Episode 1312: The AI Webinar Concierge Advantage with Sam Chang

What if every webinar registrant received a personalized call at the exact right moment without adding another salesperson to your team? In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Sam Chang, Founder and CEO of VTM Group, who shares how his journey from door-to-door sales and virtual staffing led him to build AutoCaller AI, a voice AI platform that automates sales conversations. He explains how an AI webinar concierge can contact registrants before, during, and after an event to improve attendance, engagement, follow-up, and overall conversion rates. Sam also discusses drop-off recovery, personalized conversations, AI-powered sales agents, and his vision for helping more businesses build scalable webinar funnels. Key Takeaways: → AutoCaller AI automates sales calls while maintaining a realistic tone, personalization, and conversational engagement. → Webinar operators often lose potential revenue because they lack the staff to contact every registrant personally. → Calling registrants shortly before an event can improve attendance and reduce missed opportunities. → AI can contact no-shows five, ten, or fifteen minutes after a webinar starts, encouraging them to join. → Post-webinar calls can deliver replays, promote upcoming events, book appointments, or present special offers. Sam Chang is the founder and CEO of VTM Group, which includes VTMEMBER, a virtual staffing company, and AutoCaller AI, an AI-powered appointment-booking platform. He scaled VTMEMBER from zero to 250 employees in three years, serving clients across North America. Through AutoCaller AI, Sam helps businesses automate speed-to-lead calling, follow-up, appointment booking, and pipeline reactivation without adding headcount. The platform integrates with GoHighLevel and combines AI voice agents, paid advertising, automated nurture, and trained closers to improve show rates, close rates, and revenue growth. Before founding VTM Group, Sam helped expand TELUS’s door-to-door sales operation from 25 to 350 representatives and contributed to more than $750 million in revenue. He later developed a nationally adopted sales curriculum and brought advanced sales psychology into AI voice technology. Connect With Sam: Website: http://vtmember.ca/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vtmember/ X: https://x.com/vtmemberteam Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vtmemberteam LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vtmember

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast. It's 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host, Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to be with Sam Chang, founder of Auto Caller AI. Sam, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here today.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  It is our pleasure. Full disclosure, I am a client of Auto Caller AI. And as we're recording this, I just tested it and got my first phone call from the AI by opting into my own webinar, which was super exciting. But we're going to dive in and let Sam talk. So tell everybody, let's go back in time a little bit. Tell everybody how you got started.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, how far do you want, how far, how far back do you want to go?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Um, let's go, you got in the world of business.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Okay, cool. So when I first got into the world of business, I was actually a, I was actually a meat salesman back in university. So I was back in university, I studied, I went to school to become a director. And then halfway through school, I decided I want to be a, so actually halfway through school, my very first commission-based sales job, I was selling meat door to door. So I was working for a company called Nutri Farms. I sold beef, chicken, pork door to door, and I was slinging four to 5K high-ticket packages door to door. And so on my fourth day on that job, I broke the company record. I made 20, so I sold 20 grand worth of meats and I made two grand on my, on my fourth day on that job. That day changed my life because I was on a Friday. On Monday, I remember walking into my, into business 2251.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  And I was, I was sitting in class, listening to my professor talk. And I turned to my friend Simon, I'm like, hey, Simon, I'm like, how much do you think this prof makes? And he goes like, I don't know, like, maybe like 70, 80 grand. And I'm like, no way. I'm like, profs make like $300,000, $400,000 for sure. And, and he's like, no, I think like 70, 80 grand. I remember pulling out my laptop, I pull it up and I'm like, research. What does the University of Western Ontario professor make? And what's it, was there a salary? I looked up her exact salary because it was online. It was $74,000. That day I dropped out of school. And I decided to drop out of school because I had an opportunity to fly out to Western Canada to work with a door-to-door sales company that was selling for a, the largest telecom company in Canada. So right around 2015, I dropped out of school, started doing door-to-door sales.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  And I started working with the largest telecom company in Canada. And I worked, I actually worked with a construction company that actually built all of the fiber optic cables for TELUS. And at the time, we had a vendor where we were selling home phone TV, internet, home security cellphone door to door. And we were like around 25 people, 20 of them quit. The five people remainder, we built the largest door-to-door sales team in Canada at the time. We had about three to 400 reps. We've gone through thousands and thousands and thousands of reps. And through that, what I did was basically, I, at one point, I was the director of training and development. So every single person that came through the doors at Lead Corps sales was trained by me in terms of like door-to-door sales. And so did that for four and a half years, left the corporate world. And part of the reason why I left the corporate world is because COVID hit. And then they were just like, yeah, you can't go door to door anymore. And I was like, uh, okay, what the heck do we do?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  So, so then after that, what I did is I basically went and I, during the pandemic, I was like, oh, like, let's just, you know, supply and demand, let's look for opportunities. So I was like, why don't we sell masks? So I picked up the phone and I started cold, I actually literally started dropshipping masks from China to the US. And I didn't know any dropshipping tactics. All I knew was how to pick up a phone, call someone to try to get them to, you know, take action. So what I did was I basically went on Alibaba, I found manufacturers. I would pick up the phone, I'd call them, I could speak Mandarin. So I'd call them and I would say, hey, look, like, I got like, you know, a ton of like, you know, hospitals in the US and that I know of and, you know, whatever. And I just kind of like bullshit them, I didn't know, okay? But I figured I would just cold call them afterwards too.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  So I cold called the Chinese factories, I lock up some supply agreements, and I started cold calling hospitals all over the US, New York, LA, Florida, and I started calling them and basically, hey, like, hey, it's Sam, I'm a broker. Um, I got a ton of masks ready to ship. Can I talk to your procurement department? That was my pitch. And so through that, I basically brokered masks between China and the US, which was when like the, probably like the, the, the, at the time, I thought it was the worst thing that happened to me, but it turned out to be character building. But long story short, okay, what happened was I had a mask at that time. I actually, um, I, so I made 80K in three months doing that. After that, what I did was I went and I raised about half a million dollars

• 5:26Speaker 02

  and I, I fronted a stock of masks that landed in New York. And when it landed in New York, it was seized by the American government. So I had already wired 140 grand to the Chinese factory. And, and, and the, the, the mask, when they landed in New York, it was, it was confiscated at the time. Because this was like peak COVID, it was like eight, nine months in, right? So peak COVID, um, they, American government confiscated my mask. I lost my life savings. That left me like with no money. I kept trying to get back into the market. I couldn't get back into the market because I had no money. And at all the factories, they changed the payment terms. So it used to be like pay on delivery, but then they're like, they're like, oh, you have to pay upfront because they ran out of the fabric. So in order to go bid on the fabric, you had to actually like, you know, like have cash to go bid on the fabric.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Long story short, during COVID, I started a, so I lost everything. Then right during COVID timing, I started a VA company called VT Member. That VA company, we grew and because it was of the timing of the market, we grew that company from zero to about like, so zero to 80K in 11 months. So eight, zero to 80K a month in 11 months. And then we went from 80K to 350K in the next like 24 months. And we grew that to like 200, 250, um, uh, VAs working at the same time. And right around, so anyway, so that, that was that, okay? When, when voice AI came out and I saw how realistic voice AI was getting,

• 6:53Speaker 02

  I was terrified because 80% of my clients were clients that hired inside sales agents for me that I would hire from the Philippines, train them on Zoom and place in my clients' businesses. So I was like, if I don't get into voice AI, it's just going to replace my whole business. So I decided to take all of my profits and pour that into Auto Caller to build our Auto Caller, which basically what we do now, Auto Caller is the most realistic sounding voice AI in the world. We automate client's sales processes by installing a hyper-realistic voice AI train with sales tonalities and some of the best sales scripts that man has ever written to then go and do their sales process, book appointments, close deals, text payment links, all of that kind of stuff for our clients. So that's the long and the short of it and like, as fast as I possibly can, because there's a lot more, but.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I, I appreciate that. And that was a large amount of information and an incredible story. I am sure we could spend the entire episode and more unpacking that. But let's talk about Auto Caller AI, what you're here to talk about now. So I know you gave us the one-sentence elevator pitch of what it does, but let's expand on that a little bit.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. So Auto Caller, basically, um, if, if you think about it, so right, right now, what we do is this, okay? So right now, um, Auto Caller, we went through a couple of iterations. When we first launched Auto Caller, okay, one of my very first ads that I popped off, that that popped off, and I spent like probably half a million on that ad before I fatigued, is give me 24 hours and I'll place a proven cold call on your business. And if it doesn't perform, you don't pay. AI cold call in your business, if it doesn't perform, you don't pay. Now, that worked really well. However, TCPA banned cold calling. So that generated a ton of people who wanted to cold call, right? And so my challenge in the beginning was that I needed to create a voice agent that was realistic enough that it could call someone just like cold to be able to book appointments with them directly.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Okay, so that was like a big challenge that I needed to overcome. Okay, um, after that, what we did was we pivoted. And so we pivoted towards like, hey, if you're a coaching consulting agency owner, selling high ticket and have appointment setters, right? I got an offer for you. That was another hook that we did. So essentially, we pivoted to people who were running ads, just in general.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  After that fatigue, we then pivoted again because we looked at all of our best clients and the ones that had the fastest time to value. We looked at the ones that um the the the the percentage of successful customers that has gone through and got to the value and got benefit from it. We looked at everybody and the one angle that we found that got the best benefit was actually webinar operators. So people running single day, three day, three day, three day events, three day challenges, five day challenges, like basically anybody running an event. Now, reason being is because if you think about an average webinar operator, the average webinar operator, okay, there's a couple, couple key, key things. Number one is a webinar operator is they do one to many because they don't want to manage

• 9:45Speaker 02

  a sales team, which means they don't usually have a team to be able to call all the registrants before, during and after the webinar to increase the throughput of the webinar. However, it's been categorically proven that if you're a webinar operator and use a human to call every single registrant before, during and after the webinar, it will increase the throughput of the webinar because of this one very important reason, which is that calling is the only method of communication with webinar attendees that turn a one-way communication into a two-way communication. Think about it. When was the last time that you received an SMS or email reminder to a webinar and you replied, oh, I'm so excited to the webinar? Like, no, no, never, right? It's a one-way communication. If they send you an email or SMS, it's a one-way communication. It's not a two-way communication. But if they call you, then suddenly you turn that into a two-way communication because

• 10:30Speaker 02

  it's a phone call. So that two-way communication creates engagement and that engagement is what gets them excited about the webinar and it's personalized. Okay, because from the registration questions, the AI can reference that as a custom field inside GHL to be able to go and contextualize that conversation, say, hey, you registered for a webinar and by the way, in your registration form, you said this. Is that right? Yeah. And that now the conversation is contextualized. So it makes it way warmer. Okay, so we essentially install an AI webinar concierge now. Okay, so now what we do is we install an AI webinar concierge before, during and after the webinar to increase the throughput of the webinar. And we install this concierge to basically call in a couple of different areas. Number one is the welcome call. Welcome call is the moment they sign, they they register for the webinar, we do a welcome call.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  The purpose of the welcome call is threefold. Number one, to make sure the links and then spam. Number two, to make sure to know what they signed up for. If we ask them, hey, do you know what you signed up for? They say, no, I don't know what they signed up for. Then great, this is what you signed up for and do a quick pitch. Then the last piece is um is uh to get them excited about the webinar by letting them know that there's going to be a lead magnet, an additional bonus that are going to be able to get at the end of the webinar if they attend the full webinar. That's the welcome call. Okay. The day before we do a confirmation call, hey, you coming? Yeah, do you have a link? No, text, boom, add tag, send a text. Okay, that's a confirmation call. Then the day of reminder call. Reminder call is like, hey, you coming today? Yeah, cool, later, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Then when the web, this is the magic, when the webinar begins, this wasn't available. Like, obviously, there are webinar operators that do the welcome call, that do the the

• 11:59Speaker 02

  day before confirmation call, day of, right, reminder call. But here's the thing, there's, there's no webinar operators right now doing the five, 10, 15 minute reminder call after the webinar begins.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Nobody's doing that. Okay, so what we do is we insert, when the webinar begins, did they join Zoom? No. Okay, five minute, 10 minute, 15 minute, we call them, call, text, voicemail, drop, you coming? Okay, if they join Zoom, boom, webhook fires into the software to remove them from that workflow. So the five, 10, 15 minute does not fire and then now the drop off recovery turns on. What's drop off recovery, Sam? Imagine if like the moment that your webinar attendees, they drop off your webinar, within 10 seconds, they get a call. Hey, you just dropped, you okay? Right? Or, hey, you dropped off, was this time not good? No problem, I can get you onto the next webinar. So drop off recovery could be, could be two folds. If they drop off before a certain time, we call them to get them back onto another webinar.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  If they're dropped off after a certain time, we call them to get them booked directly into the appointment of the closer's calendar, if that's your webinar flow, or get them to take the next action. Post webinar, everybody that attended, everybody that no showed, we can call them and basically attended, you could just get them to go to, you know, the next step. Everybody that no showed, hey, do you want the replay? Blah, blah, blah, get them onto another webinar, get them enrolled into another webinar. So that's the post. The other thing is that we, that we've done, for example, like, I was giving an example, like, Kiana Danielle, okay, Kiana Danielle does a um free evergreen webinar into a paid uh into a paid event, okay, sorry, into a, into a paid offer, okay, it's four figures, okay?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  And from there, she has her webinar concierge call and say, hey, it's Kiana, I'm a version, I'm a, I'm an AI version of our founder, Kiana, she pays me 15 cents a minute, so I actually don't get paid a commission. So normally it's this price, but if you buy from me, it's actually this price and offer them a one-time offer to call all the webinar attendees to offer them a one-time offer after the webinar if they didn't take action. So there's so many different ways that you can utilize auto caller, but it's long and the short of it, it's an AI webinar concierge that will call before, during and after the webinar to increase the throughput of the webinar. Yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  That is absolutely insane. Congratulations on what you've built, cutting edge to be sure. Um, I'm super excited because as we're recording this, mine is about to launch, um, and I can't wait to see the results in terms of the improvements that I get. What are, give us um like one or two case studies of this is what the person was dealing with before, auto caller, and now this is what it looks like after.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Krista Mayshore, 75 million dollar webinar operator coach. Okay, she came to me, we increased on our first webinar, we increased her webinar show rate by 80%, increased throughput from like three and a half to 6.8 to one.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  That's ridiculous. Um, what about someone with a smaller business who maybe isn't at the 75 million dollar level yet?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Mackenzie Lashaw, Mackenzie doubled her webinar, doubled his webinar show rate the moment we, we installed this as well and he wasn't at like 3, 4,000 registrants months, he was at like 2, 300, right? So um what we measure really is we measure this, we measure what is your conversion to opt-in ratio, right? Conversion at the top divided by opt-in, right? That number, because what it does is it affects the whole throughput of the webinar, right? So that's really the number that we're measuring. And so overall, if you measure that number, like the increases, I've seen any, anything in the range of like 20, 30% throughput increase to a double, right? And that's, that's also the reason why there are certain webinar operators that, like, for example, if you're a webinar operator, listening to this right now and you have a setter, I'm sure you've already made the cost benefit analysis in your mind and you're like, based on the number of webinar attendees that I have and the registrants that I have,

• 15:40Speaker 02

  it will cost me to not have a human to call these people because it will cost me in terms of the show up rate. Ergo, I need to have a human being. So this is just a, a way more cost effective way, because it's AI, right? To be able to perform this, and there's certain things that even the AI can do that like humans cannot do, like humans cannot do drop off recovery. Like, imagine somebody sitting there, the moment they drop off, getting a notification, hey, call this person, right? Like, that's like, this is impossible, right? So um, so yeah, but I've seen lifts like across the board of like varying levels of lift, yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  That is absolutely fantastic. You've now helped so many people. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  So my biggest challenge right now is actually creating something that the newer webinar operator can actually take, and so there's a couple of things. So my audience is two parts. Number one are people who, well, people who are already doing one to many, right? Who need the webinar concierge. My second thing is people who want to do one to many, but are scared of doing one to many. So right now, what I am, uh, the biggest challenge, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in, like, right now, I'm in like massive like build mode. So one of the things I'm going to be releasing down the line is actually called AI webinar insiders. AI webinar insiders is going to be a done with you program in a school group format that you're going to be able to go in and the whole concept of AI webinar insiders right now. So my biggest um challenge right now is time because there's so many things that I need

• 17:04Speaker 02

  to build specifically for the avatar of someone who is already doing a one-to-one funnel, maybe an application, VSL, um, lead form funnel, but want to do a webinar funnel, but don't know how to make that jump. I'm creating a modular, right, system where the whole concept of it is basically this, I'll quickly explain it, okay? So everything that you want to build in the world of AI requires source code, markdown file with instruction, which will ask you a series of questions, answer the question, re-output the source code, re-skin to whatever you want. So as an example, inside AI webinar insiders, one of the things that we have in there, okay, is actually the source code of our funnel. Okay, so like as an example, um, I don't know if I can share a screen here, um, but um.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  I can make it so you can share a screen, it's just the people who are listening to the audio that's obviously won't see it.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Okay, that's okay, no problem. So I'll, I'll, I'll share a screen real quick for the people who are watching it and um you can, I mean, you can, if you're curious, you can search up these, these, these, uh, these situations. So, so you see, basically, we have this funnel, okay? This is our webinar funnel and this funnel is like very high converting in terms of like a registration page for your webinar funnel, has a VSL, okay? It has um information, so this, for example, this qualification question will determine whether or not they're a beginner or an advanced person, okay? They don't have to select this, they cannot select this and still be able to go through and fill out all the information. You see how this is pre-checked, right? So this removes friction. So there's a lot of elements in here that are already built into here.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  This, okay, we built this, which is an identical version, okay, of this funnel, okay, in 15 minutes. And the reason why we're able to do that, okay? And by the way, this, right? If you look, right, you got the checkout page, okay? You got the VIP upgrade page, VIP one-click upsell page, right? Um, you have the VIP, VIP one-click upsell page. And so all the different pages of the funnel, I can one-click reskin all the ads for your webinar funnel, you're going to be able to one-click reskin, like, so right now, my biggest challenge is doing that so that I can serve a larger group um and uh and be able to, be able to do more like one to many.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Because right now, like our one to many, if I sell 50 accounts right now, I can't install 50 accounts at the same time. Like, it takes way too long. But having something like this, being able to incubate my TAM so that it's ready for my AI webinar concierge offer, that's, that would be like my biggest challenge, yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Well, sign me up for that. Um, your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Probably the best thing, the, the, the thing that I love the most um is

• 19:39Speaker 02

  is being able to take, take processes and like normally like things that would normally take like weeks before and creating systems around it that takes like minutes or hours or minutes than, than, than weeks because that process of taking something that like normally takes weeks, condensing it down so that you could do it in, you know, in, in an hour, um, what you would normally do in a week or a month, that process is very fulfilling for me because I think there's one resource that, you know, I, I, I look at it this way. The game of, the game of business is basically this, we have limited time, energy and money. How do we deploy our limited time, energy and money to create more time, energy and money? Earlier in our career, we don't have the money. So we trade time for money. Later

• 20:24Speaker 02

  on in our career, we trade our money for time. We buy time, we buy experts, right? To buy time. So if, if, if I look at it, you know, being able to take things that normally take a long time and condensing timeframes into templates that like people can use, like that creation process, I love it. I love the creation process, like new things, like when I create like a, a, when I reverse engineer something into a master prompt that somebody can then copy and paste into an AI to then generate the thing, right? That process of like reverse engineering something so that you can turn something that normally takes a week into like, you know, an hour of work, that creation process is what I love. Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  That is awesome. Well, we know your time is incredibly valuable. We greatly appreciate you spending some of it with us. For our folks who are watching and listening and want to learn more, where is the best place for us to send them?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Um, probably the best place is just go on my, everything is on my Instagram. You just go on it's Sam Chang, I T S Sam Chang, S A M C H A N G. Um, and if you just go there and send me a DM, um, I, I literally, there's, there's no automations in my DM. If I'm talking to you in the DM, it's me. So, um, if you want to skip the line, I write like, I, I, uh, messages, WhatsApp, I don't check my emails, my assistant check my emails and then DM, DM's the only place where it's like only me in there. So if you want to like come chat with me, um, get some advice, um, just feel free to go there. And then from my, from my Instagram profile, you can literally find everything else like my site and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Awesome. This has been Seth Green with Sam Chang. Check him out. It's Sam Chang on Instagram. Sam, thank you so much for joining us.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. Thank you, everybody for watching or listening. We will talk to you or see you next time.

• 22:06Speaker 03

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