Custom AI Dashboards, The Buy vs. Build Debate, & Sales Momentum w/ Tony Bradberry (Part 2) - Ep. 16

SPEAKER_00 0:00

With AI, we're able to allow those people that see the whole field a little bit better produce work and get to finished products faster that historically couldn't. So, you know, for us, that's where we've been leveraging a lot and seen a lot of lift for it. And I think going forward, that's where most people are going to find that lift is the era of the specialization probably is dying, and people that understand whatever it is your industry or your business is front to back will be your A players going forward.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

See, and see that is right there, is that's something that I think really does separate you guys from the other agencies that I've talked to, right? It's I had a client ask me recently um what uh what my opinion was on what is the best w uh marketing initiative or tactic or type of marketing he should implement to grow his business. And I um and I said it it depends on who you ask. If you ask a paid ads agency, they'll say paid ads. If you ask a you know SEO agency, they'll say SEO. Um, but being able to uh uh you know what you're saying is not be tied to one lane in there, uh, but be able to see the big picture and understand the business is gonna be the fundamental part of um, I think a lot of industries, uh, not just uh marketing and sales uh going forward is is understanding that it's what's right for one company might not be right for the other, and under like, and I think that's where the people side of this uh really does come in, and where which will be a different you know is a differentiator is um is when you know when when every marketing company is automating they're all you're all automating the same set of tasks and and things inside the company, what will set you apart, and it's it's which one understands my business and what I'm trying to accomplish the most. Uh, and we do that in a way of um you know just something simple that other firms in in our my industry I've never uh I've never heard the uh ask the question before, and it's the you know it's usually the first or second question I ask when I meet a new prospective client is what what stage of your business are you in? Are you in growth mode? Are you in exit mode? Are you like preparing for an exit or are you trying to scale the company? I think those are the two kind of lanes um that you can be in, because I don't think anyone, you know, not many people are gonna say we're in coasting mode, right? Everyone wants to grow. Maybe they don't want to do anything to have it grow, but uh, and no one's gonna say they want they want to go into decline. So uh so I think those are the two kind of lanes uh which uh from a perspective of what we do for clients shapes the the entire strategy and framework of how we implement and set up systems and um and do what we do. And I think it um you guys looking at this from a big picture is uh is really um uh you know the right way to approach just I think this evolving landscape and just in especially in business to business services in general, with where uh you know how AI is coming in and just you know disrupting the way that we all are going to work and serve clients uh in the future.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah, and I I would I would just add to kind of what you said there, um, especially in the business, the business space, but professional services, right? Professional services are trust-based businesses. Um one of the reasons people grow very quickly in professional service businesses is because they leverage their networks. They leverage past relationships, they get a lot of referrals. And then what we see being that we work with a lot of these businesses is they plateau. So once they've tapped their networks and they've tapped all their referrals, they kind of just get stuck and they can't grow anymore. And they say, well, everything that used to work isn't working anymore. Well, that's because you have to build trust when the only thing you're selling is you, right? There's no part, there's no thing, there's no physical, you know, whatever. You you are the product. And so I think, especially as we see AI evolve and things like that, it's important to remember that that you know, you are the product. And so you still have to add a value of your expertise and your trust. And the things that AI doesn't do well, that nuance, need to be the things you highlight. You need to understand that, you know, if you're doing uh bookkeeping for a mid-size manufacturing company that's got a weird family dynamic, right? Well, AI is not gonna listen or care about what that family dynamic is and why you guys have to do some things a certain way to, you know, keep people from getting upset about this or that. Like those things don't matter to it. Same thing goes for us in marketing, right? When we understand like the nuance of the organizational structure, um, kind of the history, things you they they don't really want to make people mad about. Like those are all things that if you just turn it straight over to AI and said go for it, people are gonna get upset, and there's gonna be people that are mad and the outcomes aren't gonna be what people want. And so it's better to lean on that. It's better to lean on your expertise and the value and use AI as the the doer of action. But you know, at this point, if you're in a professional service and you're not leaning into your expertise, you're gonna be one of the people that get washed out fastest.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

No, I I 100% agree with that. Um and it's that uh you know, I think that's uh the probably the most important thing to make sure you uh make your um you know when you're talking to new opportunities to make sure that they're aware of of that part of it because that is because I I've we've we've seen it similarly as well as um I feel like it's shifted back towards uh the you know it it shifted I feel like last year I saw especially at the beginning of the year you know AI was this was you know was being thrown around everywhere. Everyone wanted to be able to slap a sticker on what whatever they did and say AI powered. You know, there's their tech you know is software, AI powered this, AI powered that. And I looked at this and I'm like it if you know this is heading in the direction that I think it's heading, you know, you know, this is like a year ago. I'm thinking everyone's gonna be like that's not gonna be special pretty soon. Uh I and I looked at it as like this is gonna be like saying you're email powered back when email first came out, right? That's gonna be like, and like so is everyone else. So then what is the differentiator? And so that's where I saw, and then I feel like I started to see AI fatigue come in as time went on last year, and people then didn't want to go with uh the companies that just had all this AI-powered branding on on their service, um, especially because you know it was I the way I see it is uh their companies are going so far in on the a uh all in on AI, which I think is a good thing. Um, but in I think the part where that was was missed was where these companies decided to that going all in on AI meant removing the human component of of business, especially in relationship-driven industries like both of ours and any b uh B2B professional services industry. Um then I I think towards the end of the year it started to shift back a little bit towards the relationship side of things, and then now um now I feel like it's it's all over the place with where companies are going. You have it's like you have AI deniers, and then you have those same companies, and then you have everywhere in between uh in between. And but something I am seeing a lot in different founders uh that I talk to is there are there are a surprising amount of founders that are look are so they're they're they have this scarcity about AI because they don't know how to how to do it. And they they f like the this feeling as if maybe uh like oh I've I've missed the boat or I'm too late, which obviously it's still so early. And like you probably saw that graphic uh a few months ago of like uh there was dots, you know, square uh screen, and there was dots, and all of the dots on the screen made up uh all the people all the people on Earth, and there were different colors for different uh levels of AI adoption and usage in the world, and it was like 50% of people have never used even just a free AI chat GBT chatbot. And so it's like, okay, well, just by having used some sort of AI chatbot, you're in the top 50%. Like and then it was out of that 50%, like 90% of those people, and I'm paraphrasing the numbers, I uh they're that's it's not gonna be completely accurate, that um 90% of that they they had only used a free version of some kind of chat GPT. Um, so it's like it's and I get it because it's there's th there's new releases, it's moving very quickly. Probably the fastest moving technology we've ever experienced. Um, and it is a lot to keep up with. Like you you feel like you something new comes out, you try it, and then you get a little comfortable with it, and there's something completely brand new that makes that look ancient. And I tell any founders that I talk to that feel like they're they're too behind to start now. I'm like, no, you're you're really not. It's it's not it's you just uh my opinion is you like you you will learn so quickly um and be able to see the opportunity if you just play with it. And that's that's how I got to um to the level that you know we are and using it is just by playing around and play and that's where all these breakthroughs have like have come from. Um and we're now you know we're I'm at the point where there's uh for example, just uh last week on Thursday, new client uh came on and they sell on Shopify their product. And there's there's softwares out there that integrate Shopify into QuickBooks so that sales are posted daily. It's pretty expensive, and it's not the best user interface, uh, in my opinion. We've used it before with other clients. And so before defaulting to let's get this uh this added to their tech stack, integrate that so that Shopify sales will uh flow directly into QuickBooks. Now I'm at the point where I it was like, oh I wonder if like how would how can I build this this system to do the exact same thing? And it's Tuesday now, um and we have a functioning uh functioning application that syncs uh sales from Shopify to QuickBooks for this client. And like that's the world that we live in now, but I feel like a lot of a lot of people don't really realize what's possible. Um, but you're I feel like you you don't go from zero to being able to build functioning systems that you can deploy for clients without just playing first. And I feel like that's the best way to learn. What's your opinion on on uh or advice to those founders who feel like they've missed the boat or a little late?

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Yeah, it's an arms race. Um we I've had these conversations with a lot of folks in Tribe, I think, over the last probably three or four months. Um, you know, I think there's trepidation because people don't want to get too highly invested in one platform or, you know, it's early internet days, right? Are you gonna be Netscape? Are you gonna be, you know, Ask Jeeves, are you gonna be Google, right? You don't know who the winner is gonna be. So I think in a lot of ways, people have tried to not mess with their business too much because they don't know who's gonna be the winner. There may be a better software next week. So a lot of people are sitting on the sidelines saying, wait, while just see who wins. But the problem is I don't know that we'll know that who the winner is for quite a while still, right? There's gonna be changings, there's gonna be you know macro and micro, you know, decisions made at government worldwide levels that are gonna change who's gonna win, quote unquote. But I think what you can be doing in the meantime is always be looking for ways for improvement. So as you mentioned, just getting familiar with them. Um, there is a certain bias that occurs in kind of your example you mentioned about the 50% and the 90% of 50%. That's true. And so if you happen to find yourself, you know, on LinkedIn connected to a lot of people who are in the top 1%, you bias yourself by thinking everybody must be that far ahead of you. But to your point, the reality is most people aren't that far. Um, I run around with a lot of people that are very advanced in AI and using it for all sorts of things with really good outputs. And then you start thinking, well, wow, the market's saturated for this already. But then to your point, you get back to this idea that, like, no, the random small business and Des Moines Iowa has never even thought to do this thing or or they've never heard this. And so you start realizing that there's still a huge opportunity. So I think for me, and what we've been really embraced that our company is always just be trying new things. Um, we've kind of got a budget to try new softwares, try new things. We we don't want to rip up our operations, but things we can add that are complementary or can support our operations are are great. Um, I was in the AI chat with the Tribe guys, and uh they're talking about Victor, which is awesome. Um, it's a tool that plugs into your Slack and integrates into a million different tools, and you can talk to it and tell it to do stuff, right? And that's great. And and so we are rolling it out in gray matter and using it for some things. And um, I think you just gotta try stuff. And maybe it is gonna be the thing you'll use for the next 12 months. Maybe you'll use it for the next 12 days. Uh, implementation times on a lot of these things are very short, so it's worth trying. I think to your comment though about the biverse build thing, that's a little bit more nuanced. We see it a lot with companies that are you know looking at CRMs, right? HubSpot's a big one where people are like, well, I'll just build my own CRM. Um, I had a conversation with somebody on LinkedIn the other day about this very topic. I think when thinking about biverse build, you got to take a lot of things into consideration. A lot of things are um compliance-related things that come with being you know really well veteran engineers and understanding like how things are susceptible, what potentially could go wrong. Um so people that want to go out and build, I always caution them like, hey, be careful on the build because you'll find things that if you put them in production. Uh early on in the vibe coding days. Uh I know Clawbot, for instance, right? Everybody went to do Clawbot, and then they had that malt book that was like a Twitter knockoff for all their bots. They realized that they were exposing all their API keys to the whole place, and people were going through and just scraping them all and stealing them. Um when you build uh you know, internet-facing applications always just warn people be very careful. Um, but for internal tools, you know, we let our team just build away, right? If we set them in our server behind our firewall and their tools built to make life easier for our team, we we encourage that. We give people access to subscriptions, you know, to Claude or whatever to go build, and we say build away. So one thing that we've seen a huge value in is building reporting HTML files that we then host and use those as like presentations because they're much more interesting than a slide deck. They actually are interactive, they use JavaScript to like move stuff around the screen. I mean, it's really cool. And so inside of firewall, go ham outside of firewall, make sure you have somebody that knows what they're doing. But um, yeah, you embrace it because it's just it's where we're heading.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah, no, and on the reporting, that's uh that's been a big emphasis uh uh on something I've focused on a lot in the last couple of months is uh especially when reporting in my industry, like if I had to estimate uh across my industry, if uh if there was such a study, um and the number of clients that actually open their financial reports or reporting packages that they're sent each month, um I would say are close to 10%. Uh just I personally I feel like that's probably the open rate. Uh and so I had I was, you know, I'm thinking like, man, how there's there's a there's an abundance of of useful information on all of these reports. How like how do you solve the problem of um getting them opened? Like how do you get this to something where uh a place where a client is like waiting for their report to hit their inbox rather than it being another email they kind of open and close. Um and so like one for me it was like, well, first of all, it like it has to be visually appeasing. Uh because I'm I'm designing this you know through what I like what would make me open a report. Um and so went into and this was right at the uh around the same time as Claude Design first launched, and so you know, me not being uh artistically gifted or uh being you know being able to create visually appeasing things, uh, not my wheelhouse, but I was able to create a brand kit in Claude Design that now it's at the point where I can give it to any coding agent that builds anything and point it towards the brand kit file, and it will apply our brand kit and our style guide and our colors and our formatting and uh down to how buttons look, how they how they work when you interact with them. Um and it does that uh immediately in one shot. Uh, but our reporting, um yeah, being able to create reports that uh HTML reports that are interactive, um, but also visually appeasing, but then um and then now I we have a completely different um different uh deliverable when it comes to reporting, and we've had like amazingly positive feedback from anyone who's ever got one of these new reports that we uh we rolled them out of uh firm-wide uh the beginning of last month. And you know, that was just me playing around um and then creating a system that so then like how can I apply this to not just this report that I built it for, but any report or any tool that I uh I build in the future. Um and now it's it's it's just this easy thing, and it's uh and I think it's um I mean one from a cost per uh perspective uh for us as a firm, these reporting uh tools that we you know uh we were paying subscribers of um are not cheap. Um you know, and you pay per client connected, right? And it connects and then it creates these reports that are really not all that great, but better than just the standard reports that you would pull from it you know from the account. system itself. But we um we were able to cancel all those subscriptions now because uh this this internal reporting functionality that we built out is is better than what we were paying you know over a thousand dollars for in total um but reporting yeah definitely interactive dashboards and and and HTML files is like is like that and right we're at the stage right now where like when when any whenever we send any of that and a client interacts with that like it's so cool because it's it's just not like they're like wow this is this is crazy and it's like um and it's like shocking how few people actually uh have got to that point and so I know that you guys have probably seen the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Yeah we uh I wrote about this in on LinkedIn uh probably about a month ago one of the biggest things we did was we made a shift in how we do sales so a lead comes in um we bring them in we run an audit I have a bunch of cloud skills built out that's like my pre-call audit and it goes and it uses tools we have access to I give Claud access to those tools and starts running through an audit that a lot of agencies six 12 months were paying making people pay for and so it's breaking down their website their messaging making sure technically the website's set up correctly looking for errors are you ready for a Gen Tick search like doing all this work and then what's really cool is I say okay now I want you to go to their website and I want you to scrape their website and pull their brand kit out of their website. I want you to pull their logo out of the website. I want you to then assemble my report or my audit back together and make it look like their website so the first time I get on a call with somebody I have this live website file that I'll share on the screen this HTML file and uh we'll go through it and the amount of times people have gone hey wait a second where'd you get all this stuff like how'd you do that? And I'm like oh yeah it's cool we have a a tool that does this for us um it buys it gets buy in because people are like wow you took the time and effort to not make this about you you made it about me and the cool thing is then I share that with them after and what usually happens right when you think about sales is you sell to somebody and then they have to then turn around and go sell it to their internal stakeholders right and so by branding this specifically for them it puts everybody in the mindset that this is about us. And so when they're then presenting this internally as them internally they're like wow this is us right it's branded for them it doesn't say gray matter and all this stuff on it it says this is XYZ company. And we've seen a great you know response to that and I think from a reporting standpoint it's very similar right so we we do our reporting and it does say gray matter on our reporting but if anybody ever needed that reskinned really quickly for them to go to a board meeting or things like that we can just flip a switch and then rebrand it to them. And so you know there's a huge opportunity in in reporting and and just how information is presented to people that I would hate to be in that business right now because anybody can do it. You mentioned using design right Claude design general claude if you know what you're doing you can get to do all this stuff. I think the value is in the infrastructure most people aren't going to understand now I how do I what how do I take this HTML file and like actually make it work because if you send an HTML file to somebody, a their spam filter is probably going to catch it and their IT people are going to quarantine it because they're going to think it's some sort of malicious virus. But B, they get it, they won't know what to do with it. They don't know if you save it to your desktop and then double click it or open your browser and things will happen. So what we did was we built a system in the back end where our team can load the HTML files in and then they can send that link to the HTML file which is a live now web file on our server. The cool thing is then we added some tracking capability behind it. So we added the ability to see who's all Reddit so we know you know you mentioned before how many people actually opened the report we built the function so that people we now know if they actually looked at it, how long they looked at it, how many people did they send in their organization to look at it. But then we added the function that they can annotate over top of it now too. So I can check a box and give them the ability just like a Google working doc or whatever they can go down it and then make little notes and send questions back to us inside of that function. And so we're building this really interactive thing for our sales process but also for our reporting process. And to your point it differentiates you right like we're in a world where if you can think it you can make it and if you're doing everything that all of your competitors are doing it's just really hard to stand out right now because you've got competitors that are going hey what if we did this or what if we did that so I think to go like two questions ago right like the value of AI and the people that aren't buying into it the reality is you have to buy into it right now because people are being wowed in different ways. And if you're not wowing people they're going to start questioning what they're paying for.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Yeah no I couldn't agree more and your example like even just on the be clients being able to write comments and mark up a report that you send that is you know they get the link they open it and it goes in their browser because you have it hosted it's like you can when you look at that side by side I at least see how much friction you removed in all these different steps you know a little bit out of each step and it like it makes you know I I often think about um about uh about Amazon. I think Amazon does uh does you know the the customer experience better than almost anyone for the ease of use the you know how easy it is and how much friction they remove you know with the one click checkout uh and everything that um that goes into how easy it is to spend money on Amazon and you know Jeff Bezos talks a lot about the you know the customer experience and and and you know the more I listen to uh him talk about that the more I thought about that and how can I how can I how can we focus on that client experience and like even these little things. And you know there's a um the book I could I can't remember the book now it's um uh hosp hospitality one it it was it was a one of the tribe book club ones last year. Are you in the um I probably missed that one. Okay it's but basically it's about hospitality and and the restaurant industry and um how this guy who ran Michelin star restaurants in New York City um the attention to detail on you know the dine you know the diney uh experience like the little things that most people like most people wouldn't realize that any thought went into but uh that seemingly little things that made huge impacts subconsciously into the people who were coming into these restaurants like um setting timers for uh for each for everyone who came down and and sat uh came in and sat down at a table and where they already had their what car they drove and where they were parked on the street where then someone would run out at the you know after the 30 minute mark whatever and put a quarter in the parking meter so that they didn't have to get up and move their car or get a ticket or get towed. But then also like on where they would place the you know like plants on a bar top or on a on a tabletop where they would walk the room and look at where like if we place it here it might look good but where does it visually obstruct obstruct a view of a table where that table may not get we might someone may not from this angle see that this person needs a refill on their drink and that will affect their experience. And so you know when I it comes to reporting and uh your example of them of clients being able to just make comments on a link that they clicked with you know they didn't have to download a PDF and then review it and then write down their comments and then new email or reply and write out all of their comments or paste in their comments in an email and then hit send. Like you know these are very small problems but that friction can cause people not to send you the comments or send them at a later date even if it's not that much more friction to be able to do it. Just how you know how easy you guys made that um then instead of just being something that's was probably a very simple thing to solve for and to be able to provide is now an added benefit and a differentiator that you have over most if not all of your competitors or other companies that are issuing same reports in the you know the old school way.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

Yeah that like I said I I would not want to be in the reporting industry right now because that's just that's a losing battle for people. You know your point about the little things mattering I think is huge and I think that's why it's so important even in the sales process um to recognize a lot of those things because that's people's first interaction with you, right? And so there's a lot of data around things like when people fill out a form on your website, how fast do you respond? Generally speaking the data shows and and again I'm I'm relatively accurate with the numbers here, but you know after the first like 10 minutes that form's been received for every five minutes after that the likelihood you're gonna win that business every five minutes you delay after the first 10 minutes, it starts dropping by a few percentage points. And so people don't recognize that like in a digital world now people treat like form fields on a website similar to how people treat like a chatbot. And so they're expecting somebody to respond relatively quickly. And the amount of business we win or at least the comments made on my first call I have with people that says wow you respond really fast and people will book same day right the best time to get somebody is when that problem is right in their face and they're dealing with it. So if you can respond within minutes to somebody saying hey I'd love to talk to somebody about XYZ problem I'm having and you can say hey here's my link let's get some time as soon as you've got it you'll get people on call same day what happens is especially in sales is momentum builds right um I I joke with people a lot like sales is like going to a car dealership. When you go to a car dealership people you know that sell sports cars they don't sell them because they're well thought out decisions they sell them because momentum builds right people show up they're excited you keep getting them excited finally they make this decision right um whereas like you sell a minivan it's this very well thought out well researched thing where people have looked at crash ratings and they've gone to a lot of people you want to be more like the sports car than you do the minivan right when when people first come in you want to keep that excitement going you want to respond as quick as you can you want to do these audits and these pre-work you want to know the business you want to come with questions and even suggestions and you want to build momentum and so what that shows is a proactivity and excitement a level of service that people then correlate back to what it'll be like once they're paying because the general thing that people always do is they say wow if this is the value they've created for me and I've not even paid them yet I can only imagine what that value will be once I actually start paying them. And that's the experience we want to create and I think in general for most people that's where they drop the ball in their sales and marketing is they don't create these great experiences on the front end. They know they're great in the back end delivery but they're not really good at showing that value up front and when they do that they're losing out to the people that are creating those great experiences before anybody's ever paid them a dime. And I think that's what now in this AI world you're going to compete with more than ever is people over delivering on the front end and you're still trying to stay back in this world where you feel like you'll create that value later. You just may never get a chance to create it for people.