a list and you're reaching out one to one to everyone on that list, uh, but you're doing that at scale, right? And then you're doing that on either cold email or LinkedIn or cold calling. Uh, but the cool thing about that is you can actually like pick every single person that you reach out to, which isn't really possible with any other marketing channel.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  So let's break this down. Uh, you talked about email first, then you threw in LinkedIn just there. I, I got a love hate relationship with LinkedIn right now, but you've got all of these campaigns that you've run. What is the effectiveness of, of email versus LinkedIn?

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So to me, they just play two different parts in the ecosystem because um, on LinkedIn, you will have the highest response rate because if I message you on LinkedIn, you know, you can look at my profile, you can see my work history, you can, you can read all about me, you can see a real face, you can see that I'm not like some computer programmer, some, some AI, right? Um, so there's a lot of just, uh, trust on LinkedIn because people actually can check you out. And also if someone is, just the fact that someone's a LinkedIn user kind of shows that they're a little bit qualified because people go on LinkedIn and they log on to network and meet people that can help them grow their business, right? Um, so on LinkedIn, you could see like five or 10 times the response rate. However, you're also very limited by volume. So you can only really connect and message a hundred to 150 people per week because of LinkedIn's limitation.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Whereas with email, you could just get more inboxes and send more emails, right? So um, email will have a low response rate, but you have pretty much infinite volume you can send out and it's quite easy to automate. LinkedIn, it's a very small amount of average you can do, but it's going to get a much higher response rate. So uh, when I say it plays a different part in the ecosystem, LinkedIn is good to maybe take like your best accounts or maybe your warmest leads and just, you know, really focus on working them. Cause again, you can't get a lot of outreach out, but you'll have a much higher chance of actually hearing back from people. So that's really good for your best accounts and then email is best for everyone else to really get the, the volume out there.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Okay, that makes sense. Now, I gotta ask the question, and I'm gonna tip my hat here. Every time I log into LinkedIn, I get pitched left and right. There's nothing really of value in there. There's nothing coming in like a client going, "Hey, I saw the video. I'd love to work with you. I saw you on the podcast." Or, "We've got a speech coming up," or, "I love your book." Like, none of that stuff comes in. It's always like, "Hey, can we have a, you know, can I share with you my, my offer? Can we do a coffee chat? Can we do..." You know, they're asking for things before I even know who they are. And I know there's people out there doing programs and showing people how to outreach on LinkedIn. And it's just gotten so much, and I'm not alone. A lot of the CEOs I talk to are like, "It's a shit show over there on LinkedIn."

• 9:21Speaker 01

  How do you respond to that?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so definitely just do it differently than everyone else, because my LinkedIn inbox is also pretty flooded. But there's a way that you can, and I think it's also great if you notice how your LinkedIn is, and if you see a lot of outreach you get that doesn't really catch your attention, because you can start to look at that and see like, "Okay, well, how can I do the opposite of that?" Right? So there's a couple of things you can do that make your outreach seem a lot more human, personal, and really just like non-spamming. One is you can research the person you're reaching out to, right? Half the time, it's like, "I'm getting an outreach message from someone that clearly doesn't even know what I do." Very often, I'll get an outreach message from another company that also provides call email services. And I'm like, "I'm your competitor. Like, obviously, you shouldn't be reaching out to me. You didn't really put much thought into this list, right?"

• 10:04Speaker 00

  So researching is really important. Like, if I was to reach out to you and maybe comment on something about a recent podcast of yours, or talk about something you posted, or maybe I see that you're posting for a job role about something, right? Like, maybe in your case, right, as a leadership development coach, you can reach out to a company, you can look at their job postings. Maybe you see that they're hiring a new COO, and that's a big change in the company, and you can use that as a reason for like, "Hey, well, there's obviously, you know, with that big change happening, we're here to help you navigate that, right? And make sure that things are still pretty smooth during that transition, right? Versus just saying, "Hey, do you want leadership development coaching?" Right? So, it's so easy to find out anything about a company nowadays, right? So, if you just take a few minutes, or even have AI do this for you, to research the person, the company... Any news that's happening recently? That makes the world of difference because

• 10:49Speaker 00

  people just really feel like, okay, this person took the time and like they did their homework and this is actually relevant to me, right? That's one thing. The second thing is you can also just actually give value. So not everything has to be a coffee chat, which we all just know is like a code for, I'm gonna pitch you my thing, right? Not everything has to be just asking for a call right away. You could just give an insight. You could give a lead magnet, get something for free. That's a great way to start off a conversation, especially on LinkedIn where it's pretty like inundated with just people asking for your time.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Now, I know you're doing AI powered outbound and you mentioned AI can do it for you. Can you walk us through how that works with LinkedIn? I would imagine it's very similar with email, but like if we're gonna send a very personalized message to someone that's gonna be different than than what we're receiving that doesn't work, that offends us in some ways. How is AI doing that research and putting it into a personalized message on either chat platform?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So there's a few ways we're using AI, but what you just mentioned is probably our favorite way. Because that really, again, just makes the biggest difference when you can actually reach out to someone with a very tailored message. So there's, I mean, there's a few tools, but the tool that we use is called clay.com. If you guys look it up, there'll be like tutorials on how to use it. But essentially what it is, is so the first step of outbound is you build a list, right? You could build that list on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You could build that list in a database like Apollo if you're doing cold email outreach. ZoomInfo, there's a bunch of tools that some of your audience might be familiar with. But Clay is where you can actually take that list and you can connect it to Clay and then you can run AI agents to actually research anything you want about a lead. So you could say, let's say I'm running a Facebook ads agency and I provide Facebook marketing services.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I could basically prompt the AI agents in this tool to say, hey, check this lead and tell me if they're running Facebook ads or not, or tell me what ads they're running. Or how much they might be spending, right? And you could do that with pretty much anything, right? So anything that you would want to find out about a company or a person, anything that's at least available like on the internet, which is a lot of things. You would prompt these AI agents to just research and then come back to you with some information about that lead. And then you could say, hey, now I want you to insert that into this email template. So just like how when you, when you launch like an email campaign and you would put like the first name in brackets so that it customizes the first name to who you're reaching out to. You can do that with whole sentences or keywords or anything that you would want to like pull from your research to put into a template to sound very, very human.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So it takes your template and I'm letting in the secrets here. We invite mostly Inc. 5000 companies to come to the podcast and we do the research manually. What was your number? What was your percentage of growth? Who's the name of the CEO? Doesn't matter what data we collect, but we collect personal information and we have a template and it goes out to all the people and you guys could do this at scale through AI.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the best way to put it is anything that you or your salespeople are doing manually when they're researching lead, you can pretty much do with AI because at the end of the day, all they're doing is looking at things online, copying and pasting, organizing it into an email, right?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yep. And so Clay is the platform of choice. That's not, that's just writing the email? Or is that actually sending it out?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  That's just doing the research and then writing the email and then you would connect that to a sequencer tool.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  I don't want to get jumped into too much of the detail. I love detailed tactics. I appreciate you being here, but I know we've got a limited amount of time together. Like what are two or three mistakes that people make when they're trying to do AI powered outbound?

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So one is just definitely not doing enough. There's been a lot of times where someone's been like, hey, can you automate my campaign and tell me why it's not working? And then I see that they've only sent 200 emails, right? And you really have to just do a lot of volume with outbound. But again, it's, you can automate most of it. So sending a thousand or 2000 a day might even seem like pretty big task, but it's really not because you can set up a campaign once. But at the end of the day, in any market, you know, there's only a small percentage of people that are actually in need of what you're selling at this moment and only a small percentage of them are actually even going to open an email and read it and respond, right? I'm like for cold email, especially a good reply rate is like one, two, three percent. So you really have to get the, the volume out there and especially it's even more so the case for different services you might be selling. Like let's

• 15:09Speaker 00

  say that you're selling branding services or rebranding. Well, companies don't rebrand more often than every like five or 10 years, like at a minimum, right? So you really would have to get through a lot of people to find who's actually just looking for this right now. So one is the volume. People really underestimate that, you know, sales is for sure a numbers game. Um. Two is the messaging, like most of the messaging should be about the person you're reaching out to and the problems that they have in their role, uh, not about you. So I like to say that it's about the problems over the products. Um, most messaging I get is really just, hey, you know, here's, this is my name and I'm the CEO and this is my company and this is what we do. And it's, it's like, it's like a brochure, right? It's like, it's, it's all about them. But if you're reaching out to me and you're a stranger, like, I don't really have a reason to care about like you or your company or what you do. I just want to know if you can help me, right? So really in

• 15:54Speaker 00

  the first two sentences, you should be getting to, how can you help this person, right? It should be about, you know, their world, their problems, their industry, some insight you can offer them. I mean, you show that you can actually help them. Cause again, this is cold average, right? These aren't people that opted in to hear from your company. Um, you're, you're, you're trying to get your foot in the door. So we should really be with something about them. Um, that's the biggest mistake I see in messaging. And then also is just, um, not segmenting lists. So if you just take like 40,000 companies and you just put it into one campaign on LinkedIn or email, or you call them or whatever it is, uh, that's a big mistake because all those 40,000 people have different scenarios, right? Like the way that you should speak to a CEO is different than the way that you should speak to a VP of marketing, right? These people have different KPIs they're measured on, uh, different, different lang-, like different language they use, right? Different

• 16:38Speaker 00

  problems, different priorities. Um, if you're talking to a small business that has 10 employees versus one that has a hundred, that should be also a fundamentally different message because again, they have different priorities, different goals, and just different ways of thinking, right? So, um, it's, it's more work to do this, but that's also definitely like worth the, worth the time and a big mistake I see.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  I would imagine AI can help you with segmenting if, if you really do it well.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Like the same tool I mentioned earlier, you could say, hey, I want you to, if, if they're in, if they're in this industry, send them to campaign A. If they're in this industry, can't send them to campaign B, or, or do by rule or function or geography or anything else.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Um, great. So we went over the mistakes.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Let's talk about, you know, where AI is today. Cause you know, what we've been focusing on, I think you, before you cut on the recorder, this would have picked up. I don't know if this to be true, but there's a lot of people out there saying that AI can make phone calls for you. We probably listened, I have been curious enough to go, what are these like? And then six months ago, I listened to some of them and they were sort of like blooper reels. They're like, hi, my name's Jeff. And they're like, hi Cindy, how are you? Yeah, no, there were some little moments like that and you laugh about it and like you, I don't want that to happen to me. Like, we're not ready for that. But I would listen to one literally yesterday as I'm preparing for, for this conversation with you AJ and it was damn good. It was, you know, it literally is like, this was the

• 18:02Speaker 01

  scenario I, as I remember, the guy signs up for a lead magnet and the AI goes, does an outbound call going, hey, just want to make sure you got the lead magnet and see if you have any questions. And he goes, is this AI? And he goes, yes, it is. It's like, great. I do have some questions. And they were, they going back and forth and it was pretty good. Like there was even a little bit of humor in there. Because the, I think the guy responded in this example was like, he goes, what do you do? And he goes, well, I'm, I'm a godlike consultant in this area. He goes, oh, godlike. He goes, you were, you think highly of yourself. The AI had that, that kind of personality to it, which I was very surprised. It made me chuckle.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  But are we at the place right now where companies should be considering beyond just email and LinkedIn messages, doing outbound calls through AI?

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we're starting to get there. I think in simple scenarios, right? Like I, if you're definitely in like a complex B2B selling environment and it requires a lot of nuance, then like you don't want to be, you know, cold calling a CEO of a thousand person, thousand person company with AI, right? But I think for simple things like booking an appointment, scheduling, maybe just doing some quick qualification, like in like that scenario you mentioned, I think that's a great use for it. And then who knows, over time, it's only like, all of this is only going to get more and more advanced, which is crazy because I think it's only been a few years that chat GPT came out, right? It's crazy to think how early we are in the process and how much it's improved even since it first came out. So it's only going to get better, but yeah, at this time it feels like it's great for. Just simple use cases, but nothing too complex. Because at the end of the day, like, once you have someone who's, you know,

• 19:40Speaker 00

  booked an appointment, like, you really just want to have a salesperson to actually, like, those are your highest value leads, right? Someone who's actually ready and they want to have a serious conversation. So I wouldn't be using it too much farther in the sales process. But for that, like, initial SDR work, it's, it's a, that's a great use case for it.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Let's dive into the heart of this. And I want to give you a chance to, like, fill any gaps we had that you feel like we need to address before we close the conversation. But, you know, some of the things that are on my mind around this is, I don't think AI is replacing anyone, but I think it's amplifying the work. So if you had a one SDR using AI-enabled outbound, they could probably get done two or three or four or five times as much work. Because maybe they're sending out, you know, 5,000 emails in a month. Whereas if they were doing those manually, they might get to 500.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Is that the way you see it? Is it, it's an enhancement to the people in your team? And maybe you don't need to hire as many people? Or is it, are we getting to the place where we're like, from an outbound SDR kind of role, AI can do all of it?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the same goes for app, and it's for really any function in a company. It's really a great enhancer, like you said. I look at it as a collaborator, not an employee. So almost like someone that you work with on your team, but not something that you just say, hey, go do this thing and like, good luck, great.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  I think it's dangerous to fully outsource something 100% to AI, because we all know that it makes mistakes and it hallucinates. Sometimes it'll do the most complex things for me really well, but then it'll mess up two plus two equals four, right? So it's always going to hallucinate. And you always need to have a human involved at some point. Like, I like to come in at the beginning and the end. So I call it the 108010 rule, where like, the first 10%, I'm there to help kind of set the stage and guide AI what I want it to do. And then it does that middle part. And then I come in at the end and usually, like, most of the time, not always, there's definitely times where it's, it's, it's first attempt is pretty good. But most of the time, when I'm editing whatever AI is doing for me, there's something to fix or something to change, right? So at least in the current, you know, in the current day and age, it's, it, it needs that human, human touch.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  So AJ, we've talked about a lot of things today. You were here, so I'm not going to recount those for you. But what did we miss on this? If you were sitting down with a CEO chatting with them about the opportunity of AI-enabled outbound, what do you want to make sure that they take away from that conversation?

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for one thing is definitely try it. It's such a powerful channel. Like I said, it's predictable, it's consistent, it's targeted to get you a better quality of lead. But also give it a proper test, right? Like you might launch outbound and maybe you try some cold email campaigns or some LinkedIn and in the first month, maybe it doesn't get you anything. But if you do it for at least three to six months and really give it the time to try several approaches, test different messaging, test different lists, you will get it to work. Like I've never, we've never had a client not get leads from it. Now, obviously for some businesses, it'll work better than for others, but it's always a way to get leads because at the end of the day, everyone in your target market has an email, usually a phone number as well, right? So it's always just a way to, like, it's always going to be a reliable way to connect with your target audience. And then other than that, I would just say, just know that there's five things that go into every campaign.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  So if you're currently running some app on it, you're not getting great results. There's only five things that you really need to look at. There's either the list, right? Maybe you're not reaching the right people. There's the copy, maybe you need to adjust your messaging. There's the offer, there's like what you're actually selling. Maybe it's not the right fit for that specific list or what, you know, that target market. Then there's the volume, right? You can't just send, you know, 10 emails a day and hope you're going to get great results. So you have to make sure you're doing enough, doing enough volume. And the last one, and this one just applies to email, is deliverability. So you do want to just learn a couple of basic things around how emails get delivered and how spam folders work, so that you're not sending emails that just land directly into the spam folder.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  AJ, thank you so much for sharing your insights, your experience of this. 600, 600 to 700 campaigns, pretty impressive. I'm sure you've got a lot of data that can help people. I will say this, I've said it earlier, you didn't pay to be here. I did not charge you anything to share this wisdom, but I just felt like it was a topic that a lot of people are interested in. And where could they go if they want to check out more information from you, AJ?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks, Gina. Thanks for having me. I hope it was useful to everyone listening and that they go give it a shot. But the best way to connect with me would be email, which is [email protected]. And then the social media that I'm active on would be LinkedIn, Facebook, and then also now YouTube, which is just my name, AJ Cassata.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Thanks for being here and sharing your wisdom.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Another fantastic episode here on the podcast. I share all this with you because I feel like you want to be on the cutting edge of not just your company growth, but your own leadership. And in this case, we talked about AI. But if I can help you in any way to help you really boost your company, maybe it's just getting out of the way so that your team can be empowered and they can take more ownership of the work, they can have a higher sense of urgency, whatever it is. We have experienced doing that over the last 10 years. We've worked with more Inc. 5000 level companies in leadership development than anyone else out there. So share this with you. Love to help you and your business. If you're curious about the next training we have, go to training.coreelevation.com. And if you just want to chat

• 25:14Speaker 01

  with me and get to know me or whatever, send me an email on [email protected]. With all that being said, when you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of growth, think tank. Leave with courage. We'll see you next time.