Your SEO Is About to Run Itself (Autonomous Engine Optimization)

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 introduces the new AEO: Autonomous Engine Optimization, the AI harness Nick Eubanks used to grow a 12-week-old website, and why every sales call and customer conversation inside your company is a page waiting to be published. Then the self-improving product has arrived: Amplitude's Wave agent found its own problems and shipped fixes worth +160% engagement and a 6% to 9% onboarding lift. Eric and Neil also pick apart OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch, the five things that took Andrew Warner's new YouTube channel to 937,000 views in a month, how B2B buyers now find agencies through Claude, and why the best salespeople sell like doctors. Key takeaways◾AEO now means autonomous: content creates, drafts and ships itself with a human in the loop◾Self-improving products are live: Wave found and fixed real conversion problems on its own◾On YouTube, info calls, retention data and trending topics beat subscriber counts Chapters00:00 The new AEO: Autonomous Engine Optimization03:07 Self-improving products: Amplitude's Wave agent06:44 OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch misstep11:37 Andrew Warner: 937K views in a month16:48 How buyers find agencies through Claude21:18 Sell like a doctor

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. So the new AEO is Autonomous Engine Optimization. So this is a, this tweet was from Nick Eubanks, who was at Semrush before.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And so, you know, the whole idea with Autonomous Engine Optimization, Neil, is like, you think about us doing this podcast right now, okay? You think about, you do your YouTube channel, you do your reels as well. I did the same thing for my side too. So that's a lot of outward-facing content. But also internally, all the sales calls that you have, all the customer calls that you have, all this stuff that you have internally, there are probably content spikes that should probably be created as pages for AEO/SEO purposes, right?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  And so, we, we're calling it Autonomous Engine Optimization that actually sits inside of like ClickClo, for example, right? Where it will create the content for you, and then it will still, the human in the loop will still draft it and then publish it. But I think a lot of it's where it's going, and I talked to Tim Solo yesterday from the CMO of Ahrefs. He's like, "I hope that the world doesn't go in this direction." I'm like, "I don't think it's gonna go 100% in this direction, but I think people are lazy and people just want results." And so I think a good chunk of it's gonna go in that direction. So maybe Autonomous Engine Optimization is the new AEO.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could end up being. I, I think when it comes to all these vernaculars and terms, people are just gonna stick to the basics that actually produce results. You can't get away from Facebook and Instagram ads. You can't get away from, you can't get away from Google and ranking organically and paying for clicks on there. You can't get away from LLMs, both, you know, doing the paid and the organic. It just drives business. I was talking to Javi in the car before I drove here. I just did a podcast interview with someone in Beverly Hills. That's why I was early.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm like, "Why are you just, you're wearing a nice shirt today too?"

• 2:17Speaker 01

  No, the old white shirts that I had, they don't make them anymore. So I switched.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  What brand is this?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Banana Republic, $17.17.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  It looks expensive because it's heavier.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  $75, then they had like a 40% off sale, and then I had some coupons. And I got 10 of them, and then they ran another promotion again, and I was like, "I got another six, six." So now I have 16 of them.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  How dare you not tell me about the sale?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and then I put in my phone number to get extra, you know, like if you SMS and you don't want it pops up, I'm like, "Let me put it in, get the discount."

• 2:48Speaker 00

  See, that's a discount. But that's selfish. You didn't tell me about the discount.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  You could have. I didn't know you wanted white shirts because you don't really wear white shirts.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  I do. Now that I play tennis more frequently and they require you to wear white or black, I need to buy more white and black stuff.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Wait, when you play tennis, you can't, at a club, you can't wear a colored shirt?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  It says you have to wear white or black. And so I joined this thing called Sunset Tennis Club about a week ago, and I'm playing tonight again, right? And so it's like, I need more white. And then I saw, the funny thing is, I played on Wednesday, and the guy was wearing like a completely beat-up Lululemon shirt. And I looked at mine, and it's the exact same shirt, and mine's completely beat up too. It's like torn and all that. So I'm like, "I need nicer shirts."

• 3:21Speaker 01

  But these are terrible for playing tennis. You want like athletic.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll get, I'll get like, but I, this is for normal wear, like what you're wearing right now. Yeah, like you would wear this to speak at a conference now.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that looks way nicer than the Viori one.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Uh, Buck Mason.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Buck Mason, okay.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Viori wore my pants.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, Viori's very nice, by the way. So, but I want to call out one thing over here. So, I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but the era of the self-improving product has arrived. So this is Amplitude, right? So this, this is a product manager from Amplitude. He's like, "Hey, we have an agent now for self-improving products. So for the past few months, we had it running on our own product. It finds problems, ship fixes, and measures where they worked. Here are some highlights," right? So he goes through it over here. I'm just gonna call like two of these and we can react to it. Wave, which is the product, found that most people ignore the suggestion cards on our agent homepage. They were generic. Wave personalized them to each user's recent work and had a working PR open in about 15 minutes. It drove a 160% plus increase in suggestions accepted during the A/B test. Okay, so that's one, right?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  So that was five days, 15 minutes, 160% card-driven sends, okay? Then the next one, oh, this one, you'll like this one, Neil. So this search was one, this, this one was embarrassing, okay? So this is, "Wave noticed that when users search with only one to two characters, our docs gave zero results without explaining that it had a three-character minimum. Wave rebuilt the search experience around this limitation, educating users to type three characters, and searches that surface results went from 92% to 97, 98% or so." So I think, you know, talking about Autonomous Engine Optimization or talking about the self-improving product, a lot of people are talking about loops the last few months. This is, these are loops that are actually working now in the wild, and I am glad that Amplitude is talking about this.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  But I think, uh, this is the future of doing, but, but I'm gonna give one more because, you know, Neil's occupied right now. So, "Wave identified that when new users landed on a setup checklist with five next steps and no obvious first move, most of them stalled. Wave swapped it for one guided first step. The experiment is projected to move onboarding completion from 6% to 9%." That's huge.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  That's huge.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  It's huge.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  People don't talk about these gains and efficiency, like those kind of things change a business. Not overnight, but it changes over time. It's all about the marginal gains. Dude, in, in, uh, marketing right now, everyone's talking about this new thing, and they think it's gonna get them some more efficiencies. What is it called? I got the link. I should actually text it to you so you can pull it up and see it yourself. Uh, I'll text you right now.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Dude, this is, post is so good. I realized I didn't share this with my team. I just shared it with my team. Because I'm like, "Why don't we just have this for our products?" In fact, why don't you have this for UberSuggest? Why do you have this for Answer to Public?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Obviously, right?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good idea.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Uh, you, you see these guys? I texted it to you. They're advertising a Tier 2 Platinum Meta ad account, free.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Fund it with credit card and pay zero processing fee because, uh, WAP.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  WAP.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Covers it. If your account ever goes down, we get it reinstated by default. It's just like, I look at this and I'm like, are these people just pitching like shady marketers? And just people who are doing a lot of gray hat stuff and just be like spam the crap out of Meta and Facebook? I'm like, "I do not know how long this is gonna last."

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, WAP is, um, WAP is just have the marketplace where they sell like courses and they sell these types of services out there. And I don't know how they're valued at multiple billions and how they're doing all their revenue. I, I don't, I don't have a clue.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Well, they must be getting a kickback with their volume. That's the only way.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Mainly affiliate revenue, is that what you're saying?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  No, kickbacks. If you drive enough money to some of these platforms, uh, ad platforms, some of them actually give you kickbacks. They disguise it in different things. Some of them kick you back the money in like Ireland and places like that instead of in the US. But it was counted, they'll call it marketing, but yeah, that's, that's how some of them make the economics work.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yep. So, anyway, the self-improving product, we just talked about that, but let's go back to OpenAI for a second. So you saw yesterday on, you probably check X every now and then, but, okay, OpenAI comes out with GPT-6, right? So I think the way OpenAI handled their GPT-6 Astra launch was very boneheaded. You know why?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Why?

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Because all of a sudden, all of these AI influencers and YouTube creators, they got access. They all made videos. They came out yesterday. Guess what? Do you have GPT-6 access today? You don't. I'll tell you, you don't. I don't have it either, right? And so what it does is, imagine this, let's say you pay a lot of money for enterprise, okay? Let's say GPT, I'm making it up, right?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I have GPT-7 access.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  No, you don't. You, you don't have anything. So you have the same thing I have. So my point is, we pay, we pay legit money for this, and how's it that these influencers get access, right? And how's it that we create this stuff and we don't get it first? But anyway, point is, we're left out.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  I haven't checked.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  It's, I'm just saying that I think it's boneheaded to go with influencers, smart move, right? But to not release it to the public at the same time if the influencers are releasing it that day. Because it frustrates people that are paying good money for OpenAI's newest model.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  What I would have done is released it. Uh, I don't know if they ever, they won't release that model for free. It's paid, right? It's only paid?

• 8:26Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Or do they have a free version? So if they had, if they released it, what I would want to do is, I would only release it on the paid models and then like, if you want the new model, upgrade to paid. And that, and all at the same time when all the influencers are out there, I think that would have helped. The company that did a really good launch with their product, amazing marketing, recently was Dyson with their toothbrush. Did you see the toothbrush?

• 8:48Speaker 00

  I saw that, but like, the, the challenge with that toothbrush, Neil's talking about this AI toothbrush that has cameras, right? My challenge with that one is you can't use your own toothpaste. You have to use their lather toothpaste.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  It's sold out everywhere. You can't find it. It's sold out. It's too hard to buy.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  I was gonna buy the day of, and then I looked at the toothpaste. I was like, "I'm not gonna do that yet." I'm gonna wait for the next wave. Because what if they explode in your mouth?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't. But the review.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  You don't know that. It just came out.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but some people had it earlier, like earlier access, and they created it while they're actually brushing, but the reviews are amazing.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And the first time I watched the video, I did not buy it. And then I got shown the video a lot more by other influencers, and I'm like, "Oh, I should go and buy it." Went to Amazon, not there. Uh, went to Dyson then, sold out. And then I'm like, "All right, forget this." I'm like, "I'll just wait till someone has it."

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then we'll wait for them to see, we'll see what they say, a real person, and then we can come back to it. But see, that's a good example of a launch, right? They, they, they gave it to a bunch of influencers and the product was available, and then it sold out. But for ChatGPT, the influencers announced it, and then it wasn't available. And then, guess what? That that actually wastes their mind share for the day. Because they put all that, all the firepower into it. And then now it's the day, the, the next day. And you and I would probably be talking about how amazing it is, at least I would be. But nope, not happening right now. In fact, someone like me would probably be making a video on it today. So.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  It's their loss.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I agree with you, but I know this thing's coming out soon. I thi- I, I think for the websites like Best Buy, it's all saying like nine, eight. But there was a moment where I was able to.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  You're talking about the toothpaste?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, the toothbrush.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I was able to buy it and then it ended up turning to, instead of buying it, like notified me.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I almost bought it too, but there's only a pink version available.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, same. I didn't want the pink version. I want the blue.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  So I was close to getting it and I was like, okay, worst case, I can just get it for the girlfriend, right? But then it's like, you know, and then see how she likes it. If she doesn't like it, then I won't buy it. But yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  That's a good idea. You should go get the pink version for your girlfriend.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  You get it first. You get it for your daughter and so you can get two customers.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  No, my kids are too young for it.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Okay, get it for your wife.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  No, she won't care for this. Half the time she has a lot of tooth, half the time she just uses the handheld. She'll be like, you use it first and then let me know.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  The problem with the handheld is I brush really hard, right? It causes your gums to recede and then you have to like repair it.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  I thought you got that fixed.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  I did get it fixed. That was five years ago and then I brushed so hard again and started. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonia Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonia Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. Receding again. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called MP Digital.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer2Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Mine tells me don't brush too long. So the problem that I have is, is.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Your OCD.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  They're like, don't keep brushing. They asked me how long I brushed. I said, on average, I brush four minutes, three times a day. They're like, that's too long. Slow down how, uh, how many minutes you brush.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Four minutes, three times a day? That's crazy. All you need is two minutes.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I can't, not enough time to clean teeth fully in two minutes.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  That's why his teeth are so white. It's almost like you have veneers, but you don't.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  No, my teeth are crooked.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Veneers are really expensive. I learned that veneers are like sixty grand and, and, and people get loans for that.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  People get veneers in Asia.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, but like, I don't understand.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  It's not sixty grand. It's really affordable.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  I, well, I, I've heard here, around here is sixty grand.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz you, you, this is Beverly Hills.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Go somewhere else and it's half the price.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, but also that's a permanent thing too.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Well, veneers, they shave down your teeth and they put fake teeth over it.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  I'm saying, so it's, it's permanent. You can't undo that.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  No, you can't undo it.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Anyway, I, I saw something, uh, interesting post from Andrew Warner recently, cuz you and I have been working, you know, I believe that we're putting a little more effort into our, into our YouTube channels, at least I am. So it's interesting to me.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Andrew Warner Mixer G?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, Mixer G, cuz he started a new YouTube channel, right? And so he has fifty thousand subs, okay? So you have like one point six million or something like that. I have about two hundred thousand, something like that, right? But the subs don't really matter because in the last month, he posted the numbers here, he got nine hundred thirty seven thousand views, right? This is, uh, you know, in aggregate and then fifty eight thousand watch time and then twelve thousand subscribers added, right? I think these are great numbers.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Let me guess, he's talking about the next new hot thing and that's why it's doing well.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Exactly. So that's the first takeaway in terms of how he's grown his YouTube, right? Exactly. And we've talked about this on the podcast. If, if you hit a trending topic, like you're gonna win, like my Grockbot, my last few videos, uh, it's like, it's not bad, right? If I get it over ten thousand for a video, I'm like happy with it for long form.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  So my Grockbot for business won fourteen thousand views. The other one's like twelve thousand. Um, so he said, five things that helped my new YouTube channel take off. One, info calls. Jesse Pujee taught me how to have frequent informational calls with people who do YouTube well. And one, I learned to turn on ads. That's a big one. So whenever you don't turn on ads, like they're not incentivized to show you as much, okay? And he learned how VidIQ can be a good thought partner, okay? The second piece, uh, so is around data. So, uh, choose, Rich, show me how to look at the minute by minute view data that YouTube gives to help me cut fluff off. So you just look at retention metrics, like thirty second retention or three second retention for, uh, short form. And then X, he says X is the best indicator of what the world will talk about. So whenever you see what people are talking about, like open call agents, you attack it quickly, right?

• 14:42Speaker 00

  If you're attacking trending topics. And then four, you lean into not knowing. So just like learning from other people, bringing them on. And then five, PR, having other people promote it. Um, and he says, you know, what didn't work is talking about YouTube on X. That doesn't work that well. So, but like you and I have been doing YouTube for a little bit and I will just say, I'll share my learnings first and then Neil can share his learnings. Yes, if you're talking about trending topics, like whenever I talked about NFTs and they're hot, oh my God, a hundred thousand views, right? If I talk about dating and finance, oh my God, six hundred thousand views, right? Right? And so you can talk about wide TAM topics or you can talk about trending topics, but they, they might not necessarily drive views, uh, leads for you. Okay? So you have to keep that in mind. And then the second thing I'll say around this is that you, people are like, oh, okay, the, the packaging does matter.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Like your YouTube and, and your, your thumbnail and your, um, your headline. But honestly, if it's a trending topic, it doesn't even matter. You can have the crappiest thumbnail in the world, you're still gonna get like an eight percent, nine percent click through rate.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yep. You know, when I look at social media, I bet you Eric actually knows more of my social stats.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Bless you.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Thank you. Eric knows more of my social, about my social stats than I do. And I know this because last time we did, uh, a recording here was the time before you're talking about one of my videos. I didn't know the views. He knew the views. He even told me what my average views are on the other videos. And I looked and I'm like, oh, he's actually right.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  That's how little I check on views. I look at all this stuff when it comes to social media. I think markers have it off. Thinking about the views is just a waste of time. We measure internally revenue from all the social content we create and what actually drove the revenue. We also look at, uh, leads that come from all the social content and how much revenue that generated. So the leads for us is more top of funnel, the bottom of the funnel is, um, revenue. And then we map it out to which topics produce the best results and we just double down on those. And we don't care if it creates a thousand views or fifty thousand views. It's all about the end result. And we found our business to grow faster operating that way than just focusing on views.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And I think that's a big thing, even with clients, we try to take them from, stop looking at your total search traffic, look how much revenue your search traffic drives. And we have case studies, no joke, like real case studies of large companies worth billions of dollars where we show half the traffic, more revenue, double the traffic, less revenue, because you got the wrong type of traffic. And it's really hard to get marketers to get away from top of funnel traffic and shares and view metrics instead of just looking at things like what is actually producing results. Because your CEO doesn't care if you have one tenth the search traffic.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  He'd rather have one tenth the search traffic and double the revenue from that channel, especially if it is profitable.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  You know, I was interviewing someone this week for like an, an SEO role, right? So I was like, saying, and this guy worked at like Smart Sheet, for example, or like Drata, right? Like these are, you know, good enterprise companies, right? And, uh, I was like, so what, what's your biggest SEO win? He's like, he couldn't give me a number, right? And he's like, oh yeah, you know, the, the share of voice went up, blah, blah, but like what, how did that affect revenue? How did it affect pipeline? Oh, you know, I just don't know. But, but I'm like, but this is your most impressive SEO win, right? He's like, yeah. I'm like, well then how do you not know these numbers, right? And so, but my point with that conversation is like, this is the majority of most marketers. They think about the vanity metrics up top because it absolves them from the responsibility of having to go deeper in terms of driving pipeline and leads and revenue.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  A, a new thing that I learned, so all of our executives in all the countries need to know how our ideal customer found us. Uh, example of this is Javi, who runs Latam for us, uh, got a lead, one of the biggest companies in Latin America. And he asked him how they found us because it's required for internally, we track it all. And he said, they found us from Claude. And then he follows up with, what did you ask? And then it was specifically around paid ads on Google and SEO. And Claude recommended us for that as well as if they wanted GEO, we can do all three with them and do it combined.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And they talked about the efforts and the results, cuz we have some data on this, but it also mentioned other agencies. This is helpful for a few reasons. One, you can ask these engines these questions too. And they told us, yeah, we hit up you and the other agencies that recommended for this RFP. So if Eric asks the same question, he may get different results from Claude, but there's usually some overlap. We now kind of have an understanding of the other agencies that are competing with us in the pitch. So that was really helpful. Two, we've noticed a trend from a lot of our executives. Uh, six months ago, when they asked, where are you finding us? Most of them would say.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Chat GPT or Gemini, when it came to these LLMs or AI overviews or Google, right? So a Google version or Chat GPT. We're starting to see companies are starting to say Claude more frequently. It's not that Claude has a massive market share of people using Claude to just do searches or ask questions like they do with Chat GPT. It's that a lot of businesses have been buying Claude for their employees and their employees are now also using it to answer questions related to things that are not

• 20:16Speaker 01

  related to execution. Cause a lot of the people that I know who use Claude, use it to be more efficient in execution within their job. But they're, because the company's already paying for corporate accounts, people are starting to also use it to search or ask questions, even though they also have Chat GPT subscriptions. So we're starting to see an uptick in B2B, I'm sorry, not B2B. We are, both you and I are B2B, but businesses finding other businesses through Claude where we did not see that as frequently six months ago. We've seen a big change in that for us.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  It changes, I mean, the, it's interesting because Claude took the mind share the last few months or so, and then everyone kind of, you know, moved over to that. And what's to say they won't in the future, right? So it might go back to OpenAI, it might go back and forth. That's just like a side thing. I think when it comes to sales in general, what you mentioned around, how did you first find us, right? How did you first hear about us? That should be one of the first sales questions you ask in fact, because when you're starting, I was like, hey, cool, nice to meet you, right? By the way, how'd you hear about us, right? Oh, cool. Well, you heard from Claude, okay, well, what prompt did you use exactly? What did you see exactly? And then by the way, like you could even ask, like, would you like us to do it for you, right? But I, by the way, recently, I've been talking to my, my sales team about this, but

• 21:33Speaker 00

  I think the, the way to get larger deals is actually having an extended sales conversations now where you're just being curious about how all their work goes. Like, what are your priorities overall? What are you trying to do exactly? But because if you just try to-

• 21:46Speaker 01

  With, you're talking about with potential customers and employees.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Customers, because if you just try to force one solution down, you're actually losing the fact that maybe they're looking for multiple things. If you just try to force like the one thing that you know, versus having a conversation.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  But you already know this, dude, you've been doing sales for years. It doesn't matter what you're selling. I know you're selling more AI stuff now. The first thing you would have all your people do, including you, is you hear them out and understand all the problems, because then you can discover where you can help them. Versus just going in and selling a solution.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  And that's most salespeople. That's the lesson for everyone here. Most, like, most salespeople like to force their solution down. Like, remember, you, you met one of the, the, the salespeople from like another agency last year at the, maybe two, yeah, a year ago, at the, the Global Marketing Summit, the YPO one, remember that?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  That person only knew how to sell her solution and didn't try to learn the other solutions that we had and thus didn't ask good questions and learn the entire problem set. So I think in sales, you have to be more like a doctor. You have to understand all the things that are happening within their business and then have a, have an extended conversation. And so I think the patient salesperson actually ends up winning more.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Patient, patient conversation, not, not patient with like-

• 22:59Speaker 01

  It's all problem, solution solving, right? So you're trying to understand someone's problem and then you end up selling them a solution that works for them and is customized to them. But the really cool part about listening is, is sometimes people tell you that they have a problem A, but really A isn't the problem. The root cause of it is B. If you solve B, you'll solve A as well. If you solve A, it doesn't solve B and it creates other problems that you didn't think about, right? But so understanding is super important. Like, I had someone hit me up the other day, he's like, I want to work with you. And we have, uh, we, we are in the kitchen space.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  So they deal with like Moe and or Cohen, I don't know all the faucet names. And they work with them to get into other architects and other designers and builders to recommend their products. So their job is to get other people who sell their products to recommend them over the competition. And he was showing me all the stuff that he was trying to do and he's like, yeah, I, I'm struggling with, uh, G E O and I'm struggling with Facebook ads and it's not working. And I was like, you should just go to account-based marketing. And he's like, oh, would you help us with account-based marketing? I'm like, no, but this is what you should end up doing. I'm like, the other channels are a waste. You're trying to figure out these channels that don't really matter too much for you,

• 24:26Speaker 01

  but account-based marketing will be much more effective.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  And then they shifted focus, but they thought how they're actually leveraging these channels, like Chat GPT is off. Instead, it's the channels aren't the right fit for his business.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yep, totally. So that's the lesson, keep being consistent. That's how you went up marketing.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  All right, goodbye.