Check Out The Podcast
https://kitchenremodelingseo.com/leveraging-ai-to-solve-business-problems/
Key Takeaways
- AI tools like ChatGPT can help businesses write better emails, documents, training manuals, etc. by providing an initial draft that can be edited and refined.
- AI can analyze large amounts of data like sales reports and industry trends to provide customized insights and recommendations.
- AI can help businesses provide faster, more personalized customer service via chatbots trained on company data.
- Tools like Midjourney allow creating unique visuals and designs that can help businesses stand out.
- Prompt engineering is an emerging field where people can make a good living writing prompts to get the most out of AI tools.
- AI complements rather than replaces humans – it handles tedious work so employees can focus on higher-value tasks.
- AI-powered automation like chatbots and voicemail drops help businesses respond faster to leads, improving sales.
- Training AI on customized company data allows for providing tailored information to both customers and employees.
- Adopting AI tools early allows for taking advantage of opportunities before subscription costs rise over time.
- Continually optimizing prompts and workflows is key to getting the most ROI from AI tools.
Podcast Transcript
Hey guys, it’s Mike Goldstein here again with Crushing It with Kitchen remodel podcast. And today we are so lucky to have with us, one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence. That’s a I for most of you guys and how businesses are using it to really improve their processes, improve their sales, improve their marketing, really be able to just make your team that much more efficient. We’re gonna have with us, Jonathan Mast talking about AI and all about how you can use it and we’re gonna do that just after this.
Hey, Jonathan, how the heck are you today? I’m great, Mike. Thanks for the invitation. I’m so happy to be here. We’re so glad to have you. You know, Jonathan, I, I’ve, I’ve known you for, for a little bit here um with members of a networking group together, mind and what not. But for those people who don’t know who you are, um who the heck is Jonathan Mast. What is it that he does? That’s a really good question. So, uh I’m a digital marketer and sales coach and uh I work with clients to help them as you can probably relate uh be found online, uh make connections with their audience and ultimately, hopefully close more deals.
Uh As simple as that. Um We found that the online marketing is part of it, but so is the sal the sales part and knowing how to use consultative sales to close those deals effectively and, and provide value to the customers. So that’s what I do. And I, and I happen to be a nut about AI stuff. Uh I use it every single day as, you know, to, to make my business more efficient, to make me more efficient, my team more efficient. And I love sharing uh what it’s all about because I think so many people are, are just unsure or a little bit leery of it.
And I love to say, hey, here’s how it works, here’s how you can use it in your business and, and hopefully that rising tide raises everybody’s boat, you know, for sure. And, you know, I mean, I, I’ve heard so many, so many people, you know, address concerns about AI and I mean, you know, you’ve heard the conspiracy theorist of course, but, you know, you’ve also on the other end of it, you know, you hear people who, you know, they live and breathe and they die by AI and, you know, I think somewhere in there is a middle ground that, that most of us fall into and we realize that, you know, this is a tool that’s gonna make us so much more powerful, so much more efficient.
Um, but, you know, the, the challenge that I see, at least when I talk to my clients on a day to day basis is, you know, what actually is out there, what do they have available to them? Because they just don’t know other than, you know, they, everyone’s heard of Chat GP, T but AI and ChatGPT are not the same thing. They, you know, there’s so much there. Yeah. You know, and I think I, I was talking to a friend of mine recently. His name is, is, is Josh Wheeler and Josh has been on the podcast, um, as well.
And, you know, and he, what he had said to me one time was that, you know, ChatGPT it’s not a I, what that is is that, you know, it’s, it’s really just machine learning. Um, true. AI is yet to even hit us and, and when it does, it’s gonna, it’s just gonna be so much more revolutionary than anything we’ve even seen already. No, I agree. Josh is brilliant. He’s a great guy and he’s absolutely right. Yeah. So Jonathan, let, let me ask you this.
I mean, can you start by just briefly explaining, you know what, so what AI is to you and see it being in the home industry particularly how would like our listeners who are in the kitchen on the cabinetry space. How, you know, how would they be able to utilize AI? Well, I think more than anything else to me AI is not just like you said, it’s not just chat BT or GP T it’s not just Google Bard, it’s not just clad, it is everything that’s surrounding that, that concept.
And when I, when I say that it means there’s a lot of tools that fit in as well. Um You know, for example, I, I use AI on a daily basis to help me write emails. I use it to help me review documents uh to summarize things that I need. Uh like you being in the digital marketing space, I’m sure you get, you know, people that send you videos and books and all this and that and you know, they, they want you to watch, you know, an hour long video about something.
I’m happy to do that if there’s value, but I can’t watch 14 of them a day. So, you know, one of the things I use, I use a I to look at those, the transcripts of those videos summarize it and give me 5 to 20 bullet points about what the video is about. If it’s relevant, then I can watch it. If it’s not, then I don’t have to and even better if I determine the relevant parts seven minutes and 43 seconds in A, I will tell me that that relevant seven minutes and 43 seconds.
And so I can skip to that part of the video. Uh, same is true with books, you know, you and I were just talking about through the group, we’re part of, they just had a member intensive in Miami and they recommended six or seven books in discussion while I was there. Um, instead of buying each one of those and putting it in the library, which I will do. And I think most of them have already been ordered, but I haven’t had time to read them all. But I’ve, I’ve used the tools like ChatGPT and Claude and Bard to already give me summaries of the books and the key takeaways from the authors so that I as a business owner and a leader can take advantage of that and start implementing right now.
I don’t have to wait for the books to arrive. I don’t have to wait to get time to read them. Uh I’m literally able to, to jumpstart that process and obviously, you know, there’s a lot more but there, there’s so much, I think that your audience can use it for just in running their business on a day to day basis. If the question I ask every business on our know is if I could show you how to use AI to gain 60 minutes a day, what would that mean to you?
Because I believe you can easily add 103 minutes to your day or save 60 minutes by just using a I as part of your business process. Yeah. You know, and seriously some of the things as you were talking about that, one of the things that comes to my mind is, is the 80 20 rule. And, you know, and that’s something that so many, you know, so many business owners they, you know, they’ve heard of, you know, but they don’t really quite understand it. But when you think about videos you think about books, you think about all the, all this, the data out there, I mean, you know, you don’t, you don’t need to know everything in there, right?
You just, you just need to kind of get those highlights and, you know, when you’re using AI and I think it gives you that opportunity to say, hey, just tell me what, you know what I really need to know, point me to where I can find it. And, you know, it, it’s kind of the same way that, you know, that search engines, you know, change the world when they, when they first came out, you know, back when it was Yahoo and it was, uh, it was info and, and all that.
Um, and I’m dating myself for sure, but I was there with you. I get it. No, I, I was there, this, this white beard isn’t just because I’m young, you know, for sure. But, you know, and I can see a, you know, a, I do that. Let me ask you, I mean, when you’re talking about though, you take a video or you’ve taken a book. I mean, I, I think a lot of people say that’s great. But how do I do it? What is the actual step to do that?
What tools do you use? You know, is it, is everything. Chat GP, T is everything barred? What, what’s the process? Great question. So, um I really use three primary AI tools on a day to day basis. One T GP T that everybody’s heard about. Uh I do pay for the pro plan. It’s 20 bucks a month. Uh It’s not needed, but I use it because I think it’s better and I think it’s well worth the $20 a month. Uh I use Google Barred fairly consistently. Um It is different and, and I’ll share why in a moment.
Uh And then I use a tool called Quad Two from Anthropic, uh that recently came out bit major update and it has proven to be very useful when I’m creating content, whether that be an email, a document. Uh I’m just in the process of writing a new book and I’m using a I to help with that process, um whether, you know, creating a standard operating procedure. Uh I used it the other day to create a checklist uh that I needed for my team. And I, I went in and said, OK. Here’s the task and it was actually how to upload a video to youtube uh for a new assistant that I hired.
She’d never done it before. I don’t want to walk through and take the step by step process to capture every screenshot. So I just asked Chad GP T so I need to upload a video. Here’s what I’m trying to do and what do you know? 30 seconds later, I had a check box, not only how to do it, but what URL to go to, how to log in everything that was needed. And I had maybe spend five minutes editing it and it was done. So that sop that would have taken me a half hour to an hour probably would not have been done very well.
I got done in five minutes and it was exactly what we needed. And it, now again, in my case, being that visionary ad D guy who, oh, I’ll get around to it. Instead of thinking, I’m going to create an sop. Now I’ve actually done it and I’ve given it my staff, my staff is happy. They’re more productive. They’re, I’m getting better value than out of their work. And again, just so many things we can do. Uh So back to your question, I apologize. I, I wore waffled, I use Chad GP writing content.
I use Google Bard when I need facts or when I’m looking for information about something. It, it’s much better at that, um, for the record chat GP t will make things up out of thin air. It’ll sound great but it total, totally false. It, it’ll legal cases that don’t exist. And as a matter of fact, there’s been a couple of lawsuits about that, that I, yeah, there was actually recently an attorney, I think it was up in New York, but I’m not sure. And he actually got his case dismissed because he was quoting case law that didn’t exist. Yeah.
Um And then I, I use Clad two very similarly. Uh It’s very similar to Chat GP T. Um But it’s a different, slightly different, maybe, maybe more refined. It’s hard to say process, it doesn’t seem to have some of the same repetitive nature that ChatGPT can have. Um And then in addition to that I use a lot of different plugins specifically uh chrome browser plugins that help me do more faster uh with different things, things like carpet AI and web ChatGPT which gives the free version of, of chat G BT, full web access and things like that.
Now, when you’re using some of these plugins or you’re using, you know, the new code interpreter to analyze data and check GP T, do you need the, the, the, the paid version? Um So it depends on what you want if you want to have the code interpreter to the best of my knowledge. Yes, you do need the paid version for that. Uh, if you want the plugins that are part of ChatGPT not, you can get the Google Chrome ones regardless. But if you need the ones as part of Chat GP T, uh, for example, got one that reads a PDF and I can literally upload a PDF file and have a discussion essentially with that PDF asking it questions and it, it feeds back the information in that, uh as reference, uh, those required to the best of my knowledge of the paid subscription.
Um, Google Bar, I don’t believe has a paid subscription or if they do, um, somebody the other day said they do. But I guess because I use G suite for my email and everything else, I’ve never seen that option. Um So, and then Anthropic is Claude is coming out with one, but at the moment, uh they allow you to use it and you get quite a few uses per day. I don’t know how many I’ve never ran out. Uh, so it’s quite a few. Yeah. And I mean, I would encourage anybody to become an early adopter of new AI tools as they come out because I mean, I’m not, I’m sure you’re, you’re familiar with, um, you know, without Sumo and, and places like that where, you know, you know, you can get, you can get in on the ground floor.
Um, and what happens is oftentimes some, you know, some of these programs, they start for free or you buy a lifetime subscription to it. And then all of a sudden it’s, you know, $50 100 dollars a month that you’re already grandfathered in a perfect example of that guys, by the way is we’re using something right now called Stream Yard. And I believe I’m paying about a third or maybe a quarter of what you should be paying on a monthly subscription because I was an early adopter. So definitely go, you know, you want to go in on that.
Um You know, and, and one of the example that also is mid journey, which I mean, is a great tool. You know, if you, yeah, if you’re looking to and I, you know, if you’re looking to create um graphic works, I mean, a lot of people are using something called Leonardo dot AI now, which is a free tool. Um I don’t think it does as good a job as mid journey does, but mid journey used to get a couple of credits free every day. Now that’s a paid subscription.
Um So, you know, these, these are just things I I look at well and there’s some really cool opportunities, especially, you know, again in the kitchen remodeling space. Um you know, imagine going into mid journey and creating a custom image or a design and then having that done in a way that you can apply it to a tile background or something like that and truly creating a, one of a kind unique masterpiece for your customer. And you don’t have to go pay to have that design. I mean, I have a mid journey subscription.
It costs me $30 a month. I can create hundreds and hundreds of images for that. And I do. Uh and they’re fully licensed. Uh I’m not an attorney so don’t hold me up on mid journeys, licensing, but from everything I’ve read everything’s fully licensed, I can use them in client work anything I want. Uh Absolutely. Again, I would think if you’re a uh a kitchen modeler and you’re trying to come up with something unique for a customer, it’d be a great thing to learn and a great tool to be able to create things that are just wild and brand new.
Um I think there’s so many options like that out there. Yeah. And you know, going back to tools like ChatGPT though, you know, one of the things is, I mean, you can ask the questions or, you know, and it, it will be able to do things for you and create create solutions that you didn’t even know existed. And an example I’ll give you is uh earlier this week, I was looking to create a, a team photo um of, of our, of our team over Kier model sco and some of our people are remote.
We, some of the people I have never met in person. Um But what I was able to do is I was able to take a, you know, a photo and literally say, hey, take these and take these 103 pitchers. I want you to swap the faces or swap the bodies out of people in an old photo so that we can update our team and I, I there’s no way this is gonna work, this is gonna, it’s gonna spit something back me there. It’s gonna tell me I don’t think you understand what an AI does or something to that extent, right?
Did it. It, you know, it literally out faces. Um So that was, you know, play around with it and I think you, you learn that you can do all kinds of things you never imagined. Oh Absolutely. Um You know, again, there’s, there’s whether it be imagery or whether it be text or research or whatever. Uh The whole point is it is in my mind going back to what I just, again, I say to so many people that are hesitant to try it is I, I try it and you be surprised how quickly you could save an hour a day in your work process.
Um You know that letter that you need to write to a customer because they’re not paying you on time and you want to be firm, but you don’t want to be rude. How do you say that GP T will write a great letter and get you 80 to 95% of the way there. And you’ll need to take three minutes to tweak a few things and it’ll be ready to go. Um, you know, the, hey, your, your, a job’s running behind and you need to send an email to the client to let them know why it’s running behind and take responsibility, but also maybe try to let them know that’s not all your fault.
TG BT is gonna help you craft that email and it’s gonna sound, if you’re anything like me, it’s gonna sound far better than what you can write yourself. Um because it’s not emotional about it, but it’s, it’s got so much reference, it can pull that in. Um So yeah, I mean, those are just a couple of things that I know are, are so easy to do and take a lot of stress off me if I don’t have to worry about trying to do those things personally. Yeah.
And you know, and for sure, you know, when, when you, someone sends you an email and, you know, I mean, it, it hits home and, you know, they, they, you know, it becomes accusatory or, or, you know, someone unhappy about something. I mean, your, your first gut reaction is I’m going into defense mode and chat GP t doesn’t do that, you know, it, it takes the emotion out and you mean, I, I can even tell chat GB, I want you to write this in a professional way and remove the emotion that a human would have.
And by the way, I also want you to write it in a conversational style. So it sounds like a human wrote it, you know. So exactly at the best of both worlds. Yeah. No. And again, a real world example of how it works. We uh we just ran into a problem with a vendor of ours that we’ve worked with for many years. Um They had some changes happen and it caused some problems. Uh It ended up costing us some money because of an error they made. And so we wrote them a letter and basically said, hey, while we appreciate the issues that you’ve dealt with and we knew what they were, we were able to talk about that.
Um You know, your error cost us X number of dollars. And so we’re gonna deduct that off of the fee that you charged us and pay the balance. Uh And they chad GP D wrote so much better letter than what we could have run or written. And we got a letter back from them today and admittedly I was opening going, ok, they’re not gonna be happy. Um Not only did they were they pleasant about it? But they actually sent us our check back and said, wow, we weren’t aware that we caused the problem.
We are so sorry. Um We’re not even going to accept payment. We’ve zeroed out your account. Thank you. And we hope you’ll continue to work with us just, you know, I would have never been able to do that on my own for sure. No, that absolutely makes, makes all the sense in the world to me. Um So let, let, let me ask you this though, you know, A AI capabilities to, to just to process so much data, you know, take, take, take aside the, you know, the right content.
But I mean, I think AI is so much more than just, you know, a content writer. Can you explain how you know how you utilize tools like chat GP, T like bar to review sales trends, uh find ways to improve, you know, processes and, and and things to that extent just become more efficient. Well, the, the the tools have a tremendous ability to, to just go through reams and reams of data that would take us hours to do. So let’s say sales data, if you’ve got, for example, industry sales data and you want to analyze that and maybe be able to look at trends for what’s coming up.
Uh You can take that data, you can either upload it as a CS V file or a spreadsheet or a PDF into these, these tools. And you can ask it to, to literally give you feedback and analysis based upon the criteria that you set. It’ll look at that and say, OK, you know if this is what your objectives are and this is what you’re trying to do from a marketing perspective based on the information in these sales reports. Here’s, here’s your answer or here’s your perspectives, just tremendous value when it comes to that data analysis portion and being able to take again tremendous amounts of data and distill it down to the information you as a business owner need right now without requiring you to read through the entire process and, and go through and, and probably miss what you needed anyway because there was just too much data.
Oh, absolutely. And, and that makes sense, you know, and it, it just, it makes us so much more efficient. It’ll, you know, it eliminates mundane tasks that, you know, that, that really we don’t need someone who’s, who’s working at, at a 40 $2000 an hour rate to be doing. Right. But with that said, you know, I think there’s a common fear among a lot of people, you know, especially, you know, kitchen modeling owners, you know, you got, you have employees and, you know, they’re, they’re fearful that a is gonna replace their job.
So John, how would you explain the role of AI in really enhancing human productivity, making employees more valuable, not, uh not, you know, in as something that you should fear? Well, I, I think first I’m gonna go back to what Josh Wheeler said and AI is really not at this point, what we call AI is machine learning. It’s truly not artificial intelligence yet, but we’ll probably get there someday and that’ll be another major, major transition in the world. I compare a lot of it.
You know, people say, you know, I don’t like to say I, because people are gonna lose their jobs. Um You know, when the internal combustion engine came out, there were people that lost their jobs. but most of the people who said, ok, horse and buggy is probably not the best way to get around anymore. So if I work at the buggy whip factory, it now would be a really good time for me to learn some new skills. And that same person that used to build buggy whips now went to work for Henry Ford or whomever it was and worked on the line making other parts for, for cars that used internal combustion engines.
And I really see that same thing is going to be happening with AI. But even better than that when that internal combustion engine came out, the everyday man didn’t have the opportunity to really leverage that technology to make their lives any better. They went from making buggy whips to putting together cars. AI is really different in the fact that every single person with an internet connection can literally learn how to use it and learn how to leverage that and they can use it to better their own lifestyle and their own well-being their family because they, they didn’t have to learn a new skill that was essentially doing the same thing.
They were in the past. Now you’re able to learn new skills that can truly change your entire economic picture for you and your family. Oh, for sure. You know, and it’s funny, I, I remember a few months ago I was looking at indeed. Or, or monster or something. I was reading an article somewhere and they were talking about how we have this new industry called Prompt Engineering. And people who were, you know, who literally they could have just graduated high school. They had no college education. Uh you know, but they, they know how to ask questions and if you can figure out how to write those prompts to get the response, I mean, you can easily make, you know, six, a six figure salary.
Um You know, and I, I mean, I know there are major enterprise level companies, finance companies, manufacturing companies, you know, at the highest levels. And they’re hiring this thing called pro a prompt engineer. And they’re, and they’re paying 2100 $2000,21995 a year for someone who can make this stuff just work well, especially when you, we figure out how now you can take beyond just ChatGPT and Google Bar. Uh Imagine again, let’s say you’re running uh obviously a kitchen remodeling business and you have regular questions that your customers are asking and, and you wanna be out doing jobs or living life, you now can take the same engines that are running that the same data sets.
You can go ahead and, and have them learn on your company data. You can upload your best practices, your policies, uh the products that you sell and all that and these tools can learn that. And now when your customers either send in a text message or they’re chatting on your website or whatever, these tools can literally answer those questions and do it almost perfectly because they’re going to base it upon the same data that you used to train your customer service people on. Uh except they’re not gonna forget uh the tools that are, they’re, they’re not gonna call in sick.
Uh They’re there 220 hours a day to be able to provide access to that information and data that could very well will be coming right from your business and providing a very personalized experience then for your customer or your prospect who hopefully as a result of that goes, wow, I need to work with you because you guys just made me feel like you, you, you’re on top of the world, you’ve got everything together. Uh That’s who I want to remodel my kitchen. Absolutely. You know, and it’s funny as you’re saying that I’m thinking of, uh you know, a story about a year ago or so we were, we were using a software uh that, that helped us improve our, our content.
And I remember a client came to me and said, I don’t know who this new author is that you have, but they have taken such a deep dive and, and they, and their, their writing style is so much better than, than what you were doing before. I mean, you, you gotta give that guy a raise and I worked a little and I didn’t want to tell them that was actually an AI that took a piece of content that one of our actual human offices wrote and just improved and improved upon it.
But I mean, it’s, it’s so, you know, it can be such a game changer. Um Oh, absolutely. I mean, we just finished a client helping them write a training manual, not something we typically do, but they had a very limited budget. They were looking for some help. It’s uh happens to be a nonprofit. So they’re a great cause and we literally went into ChatGPT we fed it a bunch of data and we said, here’s all the background information. Now based on this, we need you to create an outline for a training manual and we gave that it created that for us.
Then we went back through and through what we call chain prompting or prompt, chaining where we ask additional questions we would say. Now take section one and I want you to write an introduction for section one. Now, I want you to write the lesson for section one. And we did that through each of it. We presented it to the client and the client was like you said, they said, who, who did this? Because they understand our industry really, really well. And I’m like we use, remember we talked, we were going to use AI to do this.
And they’re like, but how did it know? And I said, because it has that frame of reference, we fed it your data, we gave it all the relevant background information and it already has information on the people that you’re training is not as who they are. But demographically, you know, in this case, we were training people between about 21 and 23 that were all married specific demographic. Once we gave chat GP t those demographics and those parameters, it knew how to write in a way that was going to appeal to those people and that was going to be relevant and that was gonna be accurate at the same time.
And we turned to what would have been according to my editor on, on staff, she estimated it would have taken about 212 days to do. We did the entire project in 30 hours. That’s incredible. Oh And, and it was a benefit to the client too because the client didn’t pay us for 22-100 days. Worth of work. Uh, so everybody won in the process, you know, and, and the only, the only time I think I worry about using it to write content is if you’re using it maybe in an SEO perspective, right?
If you’re using it risky. Yeah. You know, don’t, don’t tell Jasper, tell surfer AI or chat GP J, whatever content that you’re using to, you know, hey, this is what I want you to write about and go write it, copy and paste it. You’re get, you’re going to, you know, and it might actually work initially if you know, if you surf AI, something like that, but it’s, it’s gonna catch up to you, right? You need, you need to still have the human being look at it and that’s why I say people aren’t going to lose their jobs.
But now maybe instead of having somebody write a whole bunch of content, now they can actually concentrate on making it better and editing the content adding in that personal touch. Because from, you know, think about SEO what is SEO all about? It’s this thing called Eat. We’re not talking about grandma, right? We’re talking about expertise, experience, authority and trust. And the, and the first e in that the experience, it is something that an AI can’t have, it doesn’t have humans have experiences so it can, it can have all the expertise in the world, but you still need that person.
And you need to connect it, you need to connect to someone’s profile, you know, who literally has that experience and it gives you the, and now it gives you the authority. So it’s, it’s really a marriage of technology with the person. Well, absolutely. And, and, you know, I don’t care who you are. A, I isn’t necessarily the easy button. It’s an easier button. In other words, it’s designed to save you time, you’re absolutely right. If I’m gonna write something, whether it be an email to my customer or a Facebook post or an article for a blog, I don’t want to just take copy and paste it.
You may get lucky and it might work. But in all likelihood you’re gonna look through and you’re gonna say, OK, is this really gonna be helpful to my audience? Exactly as the AI wrote it. And chances are you’re gonna say it could be more helpful if I spent 10 to 15 minutes on it, making some changes. But instead of writing or taking hours to research and write and do everything else, now, I can turn that into something that, you know, maybe I can do in 30 minutes. Instead, again, the question I encourage your viewers to ask is how can I use it to save me 60 minutes today?
Because if we could save ourselves 60 minutes a day, five hours a week, probably more for business owners. And now all that’s extra time, we have to either get caught up if your task list looks like mine. Uh, to pursue things we love or to spend more time with our family. All of which are great. So why not use it to do that? And again, it’s not, it doesn’t get us out. It’s not a silver bullet. I, I think Mike, you probably heard that too. Everybody in Seo wants this silver bullet.
What’s the one thing I need to do to, to beat my competition online? There isn’t one thing uh Same with AI, it doesn’t work that way, but just as good SEO, best practices can help and that’s where you come in and your company comes in helping people do that. Good AI best practices can save you time and energy and hopefully money as a result of that and probably in many cases, deliver something that’s better for the end user. Yeah, for sure. And you know, in AI, it’s only gonna get better.
It’s only going to continue to learn and improve us. But what one of the things I want I want to ask you is, you know, because I know you’re on, you’re on the kind of the forefront of this and I know you’re, you know, you’re reading up every day. So what are some of the upcoming AI trends or advancements that a small business owner or someone in the home services should watch out for? And really you know, how can they start their journey into integrating A i into their operations if they haven’t done so yet?
Well, I think the biggest thing we’re gonna see is that the data sets that the, the models can read are, are increasing exponentially. Uh When ChatGPT first came out, I don’t remember what it was but it was around 10,000 or 303,000 characters. Uh They recently updated it to 45 to 50,000 characters. Bear with me. I’m a general guy so I don’t know the exact number. Uh But then just last week or the week before anthropic came out in two with 100,000 character limit. We’re gonna see the expand probably I’m guessing to millions by the end of the year.
And what that really means for us as, as business owners and entrepreneurs is we have the opportunity to use these tools now to feed all of our data into as a company. You can feed all of the brands you work with. Imagine feeding in the brochures of every, every company you represent the color chips, the the the what it’s for the who? It’s for the value, the features advantage benefits and not only all that from a sales perspective, but now imagine all of your company data and having that ability for a staff member or a team member to be able to go and query the next time.
They wonder what I wonder what I’m supposed to do here what, you know, client, client calls to reschedule and they’re really not sure what that process is. Well, now they’ll have that. They can literally query ChatGPT or whatever tool you’ve got and they can find out here’s how your company handles that. Same as we talked earlier when that prospect comes to your website or texts you a message or calls in even, uh to be able to get a response to them that’s based on your company’s data and your company’s experience and turn that around.
I think the early adopters in that market are going to do the best and are going to see some of the fastest return on that investment because they’re gonna be able to provide very direct relevant information to those people, whether team members or prospects. And again, if it’s on a team member, if that saves them a half hour a day, that’s a half hour more worth of value that they can add to the company if it’s a prospect and you make their life easier. We all want to work with people we know like and trust and that’s going to improve all three of those and make it more likely they choose you over your competitor.
Who says, well, let me pull out the brochure here in a minute. And now, uh, let me see what the specs are on that versus being able to, to send a text message and go I’m ordering this cabinet or I want to order this cabinet. What are the dimensions? And imagine that’s all part of your sales data and the tool responds with that data immediately. And that’s, that’s, you know, one of the best things about when you’re utilizing your Facebook messenger or, or things like that where, I mean, you can, you can emulate a human but you, you have so much information at your fingertips and, you know, people they don’t, they don’t have attention spans anymore, right?
And if you don’t have, if you don’t have that answer at, at the tip of your, your toe or finger or whatever, whatever the phrase is, right? They, yeah, it, it makes so much, it makes so much sense. Um Just bring this back to, to the kitchen remodeler and, and the cabinetry business owners and people like that. What is the, the one tippet? You would, you would give someone in terms of how do you improve your sales process through AI? Because it, it, it’s easy to talk about content.
It’s easy to talk about marketing and leads and all that. But what really matters to people? Nobody cares how many leads you get. Nobody cares about how many eyeballs you get. How do you improve your actual sales with the technology? Well, there’s a couple of things that I recommend, part of it is, is beginning by improving your sales process and understanding your customer better. Um We’ve used it on our customer base and everything else to help us really understand who our clients are, what they’re, what traits they have that are consistent, which ones are not.
And we’ve done it by breaking down. You know, we won’t gone through and looked at our client base and said, ok, here are the clients that we would move heaven and earth for and they would be thankful and pay us to do so. We want to move heaven and earth because they’re gonna be thankful for us doing it. They’re not gonna expect it, but they’re gonna be willing to pay for it. And then we’ve got at the all other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the clients that you could move heaven on earth for and they’re gonna be upset because you didn’t do it faster.
They’re not gonna be, they’re gonna ask you to do it for free. And those are the clients you don’t want to work with. And then there’s everybody in between and by, by feeding that data in and, and making some assumptions, we then were able to use the tools to come back and say, how do we best position our services to this market? And it’s, it’s some of the insights they gave us and I’ve been in this business since 1995. So I’ve been doing this a long time. Some of the insights that it gave us, I never thought of before.
Some of the ways to approach our, our prospects and to, to talk about how our services make their lives better in a way that I’d never even considered some of the pain points that they’re likely experiencing and how we could address those. So that’s part of it. I think it’s improving your own internal sales processes and how you can respond to customers. Um The other part where I find a I to be hugely valuable is just in helping us keep in touch and nurture those clients and, and keep them on, you know, they say you need 20 some touches a year um with a customer to keep them a customer.
So they don’t forget who you are. Even after they’ve written you a check and the ability to use AI to help with that, whether that be through text messages, whether that be through blind voicemails through emails, there’s so many ways that we never have implemented in the past because we simply didn’t have enough time as business owners and entrepreneurs. And now we do because we can leverage these tools to expedite that process, you know, significantly uh through that sales process. So, and I would suggest to anyone who’s using AC RM system, look at the automation that you can incorporate.
Yes, look, look at those work flows and the the emails, the voice mail drops the, you know, the text messages, you know, schedule it out. You can, you can track when someone’s birthday is, you know, all special events in their life. I mean, if you’re a restaurant owner, you know, when, hey, when, you know, ask the question, when’s your anniversary? The first time somebody comes in jot it down, put it in the system, the system is gonna remember it. It’s gonna say, you know, I mean, this is just basic, doesn’t forget. Yeah.
Well, I’m sure you’ve seen this too, Mike, one of the other big things we know and, and Harvard just came out with a study at the end of last year that showed that for every minute. It takes you to respond to that new sales inquiry. Your likelihood of closing it after five minutes is actually down to less than 10%. So think about that as a business, you’ve got a new prospect calling in life’s busy, you’re on a job, whatever is going on. We, we just don’t get to respond to every email, every text message, every phone call within five minutes.
And again, according to the study by Harvard, and I would believe it once you’re past that five minutes, your chances of closing that deal are literally like around 10 to 12%. It drops precipitously with AI tools. We can identify that call, the moment it comes in and we can follow up with them within seconds. One of the things we’ve implemented in our company if you call and we don’t answer the phone, which does happen sometimes because everybody’s on the line, the system, some an AI tool that we have will message you back because what are most people using nowadays?
They’re calling from their cell phones. So we automatically send a text message back that says, hey Mike, I saw you called, I’m really sorry. We missed your call. How can we help you? And you know what? It surprises me. How many people then text us back and go. Oh Jonathan. Yeah, I was calling about the following. I had a question about this and now instead of them going, oh man, they didn’t pick up the phone. I don’t know. Oh, it’s still on my list. I’ll call somebody else now all of a sudden they’re engaged with us in a conversation and they’re not calling our competitor, they’re talking to us.
And I think that’s one of the best ways you can use AI based tools to provide that higher level of customer service, that immediate response that people want. Again. We, we have the attention span of nets myself included. Um We need to be able to respond almost immediately in order to save those very precious inbound leads that we’re getting. It’s funny you say that because, and let me tell you one of the things that we’re doing actually now with some clients and guys, you can only do this and check with an attorney first because you only do this in certain states.
But when somebody calls and we don’t pick the phone up and don’t call back within 30 seconds, we do a voicemail drop and we’ll have someone be, hey, you know, hey, this is Mike from ABC Company. Just so you called? Sorry, I was on the other line. Uh I’m sorry, I missed you here. But uh what’s the best time for me to get back to you? And they, most people, what they do is they don’t realize that’s a voicemail drop. They think that you, that you called and they just missed your call.
So it’s, you know, it’s even more personable than the, than the text because absolutely. And you know, and you can, you can do that, you can use the text messages, you know, get talk, talk to the attorneys because you can’t do voicemail drops in every city. I just wanna put that out there. Um, but it’s, it’s definitely a way that you can incorporate a I um you know, it, you know, so it’s, it, it’s just again, it marries that the human touch that the human, the sales guy who has the actual voice on it, but it’s incorporating that the automation so that you don’t have to physically do it.
Um No great idea. Fantastic idea. And again, it just a uh a real practical use of AI for, for sure. Now John, you, you, you’ve given us some, you just dropped some real knowledge bombs on us today and you’ve given us so much information. Um, you know, and I’m sure my, my listeners really found a lot of value in that. But for those people who want to learn more about a, I, for those people who want to, you know, get a little bit more information from you.
How is it that they would find you? Where, where do they go to, to talk with you to engage with you? Uh, is there, you know, is there a group? Is there, is there a phone? What’s the deal? Oh, great question. Well, if, if you’re listening to this, the, the fastest and easiest way is just to go to my website, you can message me right from there. It’s white beard strategies. You guys have no idea where that came from. I don’t know. Uh, but white beard strategies and if you want, um, Mike, I know you know about this, I, I run a Facebook group.
This is not a for-profit thing, but if you’re a business owner and you wanna know about how to leverage AI, uh, just go to white beard strategies dot com forward slash AI group. Um, and I see my, got the message there on the bottom. Just go there and join it is a private group. You’re gonna have to apply. Don’t worry, I let everybody in but it’s not public because we, we keep, I don’t wanna say the riffraff, but we keep all the marketers and sales people out there’s no sales pitch.
You’re not, you’re never gonna be pitched in that group about buying a course or buying a bunch of prompts or anything like that. We’re there to help everybody. We’re over 2100 people in just the first two months. If you want to learn, that’s probably the easiest and best way to do it. Uh And the other thing, if you head to the website, my cell phone number is on there. You got a question, pick it up and call me. I’ll answer. If I’m not in a meeting, I’ll pick it up.
I’m more than happy to be a resource to anybody. If you know Mike and are listening to his podcast, uh you know, you’re, you’re a friend and, and we wanna chat, we want to help. I’m a big believer in that rising tide raises all boats. So, you know, use us as a resource. That’s why we’re here. Jonathan. Thank you so much for sharing that. And guys just, you know, quick endorsement is I have been a member of the Facebook group for some time. We have found so much value in that group.
We actually had, we’ve had asked a couple of questions, Jonathan. You’ve actually helped me by responding in the group with certain, you know, helping us write some pro that there’s been real game changes for the way that we, we look at SEO data interpretation. So guys definitely join the group, check it out. Um But with that said, you know, again, I want to thank you so much, Jonathan for being on the podcast today. Uh We had a great time, we learned a ton. Um So with that said, uh this is Mike Goldstein for Jonathan Mast.
