Every Lead Gets a Call in 60 Seconds: The Bots Running Eric's Agency

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil open up their own marketing week. Eric's $250 test assignment that turned into a $2,000 quote, the GrokBots he built in his free time (a call bot that phoned a spa and confirmed a booking, a haggle bot renegotiating every software bill, and a speed-to-lead bot that calls every form fill within 60 seconds), and the 2x2 he uses to decide which agency work becomes a reusable workflow and which gets killed. Neil on speed to learning, why wins on one channel take too long to reach the rest of the company, and how he finds agencies that stopped growing and buys the ones losing deals only because they are too small. Then the social tests: Neil's new screen-share format and LinkedIn engagement scraping, Eric's comment-to-DM flow with Lead Shark and Goji Berry, and the YouTube video that was edited entirely by AI. Key takeaways◾Every lead gets a call within 60 seconds; a bot can do it and sound good◾Speed to learning is the bottleneck: move a win from one channel to every channel fast◾Reusable workflows beat custom premium work; build them, then hand them to the team Chapters00:00 Our marketing week: the $250 test that failed02:42 The GrokBot that booked Eric's massage04:17 Haggle bot and speed-to-lead in 60 seconds05:18 Neil: speed to learning07:46 Buying agencies that stopped growing10:24 Eric's 2x2: reusable workflows13:14 Neil's new screen-share format15:40 Scraping your LinkedIn engagers16:38 Comment-to-DM with Lead Shark and Goji Berry18:21 YouTube: relevant views beat viral views19:54 A fully AI-edited video22:16 AI thumbnails that actually look like you

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:44Speaker 00

  And then there's all, obviously some interesting marketing things that has happened for you this week, also on the business side as well. So, you know, I figured we should talk about our weeks as well, because those are some of the more interesting stories.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  All right, go for it. You started off.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Well, I'll tell you what was, uh, interesting to me. We had, um, so I'm currently looking for like, um, brand creative strategists on the long form and short form side, right? So there's this one person that came in and I think they're very smart. And they have a lot of followers, right? They've clearly kind of been there, done that. And I'm like, okay, this person clearly understands how the game is played. And so we started with like a test assignment. And so here's the thing. Remember, I, I, I talked about how agencies shouldn't work a few weeks ago. I'm going to give you this example and you tell me what you think. Okay, Neil, you ready?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  So, so this person did four content briefs, right? So when you're doing like a content brief, it's like an outline for you to create content, right? And Neil, you've seen that with your content, right? So Neil, assuming I do four content briefs for you, assuming you don't like them um, with this test assignment, what should be the order of operations next? Should I be redoing it for you? Should I be charging you again to do it? Or what should I be doing?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  If it was me and someone sent me four content briefs and I didn't like it, I would just fire them and move on.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what should be the expectations with this, um, with this test?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  That the briefs are actually good and the person likes them and you understand them and understand their business and take the time to figure out what kind of brief you're making. And then if they tell you they don't like them, you should explain why they're good for them, assuming you did all your research on their ideal customer profile and their business. And, you know, if you have good data and reasoning behind it, someone may end up creating it.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  So my take is I should be, let's say I didn't do enough research and you're giving me feedback on it because you like me, right? Because I do like that person, um, I should be revising it, right? I should be revising, at minimum, I should be revising it.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Wait, they didn't revise it when you gave them feedback?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  I gave them the feedback and they said, um, so instead of revising it, so it was, keep in mind, this is a very small test, right? It's a very, very small test. It was like $250 for like four briefs, right? And she, and, and, and this person was like, oh, uh, okay, well, that's not included in this one. It's going to be $2,000 for 10 briefs. I'm like, wait, what? And, and I'm like, hey, this is not, this is just not going to be a good fit, right? And I said, look, I wish you the best. I think you're a really smart person. But this person's going to learn eventually that this is not how you do business. Because you want to play for the long term. And not only that, there's so much that you can, that we can learn from each other, right? And so, like, again, this is a situation where it's like, agencies having a bad rap, where it's like, you're actually putting more on my plate and you're not making it easier for me. So this is the, one of the things that, that like, this week this happened.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Um, and obviously there's more. I'll, I'll share a cool thing with you and then I'm going to flip it over to you. All right, Neil, here, check this out. So I've been working on this, um, this speed, oh, you know what? Here, I'm going to show you another one. So Neil, I, I, I made a Grok bot that made a massage appointment for me tomorrow, okay? Um, and so, so I also made another one. Okay, check this out, check this out. So this shows that, um, it, it made a phone call yesterday. So I was like, hey, so I was tweaking the bot. It's called a call bot over here, right? And I was using Twilio, all these things. And by, I was just telling it to set it up. And so it, it calls this, uh, this, uh, massage place that I like called Tomoko. And it's like, okay, uh, reach out to Jamie tomorrow at Tomoko Spa. Ask for Saturday's, uh, September 12th couples massage with two female therapists.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  What she said, you're already booked, meaning they've had this conversation, right? I just wanted to call to see if it'll work and it worked. So imagine, Neil, all the things that you would be put on hold for, you can just run it through this bot, right? All the things that you never want to deal with. All, by the way, a lot of people, just, just a pro tip for you. You can actually search how much money is owed to you by the state and you can have these bots kind of look and make the phone calls for you and, and, and just stay on hold. Um, and then maybe it could, it could transfer over to you, right? But the most-

• 4:43Speaker 01

  That's cool. The state calls are such a pain when you call them. Oh my God. Yeah, I never thought about that. That's such a great idea.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  There you go. And by the way, Neil, you'll like this one too. I have a Haggle bot. The Haggle bot, actually, um, it's been sending emails to all the softwares that we pay for. And the funny thing is, it, like, everyone from all these softwares, like Asana or our applicant tracking system, they're all responding, right? And it's like, hey, you know, this, this rate's not going to work for us. Like, what's the best that you could do, blah, blah, blah? So instead of, like, you can just have your finance person running the Haggle bot. So my whole thing with these things is I'm just making these Grok bots and I'm just handing it over to my team to run. Um, but the best one, Neil, is I have the speed to lead bot. So anybody that, uh, fills out a lead form on the site gets a call within 60 seconds now. And it, it, the voice sounds good. Like I, I had, uh, a few people on my team testing it. And they're like, dude, this sounds really good, right?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  And so I'm like, oh, well, like, we can probably run this for, for, for, uh, you know, deals that are, are, are like stalled or deals that we need to revive. Um, but the cool thing with, with Grok bot is, it's, um, it's fairly simple to spin these things up. You just need to spend some time with it. So that's another cool thing that I've been messing around with in my free time this week.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  So when I look at this week, Eric mentioned something on speed to, what was it? Speed to follow-up or something like that, speed to lead?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Speed to lead, speed to lead.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I've been actually focusing a lot this week on speed to learning. And what I mean, speed to learning is, imagine this.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  You do work for, you, you do work for your company. You see something that's working really well on Instagram. How often is that knowledge transferred to the other social profiles? Sometimes it's the same person, so it gets transferred pretty quickly and they actually go and execute on it. Sometimes that knowledge needs to be transferred to people who are running email because they're figuring out what copy's working well. Or they need to send it to people who are on paid strategy or, you know, conversion optimization, whatever it may be. And one of the biggest bottlenecks that I see in organizations is the speed to learning. And what I mean by that is something happens,

• 6:51Speaker 01

  you make a change in one of these platforms and you get this result that is very advantageous for you. Sometimes you got that result deliberately because you intended to run that experiment and you knew something would happen. But a lot of times it actually happens by accident and it's just pure luck. And but that's okay. That happens with all marketers in many cases. But you take what you got lucky on and you need to implement on the rest of the organization. Now imagine this for an agency. You have hundreds of clients, maybe even thousands of clients. You could have them in one country. You could have them globally. You may be running multiple channels. You're quickly, you, you're not only implementing what you already know what's working, hence companies hire agencies.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  But you should also be running a lot of tests and experiments to figure out how you can get even better and better results. But what I find in almost every organization, when people learn something that's working, that knowledge sometimes gets transferred over to people. But even when it does get transferred, people are very slow to execute on that. And these are easy wins and low hanging fruit. And that's one thing I'm trying to tackle more in marketing and I believe a lot of organizations face this issue. Especially once you start scaling above 100, 200 people, you start seeing more of these issues. The other thing that I've been working on, uh, this week is how do you find

• 8:18Speaker 01

  businesses or, um, what's the best way to search for businesses that haven't adapted? So what's really cool about ChatGPT or even a lot of companies out there, forget ChatGPT, it could be any AI system. Uh, a lot of people post their revenue numbers and you can look at their headcount numbers over time. So imagine you can end up finding players in your space, semi-competitors or competitors that may be specializing in a, in an area that you're not as good at. Um, and they've been doing it for a very long time. Call it 10, 15 years, maybe even 20 years.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And if you can see that their headcount's roughly flat, they're not growing. Why are they not growing? So what we've been doing is, or what I've been doing, and I've been doing this for a bit now, but I've been spending a lot of this week doing calls around that, is talking to companies who haven't been growing and looking for the ones who are telling me we're losing clients, we're getting included in the right pitches. And I ask them to prove it to me because you can look at their leads, their CRM and all that kind of stuff, especially after you send NDAs and you're going through diligence. You can see if they're getting the right type of accounts hitting them up that you would love as customers. But then you look to see why they're losing it. Are they terrible at pitching? All right, that's fixable. That's not the ideal thing I want to fix, but it's fixable.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  The thing I really look for is the people who are great at almost every aspect of the business, but they lose the revenue because the companies feel they're too big for the agency to, uh, that they reach out to. And the reason I like that is is if I can acquire those agencies, I instantly solve that problem due to our headcount and our scale. So now they go from having a good product, good service, but losing business because A they didn't expand their services over the years to enough that what people want. And B, they don't have the headcount to win those bigger deals, even though they're getting the inbound RFPs or requests.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Um, and I found that to be a potential gold mine. Um, it's just hard to find those right ones. And then a lot of people may end up claiming some of those things, but you got to get them to prove it and really dig in and talk to some of their old customers or old pitches that didn't go through and figure out why they didn't actually choose that company. And then from there, you know, if you can work out a deal, you can end up, uh, growing much faster.

• 10:55Speaker 00

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• 11:31Speaker 00

  All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  So I'm going to pull something up real quick that's kind of related to this. Um, so basically, okay, here we go. I'm going to pull this up. So I had put, I made a two by two in relation to what Neil's talking about. I made a two by two chart because I was workshopping something with, with someone on the team this week. Okay, cool. So what I have up on the screen right now, those of you that can't see it is a two by two. All right. This is how I'm thinking about agency services or marketing services, software in general. So right now we have, um, you think about it this way, you, if you have a two by two here, um, on the X axis, you have your customer usefulness. So left going to right, the more you go to the right, it's more useful. Okay. And then on the Y axis, you have the ongoing delivery effort of something. Okay.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  So you have low to high, uh, going, you know, up, uh, south to north, basically on the X axis. What I'm really calling out here is a lot of the stuff that we should be trying to build more of, uh, for, at least for me, is reusable workflows, right? So these are, you know, these are high usefulness, but over time it's going to be less work over time, right? You, you, you might need to customize every day now and then for a customer, right? Now, I think a lot of agencies right now, they do custom and premium work, which are, this is, it's obviously useful to decline, but it's high ongoing delivery effort, right? Which is why a lot of people that I'm talking to right now are trying to leave the agencies in droves, right? And I'm in some of these AI, uh, executive chats, and these are not even agency, but, but tech companies, right?

• 13:19Speaker 00

  They're just like, dude, you know, like, things are just too slow right now. And like, you know, these companies aren't adapting quickly enough. And so, you know, they all want to move from, from this world where you're still doing maybe 10, 20% of your work's maybe like this, maybe 80% is like this, where it's reusable and scalable. And then anything that is like low effort, low usefulness, you probably deprioritize it, not probably, definitely. And then anything that's high effort, low usefulness, you probably need to think about stopping and then refocusing the company, right? Cause in today's day and age, you can do anything, you just can't do everything, just more and more of, so that that focus, uh, muscle is even more important today. So something, this is something like, I'm constantly, uh, recommunicating the vision to the company in terms of like, hey, we have this, this three layer cake, like this is how things are going to go. This is how everything connects.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  And I have to kind of be the chief repeater, the chief reminder officer over and over. Um, and, and just so, so people know where we're going, right? That's more important than ever. And then some of the things that Neil's talking about in terms of what we're doing is, is we're constantly, again, thinking about reusable workflows, like how do we scaleify things? What repos do we put them in? How do people, how do we continue to repeat that over and over? These, these, these, um, how do we make sure that these things are secure? How do we make sure that there's a gateway for it? So that way it becomes a lot more scalable. And then we can look at, similar to Neil, like what's out there that where we can, you know, acquire the great talent and the logos as well, and then figure out how to grow from there. So anyway, that's, that's part of how we think about this from like more of a business angle, I'd say.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  What have you been changing up on your, or have you been doing any changes on your social media? We actually started doing some tests this week.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you go first.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've been trying to crank out more content, more longer form content. And we've been finding, and when I say more long form content, we've been trying a new format where I can be screen sharing. So it's recording me in my office, which is where I am right now. Laptop tilted to the side, camera head on directly to me. And then it goes in between me talking and screen sharing. Technically, I'm not really screen sharing, the team is doing the screen sharing. What's happening is, is there's a teleprompter with, you know, the script that I'm supposed to read. And then when I go to my computer, it's the same script on my screen, so I can go back and forth and keep talking.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And then on their end, through post-production, they do all that stuff. That way we don't need a camera behind me, recording the screen or anything like that. I don't always follow the script. Probably a large chunk of the time, I'm just ad-libbing and just talking away. Cause then they'll tell me what they're trying to say, and then sometimes the script is just too wordy and long. And I just want to freely speak. I would probably say I do that 60% of the time.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  But, you know, uh, those videos seem to be working out really well on all the social platforms. So in essence, not only am I recording more videos and more longer form videos, but I'm trying screen sharing formats, which people like. The whole thesis behind it is even though a lot of our customers or ideal customer profile is a large global company, they have a lot of people internally in marketing. And we want to give them a lot of the tips and the strategies, so that way they can be more effective at their job. And then when they have a brief that they want to put out or RFP, hopefully some of those people think about us. But the longer term play here is we're just getting our brand out there. And a lot of these junior people will eventually get promoted, they'll eventually be the ones

• 16:48Speaker 01

  pushing out RFPs and be more decision makers. And hopefully they keep thinking of us as well. The other strategy that I've been doing is we've been scraping all the people that have been engaging with our content on social, specifically LinkedIn, then looking at their job profiles, uh, what's their position, what company they work at, we try to estimate the size. And then we craft really personalized emails to them based on their business. And if we honestly think we can hopefully do it, if we don't, then we don't waste our time crafting email, but we're putting them in buckets. So let's say Eric hypothetically worked at Microsoft and he was a CMO. Let's just go with this example now.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  If Eric interacted with five of my posts in the last six months, I would more likely reach out to Eric than if someone was a CMO of Apple and they only engaged with my content one time in the last six months. So I'm looking for people who continually engage roughly at least once a month for a consistent period of time, and our period is usually three months, because we're finding those people are more likely to engage in conversations. And even if they don't give us any business, they know the next time they go out, they're much more likely to include us in a brief.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Yep. So a couple of things here. So, um, what Neil's talking about, I don't know what tool you're using, but I do know that, um, Goji Berry can help find the people that are engaging on X and LinkedIn at the same time. So if you're attacking both of those, it makes sense. I think Lead Shark is something that we use. So I'll go ahead and share my screen right now and talk about the two things that we're, we've been doing. So if you can see my LinkedIn over here. So this is what we've been doing. We've been creating these, um, you know, comment to get access on this guide type of thing. We add them to the newsletter. And then if you combine that with a Goji Berry and you see who's engaged with this. So for example, 900 comments on this one, 115, uh, you know, likes. So the idea should be, okay, they get an automatic DM and then you add them to your list.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  But the other thing is, um, to Neil's point, you should be looking at the people that are maybe engaged three to five times the last 90 days or so, and you should be hitting them up. And you should, I, I think you should have a human loop there. And I like something, I, I watched a Gary V clip the other day. He's like, you know, I'm, I'm big on this one thing right now. 15, 85, 5. I'm like, what's that? So 15% of the time, so in the, in the beginning of, of doing a new project, he's involved for the first 15%. So he can set the tone, right? And then you let the team work on the, the rest of it. And then he comes in for the last 5% or so. And, um, that's kind of how I'm thinking about tweaking a lot of these things right now. So I'll let the, I'll set the direction, look at how the team does it, come in, tweak it a little more, and then go from there, right? So like, you know, that, that, that Goji Berry Lead Shark thing is the thing that we've added, uh, recently.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  But the other thing I'll call out too is looking at-

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Go back really quickly to that image. When people comment CMO on LinkedIn, I'm assuming you manually message them.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Nope, automatic.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Automatic? What are you using for the automatic messaging?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  I think it's called Lead Shark.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Lead Shark? Good to know.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  There you go. See, look at this, see, screen sharing is good, man. Lead Shark, Goji Berry. So, so, um, the other thing, Neil, you, you kind of called this out, but like, I'm looking at my, my YouTube channel and I'm starting to become more proud of it. Because if you look at the, the views, uh, recently, um, and there, there's a big thing with, with, uh, GPT-6 Oster. So last Saturday I decided to record a video. Literally I got the video out myself with the thumbnail and with the editing, right? I think it was, um, it might be one of this one. It might be either, yeah, I think it's this one. How I use GPT-6 Oster to run my business, seven real examples, right? So I'm attacking the latest marketing trend, uh, sorry, latest AI trend, and then layering it on with marketing stuff, right?

• 20:32Speaker 00

  And so how I use GPT-6 to run my marketing for a day, how Graftbot runs a market, like, I'm good with 3,500, 5,000, I'm good with 12,000 views, 13,000. Like, I don't need, you know, rich BFF, like, I love Vivian, right? But I don't need 731,000 views because it ain't going to drive no leads, right? And sure, I can talk about dating over here, 488,000, 485 over here, but that's not the most exciting piece. The most exciting piece is getting the relevant views.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and just be careful for the Vivian though. I know, I think with you, one of her most popular things was you should be quitting your job every few years, or was that a clip out of your channel?

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, every two years, you should be quitting your job.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Every two years. The current CEO of Apple would not have gone that position if he kept quitting his job every two years. And same with Sethia from Microsoft. I'm not saying you shouldn't or you should, I'm just saying, figure out what works for you.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  You should always do to Neil's point, what's right for you and what's right for Neil or me might not be right for you. So just keep that in mind. But one thing I'll call out Neil is in the past, like we do have editors on the team and then, you know, they're great. We do have thumbnail people on the team. But Neil, like for me to cover this, these types of topics, whenever I, the inspiration strikes, I used to not want to do it because I knew I'd have to wait for the editor. I knew I'd have to wait for the thumbnail. And by the time the video came out, it would have been like a week later, right? Now I have a G P T six Astra skill called leveling up content engine. And it'll cut out the short forms. It'll, it literally edited this video and it came out with the thumbnails like this video Neil is completely A I edited. So here. Alright, so chat G P T Astra is out and everyone's going crazy about it.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  You know, everyone's talking about all these games that they're making, Call of Duty this, you know, Mario this and like, you know, all of these like world games and all that. And don't get me wrong, that's cool. You see that Neil? Like the first thirty seconds, like all these things that it added, it added on its own, right? So like even these pieces.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  The only thing I don't like is a thumbnail because it's not your real image and I feel it's bad for branding.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  So I added to the skill, like I just messing with it. You and I can create these things where it's like, and I can even share the skill with you if you want, but it's like the first thirty seconds is very important. Keep the editing tight. You know, don't, don't have a bunch of like dead space, have captions at the bottom. Neil, to your point, I improved. Look, this thumbnail clearly doesn't look like me, right? It looks like somebody else. This one over here, right? But this one, hey, how's this one over here?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  No, that one's good. I assumed that was not done by A I.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  No, this one was done by A I too, but I just improved it. I said, hey, here's what I actually look like. You get what I mean? So I'm, I'm just like, dude, I get it, right? Like I, so one of the editors this week, I was like, look, man, I'm like, you want this, but then you can't hit deadlines. And then at the same time, I'm doing this right now. So like, you know, at the same, you're going to have to catch up, right? And so, because I interact with my brand team like once a week and I'm very direct with the feedback. So he's like, he's stepping it up now and I'm hoping I could just hand him these skills. But the whole idea is like someone like a Neil who's, who's, you know, pushing his company, you know, the founder, right? And same thing, founder for my company. I think it is your job to figure out how you can constantly mess around with these things. And if you can make a cool reusable workflow, hand it off to your team and then let them take it from there. So.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Got it. So, um, yeah, dude, and when it comes to A I and thumbnails, the other thing you can end up doing, Eric's spot on, this is how I actually look. Like Eric and I probably have, no joke, a thousand plus images of us that are not recent, but recent enough that you can actually put into A I and be like, this is how I actually look like. Make sure I look similar.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  So that is it for today and we will see you tomorrow.