Using AI to Convert More Leads and Save Time

Hey, this is John and before we get started, I have a gift for you for being such an amazing listener. Everyone's talking about AI these days, but most of it's about tactics. We've created a series of prompts we use to create strategy and you can have them for free. Just go to dtm.world/free prompts and grab yours. Now, let's get started. Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jance. My guest today is Joe Geckna. He is the co-founder and CEO of Rainmaker, where he's building the first AI native sales platform for small business combining his interest in technology, leadership and human connection. Today we're going to talk about how AI is reinventing sales as we know it for small business. So welcome, Joe. John, thanks for having me on. Love this show that you have. Well, thank you. Thank you. So, I guess let's start with what needs to be reinvented. Why are we reinventing sales? I'm not sure that particularly we're reinventing sales, but how we actually make sales happen. And I've been selling since I was 16 years old. So I think I learned the essence of the conversation, but more than anything, why is someone looking to buy something? How do we make that? And so what happened, as I got inspired over the past year about the Rainmaker idea was, well, business owners don't start businesses with the idea that they want to do is sell people. They want to deliver their service. Yeah, home services, both along, cleaning the house, I don't know, walk the dog, whatever it might be. And then they start this business and they sell usually this early adopter, but already want their service in their local community. And then they have to find like, oh my god, I got to buy some leads. And I got to talk to these people, then I got to convert them, then I got to turn into customers. They're doing this while they're maybe driving in their pickup trucks of the next customer and just gets harder and harder for them to have a life when they stepped into this idea of like, American, my home business, make this work. And now they're stuck in their stock at the hardest part, which is the part that we wanted to focus on, which is, so we're reinventing in the context of how a small business owner operates their business. Yeah, it's funny. I talked to many business owners of all everything you should imagine. And if they've been in business for a couple of years, at least they realize now that 50% of the job is selling. Yes. They're getting sales. And as you said, a lot of them just want to swing a hammer. Yes. So it really does make it tough. We use the phrase that I think this is straight out of your bio, AI native sales platform. What does that mean? I guess it and maybe describe it in the context of rate making. Oh man, let's take a good question because it has an AI sort of been around for 30 years, right? I mean, you know, MIT and Marvin Minsky and the rest of the way. Oh, just even our driving directions, things like that people don't realize have been very powered by AI. Yes. We can use it for a decade. So the models that underlie the idea have been around for a long time. We've evolved to this thing called the larger language model, which is giving more access to sort of regular people in terms of, you know, this token based conversational creation in real time. So AI native for us is the parts of the workflow where we want to leverage AI algorithms and technology. But the whole system itself, I mean, we probably use 30% as this AI part. 70% is a workflow. It's a data integration problem. But in the part of the conversational dialogue, yeah, there's native AI where we're going back and forth between our own LLM, is everyone would call it or what an open AI might look like. But we're also using the broader context of AI to mean machine learning as well. So the ability to leverage mathematical models to insights to be able to bring out derivative perspectives that you wouldn't be able to do with just a normal database. So that's the AI native part of what we're doing. So a lot of small business owners don't have the budget or just don't really have to wear with all to put together operations to BDRs, closures, whatever all the roles would be. But in a lot of ways, is this leveling the playing field a little bit for that smaller company? That's the hope, you know, there's a language that everyone started using, which is like democratize capability access to systems and all that. I think that the fundamental thesis that we took to this was actually literally to say, what would the small business owner need and what could they invest to make this kind of transformation happen? Because actually, if this works, I think we give them their life back. And that's sitting at the soccer game with their phone connected to their ear and they're not driving and texting in their pickup chalk or whatever vehicle they might have. That our price point, you know, on the low end, it's $500 a month on the high end, it's $1,000 a month. This is less than hiring a person to answer the phone. We can cover you 24 by 7 by 365, learning off of your dialogue, your brand, your voice, and leveraging our sales expertise, our workflow, our database and the combination of which should allow that business owner to grow as much as they want. They don't have to look. I mean, some business owners have told me in the past, look, I don't want more business than I have today, but I just wanted to be predictable. I don't want the ups and downs. I'm spending so much money on leads. I don't even know what I'm buying. And so we're trying to get this to where that American dream is not so daunting. And actually that, I mean, look at John. I can't believe how many people want to start their own business. What are they thinking? Maybe we could actually make that emotional journey better and turn it into something that doesn't dominate their life. One of the, I think, fastest ways to erode trust in marketing is when things feel very automated, very authentic. We all get the AI spam. Now, how do you balance that? Automation's great when it reduces friction. It's bad when it kills relationships. I think it's a good question. And there's a balancing act that we're going to have to play over the next year. I think if we were a year from now, we'd be really hard pressed on the difference between a voice generated by AI or a person's voice. Sure. So we're not far away from that. RF thesis is this consumer is making a phone call because they want more information. Yep. And because the website didn't provide it to product, they provided it or they just have some emotional support that they want. And so to the degree that we can give them better even if it is a little bit robotic or you can notice this in AI. But if you want you need, like, you got this example, you know, we have a lot of pest control customers. Someone's going to spray from mosquitoes in the backyard and the parents and gosh, I got kids in the dog. I'm wondering, is this safe? I just want to ask that question. They would probably love to get the owner. It's unlikely. So what if someone sounds enough like the owner and knows it enough to be relatable and answer the question effectively, not just in a marketing way, the depth of, hey, this is organic. Here's how to think about it. Here's what we've heard from other customers. Here's things to consider. And so I keep believing that what the consumer is looking for is just more better information when they need it. And now this is the starting point. Now, probably everyone will want to adopt this within a year because they will be skeptical. And as they experience it more and more, it'll get better. Look, I've run call center businesses in the past. What I've heard more than anything is I don't want to talk to people who, well, I can't even talk to them because you've an IVR. Number two, when I talk to them, they don't know anything. Number three, I can barely understand them. Right? That's the experience to date. We think we can leapfrog over that by bringing this brand context and a voice that we can understand that's available whenever we want. As I imagine, midnight on a Saturday, you just want to ask that question like they can't do that today. I would totally agree with you. I don't think we care what the technology is. This one's we get what we want. And I have interacted. I'm sure we all have with customer support, thoughts now that are there and every software. And when they're just maddening, it really, it's a terrible experience. But I've also got a couple software platforms I interact with a lot and I get the issues. And to me, I'm like, I don't need to talk to you with somebody in support because I got what I want. Yeah. You know what's interesting also, like what we see, the integration of sales and support coming together. Right? The customer doesn't think about those differently and often they call the sales line because they'll answer and ask them, right? You might spend money with us. Of course, we're going to answer. So we want to like say, hey, it doesn't matter. Call the same phone number and bring your sales opportunity or your complaint. We think about this, even in that non-fimal business area, we've been talking to some pizza chains, like you order your pizza, it's great. Hey, it came with no pepperoni. I want to call back the same number and get it resolved. Rather than send an email or try to call the store, we can get that resolved. I think the integration from John, I've been working on customer stuff for 30 years. I think it's the first time we might be able to set the first time really delight a customer because we're going to work and live the way they are. do not the way my business says I can't answer the phone now it's too expensive to do this and put technology in the way because it's just too expensive. We're going to try and normalize the expense of this and the experience so that it becomes magical. Now, we're going to, you'll see on our website soon, we're going to put up numbers people can call and try and see what it sounds like. They'll experience it and they'll be like, well, maybe this is what the future could be like because imagine if it is, hey, you want to keep up on all things duct tape marketing the stuff I read the books the people I interview check out the duct tape marketing news letter every week we're going to send you out we're going to keep you up today and on what's going on in the world of marketing and just for subscribing you're going to get our free chat GPT props that will allow you or assist you in the creation of marketing strategies and plans. So check it out it's at dtm.world/news that's dtm.world/news. I tell you a couple markets I'd like you to have Target credit companies and airlines could you get them all for? Oh my god, I fly a lot and I sort of wonder, you know, but you know this, like it's the same as your cable company, like call them up and try and get something like you can't you can't even figure it out. I think this is one of the areas where AI will advance the ball. Yeah. And because this is under the owner control, it doesn't have to turn into a marketing vehicle. They don't really care about that. They just want predictability and they want their life back. And if we can deliver that for them, you know, this one feels like probably one of the most sort of beneficial systems I could have worked on. Yeah. Well, and you're absolutely right, those IVR systems from the past. I mean, they basically had a tree of options. If you didn't fit into one of those options, you were kind of out of luck. Whereas AI can essentially have infinite options for what you're after. Yeah. And I think the other thing is that we learn as we go. So you get all these transcripts. You start to see a pattern. So imagine someone had 50 locations. Well, they never saw the data pattern across all of that. In the future, we can run this into our large language model and ask questions like, what work, what didn't work, where the objections had we handled objections in the future? How could we nurture this customer better? We can even more like in this part of town that care about this. In this part of town, they care about that. It's like the personalized to the sort of. Yeah. So you have found one thing that we thought people would like personalized. And then they changed their mind like so regional accents, for example. So we had a customer who said, we would love a Southern accent and we put it in there like, no, we actually didn't really want that. That was too much. So they said, how about that good Western one? You know, you know, versus male, but we can regionalize and we can make it feel to the brand, more than you could look, we know this. We would love to be able to hire people and haven't been experts day one, haven't get better all the time. Sadly, that doesn't happen, but we can do that actually with the AI. So talk about some very specific use cases that us all business are. I mean, are people using this for outbound or is this all all really kind of inbound customer service support? Yeah. So this is a good question because we're going to reframe this idea of outbound. Like why does outbound happen outbound is typically a sales process, right? Yep, but that's because the customer can't talk to you when they want to talk to you. So we're going to redefine outbound in the following way. If you come and fill out a form, you should be able to talk to someone at that point. You should be able to schedule when you want to hear from someone. You should not be throwing your name out into the ether, hoping that someday someone actually gets back to you. When they inbound or this outbound, you never answer who wants to answer from a call might even look at spam. So one, we want to make it work to the the prospect or this potential customers time frame and interest level. This is starting first as a sales platform, which is someone has demonstrated some interest. Maybe they got a Google lead or they got a web form filled out or something to that effect and they want to reach out to us when they call the company phone number. It would break into our AI and the AI would have that dialogue with person. They'd go through the conversation, hopefully overcome any objections. And then they'd say, would you like to go forward with the sale? If they say yes, then we do auto scheduling into a calendar, we take payment, and then we summarize that data for the owner and update the CRM system. So that's the first use case. Really is sales inbound. So do you think that one of the things we've really witnessed over the last few years is people were going because they can farther down the journey before they ever pick up a phone or contact a visit. So much research we can do. A lot of people are putting pricing or these calculators on it so that somebody can actually like almost be ready to buy before they raise their hand. And I think a lot of that has to do with you starting to talk about people don't want to talk to themselves. They don't want to be sold. It's a hassle to like schedule an appointment and then meet it. So do you see this actually becoming a tool that people will say, oh, I'll talk to the AI bot before he because I can get the information and I don't feel like the AI bot's not going to pressure me to do something. Yeah, you know, so that's a great question John. So when we start the company, first thing I did was write our manifesto, you know, what do we believe in? But the second thing that I wrote was our brain maker constitution. And that constitution is a set of responsibilities we want to uphold, which is we are here to inform the customer on behalf of the owner. We're not here to manipulate. We want to make them make a better decision. We believe that when they do they'll buy more. And so we actually want the AI to be more about informing. And if it gets the person to the place where they want to buy them, they should be able to do that easily. But it's okay if they use it as a place to get knowledge and to learn about the brand and about the products. It is not meant to manipulate and try all of those sales tactics that person would do. And we can actually program it that way. That's why we wrote the constitution. Yeah, well, what I'm getting is I mean, imagine doing like a webinar or something. And then typically the CTA is like schedule with one of our advisors, right? Well, now imagine you say schedule with our AI. It'll answer all your questions. You won't have to know anything or do anything. It's not going to try to study anything. You'll just answer your questions. And then if you want to move forward, you can schedule. Do you see a day where that exists? I think the first part for sure, but I don't know the 11 need to talk to the human because this should be as good. But we can do that in the process and look, I think it's up to the owner. If they want to provide information, then we want to provide information on the behalf. The reason why they might do it now is they're like, well, every time I talk to you, I should close you, cost me more to talk to me at the time. But the way we saw our platform, it doesn't matter if we talk to one three or five times, but they are to help that person make a decision. And this comes back to my sales experience. My most effective selling has always been when I have a more informed consumer or buyer. They buy better in this way. Price goes down to list. A lot of things. Yeah. That's right. When a salesperson tries to manipulate, you often don't get to the outcomes you want. So we're really rethinking this entire buying relationship with this process. Yeah, interesting. So if a small business owner's listening to this and they're like, ah, this is all of the well-meag, I don't know. I know I need to get into this, but like, how? What are some of the first steps that they need? And some of them will be mindset, right? Yeah. So technology, maybe. Yeah, I wouldn't. I think this is like a funny way to say, but we have three versions of our platform. The first is the anytime agent that'll just actually do the answering for you 24 by seven or hour, hours a weekend, but just take the call and summarize it for you. It's a way to say, hey, I wonder how my customer is interacting. Then we can move into scheduling or payment and then on the full way to the full-blown solution with integration and so on. So part of it is maybe you need to explore what it would be like. The second is, you know, to listen in and share what calls are like, you can get an experience and say, wow, maybe that's not so bad. I think the third thing is to start to look at, you know, what the constraints are that you're going to have into your growth plan. Do you want to make a commitment to hiring people? Do you want to spend that additional capital? Or would you like to put in a learning system? So I do think that it's a bit of a step back to say, how do I want to run the business going forward? Do I have the capability or do I want to get back to the reason why I started this? So yeah, it is a bit of soul searching. But at the end of the day, I think we go back to why you start a small business. It's because you want to get the product that you believe in in the hands of a lot of people and the sales part gets in the way. And I've never met a small business owner says the reason I want to start the businesses is because I want to sell. So I think that it'll become more normal and you know what I've been going on a lot of show us the presentations we have of people are just like on the not are going beyond just curious now. They're like, yeah, I really could be considering you should not. Now, in every technology adoption curve, you got early adopter, early majority, late majority laggards, there's some people who will never do this. And amen, that's fine. But if you want the source to what you want, then it's probably worth looking. - Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this long enough so that there were people that swore they would never ever have a website. - Right. (laughing) - Exactly. - Well, we come along right now. So, Joe, I appreciate you stopping by and introducing us to the tool. Where would you invite people to find out more connect with you? - Yeah, you know, Rainmaker with a Y, R-A-Y, and M-A-K-E-R dot AI. That's our website. Now, I'm on LinkedIn, Joe Gagnon. You can always check me out there and some fun things that I've done in my life. That'll tell you a little bit why I started this and what I believe in. And, you know, appreciate, John, we're having us on. We really are committed to sort of democratizing this capability at a price point that makes it easy for a small business owner so that they can sort of, lean into this American dream and, you know, perform maybe better than the others I was possible. That's what the idea behind technology is, right? This isn't supposed to make it hard or scary. Just make it better and let's, we're gonna hold ourselves to that. Yeah, 100% on board with, I mean, technology that removes friction that allows me to do something the way I wanna do, I'm all for it. I think it freezes up to do than the human parts that technology will hopefully never be able to do. Yeah, I, yeah, well, boy, I'm sure we could have a whole nother podcast on this, but, you know, I don't believe that there's some big, bad AI in the future. You know, we are gonna use this to our productive benefit. We're early, right? We're still early in this journey. There's a lot of noise around it, but as we bring out applications like we're working on, I think people are gonna start to say, oh wow, this actually can be very productive for us. So you're excited about that. Yeah, and I think also, we just like all technologies, the more people experience it, have a good experience, so be less resistance because they're like, oh, okay, that change wasn't so hard. That's right. So we've lived through many of them right, John, and that's right. Everyone else looks back and says that, you know, we weren't gonna leave the horse and bugging, came to a car and we can't live without it. Yeah. I do think this one is really fascinating because it extends us maybe another order of magnitude than we could have otherwise. And we're so committed on this price point because, you know, in small business, we understand that these are tie margins, and, you know, we wanna make this very accessible to people, and, you know, there's 30 million small businesses in the US, probably 10 million who could be in our target profile. Yeah. We could get hundreds of thousands doing this and wow, we'd all do better because it's the lifeblood of the economy really into the day. Yep. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Dr. Martin podcast and hopefully we'll run it two on these days after our verocho. Thanks, John, appreciate it. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)