- Speaker #0
Hey, I think we have a three-year window here to actually make a lot of freaking money.
- Speaker #1
We are being a little bit too micromanaging, and I think AI is becoming a bit of a teenager now. Like, it was a bit of a toddler, now it's become a little bit of a teenager. It can do a lot more without just having to tell it what to do.
- Speaker #2
We have to look at the way we're hiring people. If you're starting a company, one of the main people you've got to have on your staff is somebody that can understand AI.
- Speaker #1
Are you training people to do the work? Are you training people to train? the software to do the work.
- Speaker #2
Your watch on marketing misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #0
Hey, Hey, it's the misfits. It's your good old buddies, uh, Norm Farrar and Kevin King. How are you doing, Mr. Farrar?
- Speaker #2
I'm doing good. I am looking forward to getting out there and, uh, trying a new cigar.
- Speaker #0
I know you got me, you got me corrupted now. It's all your fault. I'm sorry. I smoked a rare pink the other night by myself. I never smoked by myself. And I always smoke socially. And then I go off and have a little sabbatical in the Caribbean and say barts. And I'm smoking Cubans by myself and writing notes. I'm like, this is actually loosening up my mind and pretty good. So now you got me going on my balcony occasionally and actually smoking a cigar. I'm like, gosh, dang it, that Norm Corruptor guy.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah. And, you know,
- Speaker #0
thank god it wasn't the crystal meth uh i did i did i was cleaning out i i uh i had a i got a new humidor yeah uh to replace one that was kind of on the blink and i was cleaning out the old one and buried behind some stuff on the very bottom shelf was some old paraphernalia from my ex-wife and i was like oh what is this doing here um so i was like that's not that's not my scene um i took a some pipes and some different things. I don't even know what they do. Obviously, they were for smoking something besides cigars.
- Speaker #2
Were they branded? Like, did they have any logos or anything? No,
- Speaker #0
there might have been something on it. But those, I was like, those are out of here, so there's no confusion. But, yes, I mean, speaking of confusion, there's a lot of confusion right now out there in the marketing world when it comes to SEO and what are they calling it, AIO or AI optimization. and And our guest today is someone that, you know, she was at the recent BESS event and she talked about this there. And a lot of people are like, oh, what's she talking about? I don't quite get it, but she's on the leading edge of this stuff. Isn't that right, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, absolutely. And when we bring her on, this lady amazes me. She's been on my podcast a couple of times and just love having her on. She gets right to the point. She knows her stuff. and Well, why don't we just bring her on and she can start too. And hopefully there's, Amara, no multisyllabic words, please. Just keep it down here. Just for me. But a good friend of mine.
- Speaker #0
Fourth grade level for Norm.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah. Fourth grade level. But I'm going to introduce Amara. Let me see this. I told you I'm going to screw this up. Amaregi. So we'll bring her on stage right now.
- Speaker #0
There she is. Hey, how you doing?
- Speaker #1
I'm awesome. Thanks for asking. How are you all?
- Speaker #2
Doing great. You know, the first time that we met, I don't know if you remember that, but that was at M3. It was a networking event and Scott Cunningham introduced us and then we went out to dinner and just listening to you talk. I'm sitting there going, wow, I really have to get to know this person. You know your stuff. You've always amazed me, the new things that you're talking about or putting it in perspective. Like I remember on my podcast, the Lunch with Norm podcast, it was simple, but you broke it down really interesting, just schema. You know, a lot of people didn't understand schema and how important it is for websites. And you just, we spent an hour on that and I got a bunch of just messages, DMs telling, thank you very much. We had no idea. And so four or five people reached out after that. And so thank you for that. And today...
- Speaker #0
Wait, wait, Norm, wait. You can't just jump over that. What is schema? What'd you say? Schema? Sounded like you said another word, but schema?
- Speaker #2
Schema. Go ahead.
- Speaker #0
What is schema, Amara?
- Speaker #1
Schema is nothing more than structured data, right? So think of it as you have water, you put it in a glass. It's structured. It's in a glass, right? Otherwise, if it's in a puddle, if the lake is unstructured, it's there. You can still use it for something, but it's a lot harder to use. You don't know what it's there for. It's just there. If by looking at it, it looks like water, but it could be something else, right? And so when you structure your data, not only did the glass look like it's got water, you can actually put a label on it that says water, right? So when you look at it, it's actually understood that it's water without having to guess. And so with schema, all it is, is just structure your data so that search engines and, and, and Chattoputti, LLMs. OpenAI, Anthropic, whatever LLMs you're using can better understand and vectorize your content.
- Speaker #2
Humans. So, you know, when you do that initial search, all of a sudden, let's say you're putting up a recipe or you have a blog article or it's a website. It could be almost anything, but you'll notice the websites that don't have it compared to the ones that do and catch your eye. It might even be a ratings for something. But you can do this, and it's very simple, very simple to do. Any web developer should understand it. And if they do, that's actually a question you should be asking is, you know, do they understand schema?
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So this is something in the back end. So she said to make sure that the water that's you understand that it's water, not a puddle. When you understand it's water, even though they're the same thing, it's composed of the same thing. So is this a way, Norm and Amara, that you, I'm just, I mean, I understand schema. I'm asking for the audience. Is this a way that you like code something in the background in like in your HTML or whatever? It's like you're putting certain headers and certain H1, H2, H3 tags and so on and certain things the way you label them. Can you explain a little bit or give an example maybe on that?
- Speaker #1
Schema, so not too technical, but Google, which tends to. rule all things in the search world, even with, you know, the chat TBTs and perplexities of the world. If you go to schema.org, you can see all of the rules around schema. Schema is JSON that you add to the back end of your site. So it's not on the front side where, you know, you see the code or see it displayed on the front side of your site. It's like metadata, right? Like a Meta title, meta description. We're all used to that, right? So it's additional metadata that is back there that structures the content that's on your page. And sometimes it's off-page content. Like, what date was this published? You don't necessarily have that information on your page or blog post, right? But in your schema, you might have date that was published, date that was updated, author information. And it helps the search engine to understand recency. how recent this content is versus it having to guess. Just one example.
- Speaker #0
Okay.
- Speaker #2
So starting off with schema, but let's talk about a little bit about you a bit more. So I was amazed. We were driving back from that initial meeting to find out how experienced you are on the other side of the fence. Forget the marketing side, but just operations. And then we got talking and you are. a gold partner over at HubSpot. So I'd like to talk to you about that because a lot of people, a lot of marketers, and it was so funny because I was saying, oh, well, we don't use HubSpot. It's too expensive. And you were saying, well, there's only one. Just use HubSpot. It's not too expensive. Just hear me out. And, you know, we'll talk about that. We'll get into that. But also you have an agency called Fullstack. And you're also one of the higher level moderators for Digital Marketer. One of their, well, I don't even, I think that's changed now. But what is it? The foundation room? Is that? Scalable. Scalable. Okay. So scalable. You take care of all that. High level questions. Smart lady. Smart lady, Kevin. And you had all this smartness at the Iceland event and you didn't get into it. She should have had the one room to herself.
- Speaker #1
That was an amazing event, by the way. Great job, you all. I never miss it. Never miss an event like that again, for sure. It was amazing.
- Speaker #0
I appreciate that. Yeah, Iceland was good. So just for those listening, I do an event of BDSS and it's Amazon focused. And then after that event. I do want... That's called Elevate 360, which is not Amazon focused. And it's to help e-commerce sellers up their game outside of Amazon. And Amara was one of the speakers at that. And she blew some people away with some really good operational and SEO stuff. So what is your main focus right now, Amara? Are you juggling a bunch of different hats like what Norm just rattled off? Or is there one main thing that's like your focus and these others are just little like side hustle, side project deals?
- Speaker #1
Actually. I have some very, I have a huge, I have huge news to share with you. And these are the first ones that I'm telling outside of any contractual obligations. You guys ready?
- Speaker #0
Ready. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Don't hit that button.
- Speaker #2
I'm listening.
- Speaker #0
All right.
- Speaker #1
So I just sold my agency.
- Speaker #2
What?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. All right. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
And it just got purchased by a private equity firm. So I'm going to be. more like a CRO, but CMO, CTO for a portfolio of companies that in between two and four, $400 million doing the marketing, the marketing and revenue operations were, um, for our portfolio of companies, which starting July 1st.
- Speaker #2
So we didn't have a chance. We didn't even have a chance of getting you to work with us.
- Speaker #0
We tried Norm, we tried, but you said, Oh, just hold on. we can get her cheaper later It'll be okay. And now look, you know, price has tripled.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So you're going to be helping. So the private equity is buying your agency and then you're staying on to help manage their whole portfolio stuff. Did I understand that correctly?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So commercial real estate, retail, health and beauty and wellness, some coffee shops. It's a really, really cool lifestyle brands. doing a lot in very interesting spaces that people have kind of disappeared from, but are going to be coming back to. It's very, very interesting. Instead of malls being destroyed, we're actually buying strip malls and rebuilding them and bringing more luxurious, more lifestyle brands into them, which is really, really cool. And all sorts of things.
- Speaker #0
Rebuilding them as a mall or rebuilding them as tearing down part of it and using part of the structure and then making that whole big... piece of real estate into something else.
- Speaker #1
We're rebuilding it into a more beautiful, more luxurious mall in certain areas all across the country.
- Speaker #2
So let's talk about that.
- Speaker #0
It's going to stay as a mall.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Shopping center or shopping center.
- Speaker #0
The reason I asked, we have one in Austin that is called the old Highland mall and it was a big mall 30 years ago. And it kind of deteriorated to where there's like three shops left and became part of a ACC, a community college. And then they tore down about half the mall and then use that. big parking lot space and everything that it has. And they built like townhomes and like a little, you know, outdoor area there. That's why I was asking if it's going to stay as a mall or become redeveloped.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Reinvesting in, reinvesting in luxurious experiences in shopping areas all around the country, which is like weird, right? Cause you see these buildings say out of the long beach, California, all of our old malls and shopping centers are being destroyed and turned into the housing, right? Cause of the housing crisis. So it's just very interesting. There's a lot of industries that there's a lot of brands within our portfolio that which I'll talk about later that you thought were dying, but we're actually revitalizing investing and it's actually really, really cool.
- Speaker #2
People think that retail is dead, but it just smells funny. And then you take a look at it, different angle. And that's what great marketers do. That's what misfits do is they can take a look at something that everybody else sees as dying and take that niche and then. just turn it around.
- Speaker #0
You go, Ooh, pickleball court and Amazon warehouse distribution center there.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. Not anymore. So how did, how did they, when did this happen and what was their thoughts behind it? You know, we're talking about the private equity firm that just bought you out, right?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So, um, I was working with them as a client or they're my client. And then they're like, hey, we actually don't need to manage our whole portfolio, but exclusively. So I was like, OK, I know we're a month ago. So everything's being finalized right now. It should be done by the end of this week. But, you know, I'm I'm every plan that we take on going forward is going to be part of the portfolio. So doing lots of M&A for other things that align with the verticals that are in the portfolio. And so I'll be installing operations and, you know, growth and revenue. operations within these companies to help them to help them grow essentially.
- Speaker #0
Hey Norm, you'll love this man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50k a month, but when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me.
- Speaker #2
Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded.
- Speaker #0
Exactly man. I told them you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos. Even changing cogs using FIFO.
- Speaker #2
Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs too?
- Speaker #0
Sure does. That way you can keep your quarter four chaos totally under control and know your numbers. Because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory, it sends review requests, and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon.
- Speaker #2
Now that's like having a CFO in your back pocket.
- Speaker #1
Hmm.
- Speaker #0
You know what? It's just $15 a month. But you got to go to sellerboard.com forward slash misfits, sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial.
- Speaker #2
So you want me to say go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your number straight before your accountant loses it?
- Speaker #0
Exactly.
- Speaker #2
All right. That is incredible. Like just to. It's the reverse. Everybody thinking that everything's going back online and to take advantage of that and to market that, I'm sure you're going to have lots of success. I want to talk about something that we talked about a long time ago, and that is HubSpot. So people on the go, they want to have a CRM, something that they can depend on. And most people think HubSpot is... way too expensive. Let's talk about that.
- Speaker #1
I think people don't know how to evaluate software. I know shots fired, but hear me out. I think evaluating software is as important as looking at a house, right? Where are you going to live? Because that's where all your data lives, where your customer data lives. And so there's a lot of aspects to a CRM that HubSpot does very, very well that most I would say customer platforms don't do well. And that's more than a CRM. It's more of a customer data platform. When you think about it that way, it's not just what you can do with your customers within a platform. It's what you can do with that data outside of your platform too. And that's what makes it great. So their Facebook ads integration, their Google ads integration, their YouTube ads integration, all of their automated segmentation. People are horrible at segmentation, by the way. I have never actually... met a company that actually does segmentation well, because it takes a lot of work and people underestimate the value of it. They just think tag everything to death and find my tags. And, you know, but you don't realize how, how laborious and how prone to error it is when you're not on top of it. And it's not automated based on rules, how your customer goes through the customer journey. The thing I love about HubSpot is that they have smart segmentation where as the customer moves through the customer journey, it... your prospects and customers fit different criteria. And so in real time, the person that was looking on your website is now a lead and is now a prospect because you got a call and you qualified them and now they're a customer. So unless you have those segments set up properly, unless you're moving them through those different lists, you can be marketing the same people over and over again. They've already moved on to a different place in your journey. So you're wasting budget with their app. With HostFly, you have not only more automated segmentation, you also have automated data going into Facebook and Google and your advertising platforms. So you can exclude and include and show different creatives as they move through their journey in real time without having to use tools like Zapier and things like that that fail all the time. They're not necessarily moving people to different parts of the journey. They're just saying, yes, they're this, no, they're that. go into these different lists and it could be, it's a lot harder to manage with a tool like Zapier or you're having to do manual CSV or Excel imports to get that data in or optimize your ads. So we have a true customer data platform that can push where customers are at in any part of the journey to different tools to use. It's wild and more efficient, right? 40% better ad efficiency across the board every time we've done it for our clients and it's set up properly. So then it sounds quite too expensive.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, we've talked about the human experience. I think you said it, if I remember, HEO, which is very similar to SEO. But this would be what you just described. At the end of the day, really is your human experience optimization, right? It's just that flow, the ease of making a sale or understanding your customer a little bit better. So you can... work or provide data to them like you were just describing. But it's just that a lot of companies, a lot of marketing companies that are trying to do something or just general business, they don't, they remove that. They forget about the human experience. And again, when you were on the podcast, we talked briefly about the human experience optimization, not just SEL. And I think looking at HubSpot. That's part of this whole HEO experience.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, because it really, a lot of people look at their CRM as a funnel marketing automation tool. See, when you think of funnel, right? I think of pouring oil into a cone-shaped thing and it going onto the floor, right? When I think customer journey, I think there's a place where you start and a place that you finish. There's a lot of things that happen along the way. It's not always linear. You'll start, you'll stop, you will go there quickly, you will go there slow. Some parts are slow, some parts are fast. Sometimes they go off the path, sometimes they stay on it, right? I think of a phone more like getting on a roller coaster and not being able to get off until the very end, right? No matter how you feel. A journey, people can leave the journey and come back to it. Whatever, right? The customer is more in control of their experience. And that's what people want. I literally was on a digital worker call today and telling our people that are in our mastermind. Because they were talking about how their lead magnets no longer work. I'm like, well, duh. Because your stupid checklist that you made can now be a question you're asking ChatDBT. How do I make a marketing plan? Well, your stupid 20-point marketing plan is not that great. ChatDBT can give you something great too. Right? So the customer wants is different. Right? And so how do you give the customer something that ChatDBT or whatever can't give them within their journey? Now you're thinking journey-focused, not... funnel focus and offer focus.
- Speaker #0
So how's the CRM? For those listening, that CRM is customer relation management, right? That's what it stands for. For those that have never used that, can you just paint the picture of what that does? So you upload your customer, current customer, if you're migrating something, you upload your current customer list and you may have some tags on buyer or whatever in there, but then going forward, everything's happening within the CRM. So all the landing pages are built within HubSpot. All the sales are happening. Maybe they're tied to Stripe or something, but it's all coming back in HubSpot. All the blog posts, all the whatever, is it all happening within there? And then you use the outside tools like Facebook and Google to put stuff out or walk me through so I have a full top level just basic grasp of how CRM works. Or am I still using all my other stuff too?
- Speaker #1
Well, in theory. A true CRM was going to capture the customer data before they even come into the CRM, right? Think about it. You have third-party cookies that are, like, dead and or dying, right? They're not as reliable. Browsers are like, no, thank you, right? But a first-party, like, first-party cookies, your CRM, you can put a tracking pixel or tracking code on your website from a tool like HubSpot. And it can actually be tracking who is on your website. And then once they convert, it has all that information. Like I can look at a customer profile and see all the pages that they looked at before they converted and after.
- Speaker #0
Okay.
- Speaker #1
Which is really cool, right? So now I have a full view of their journey down to the person. Not just 10 people that visited this page. This person visited this page on this day at this time. And if I hunger information, if I go back to that page, I can send an automation to send me an email as a salesperson. Because it's not just... People just think marketing, Sierra. It's a customer journey. So it's sales, marketing, and customer service. And finance is what HubSpot really, really excels at, right? Planning to like a newer arm of it. But so now if someone lands on my product page, my pricing page, that I heard they maybe downloaded a lead magnet or joined a webinar. I can now say, hey, every time someone that I know lands on this pricing page, shoot me an email. I can pick up the phone and call that person because I know they're actively looking at my brand. I can send them an email and say, hey, I saw that you were on our pricing page. What questions did you have? Or I can just create an automation to email that person, right? Those are things that humans aren't doing with just the, you know, active campaign type tool where they're just sending out an email because they have something to say. What can you send to a customer to improve their experience in the moment? That's what you can do with a great CRM. Well,
- Speaker #0
it's like an independent cooking system in a way where you, instead of relying on Google or Facebook's pixel or cookie or whatever, that you actually have your own that's been following people around and actually giving you data directly that you can use to manipulate as you please, not as one of the big social media platforms pleases. Yeah. Okay. I just want to make sure everybody understood that. Okay.
- Speaker #2
I've worked with a lot of companies who've had CRMs, but it's like any app that's out there where they might know 2% of it or 3% of it, and they don't do anything with it. Not like what you were describing. For smaller companies, different brands, what is something that's very simple to do that you see that could be implemented very easily? to get some results with a CRM. Yeah. With a CRM.
- Speaker #1
I think it, you know, it doesn't have to be HubSpot. Cause there's other tools that do,
- Speaker #2
right.
- Speaker #1
Uh, you know, smart segmentation, smart list, things like that. Um, I think, I think before you even put your stuff in a CRM, really think about your customer journey and really look at how you want to communicate with your customers. So. before they become, before they even get into your list, right? How are you, how are you tracking them? So that's going into like Google tagger integer. So much has changed in the last few years, right? How we email, how we track. So Google analytics for GA for people like, please give me the old analytics back, right? Cause it's more powerful, but it's more complicated, right? So how do you even like, I just want to see how much traffic my site's getting. I just want to see how many people are converting. Here's a hack. has a lot of that Google Universal Analytics data out of the box. You could just download it for free. You could actually use HubSpot for free, right? So I say it's not expensive if you know what you want to use it for. You actually put in the software, you could actually put the tracking code on your website and it'd give you the same data that GA4 gave you in a way that's a little bit easier to use out of the box without even having to configure, because you have to configure GA4 properly, which is really great. So. For people who are really, really struggling and don't understand analytics, HubSpot's a great tool for that. UTMs. A lot of people don't know what UTMs are for. Good marketers, experienced marketers use them for campaign level, ad creative level tracking. HubSpot has it baked in, so you don't need to do that. So if you're not that sophisticated, don't have great processes for tracking, HubSpot literally overheats all of it so you don't have to think about it. And it's organized and you can see it in beautiful reports. So if your team is just like big bruisers and just want to get in there and do it, that's a great tool for that without sophistication. You can do it with a lot of these other tools, but without some sophistication of processes, it becomes a huge mess. So then what ends up happening is you have a CRM that you hate. You're like, oh, this thing sucks. I can't use it. I don't know what's there. I just use it to email my people. That's it. And then you move into another tool. And then six to eight months to a year later becomes that tool again. So I think. Before you even sign up for a CRM of any sort, it doesn't matter if it's a test or not, the one thing I would recommend people do is really understand their customer journey, have that document of how, have that diamond of how customers happen. And that's what we do at Digital Marketer and Scalable is really have people on our masterminds really document that entire growth journey from the time they are aware of your brand to the time they become a customer to the time they're upsold, cross-sold, ask for referrals, all that stuff.
- Speaker #0
Does this work on a website or can it work like in an email? I mean, just a hypothetical example. I send out two emails, two newsletters a week, and I can segment based on, like you said, do the basic spreadsheet segment, segment based on who clicked an AI story or who clicked a story to something at the New York Times. And I know, okay, these people clicked it, but then taking that data and layering it on top of each other and like, okay. I want to know how many people that click an AI story are also clicking, going down these other three paths and then build a profile of them. Can I do that with a CRM or does it have to be actually on a physical page where you're putting this pixel or this special CRM down? Can I add it into the UTM tracking that I don't know how that would pick that up? But how would something like that work?
- Speaker #1
So the way I would do it for sure, I've done this before. So what I would do is... back up a little bit and say, who are my personas? Who are the people that read my newsletter? and create a profile, right? Business owner, investor, marketer of some sort. And maybe there's a fourth, right?
- Speaker #0
And I would make some assumptions based on how my content's laid out. Anyone that's looking at a marketing automation situation might be a marketer. Anyone that's looking at Wall Street Journal might be an investor of some sort. You can attribute different links or article buckets to different personas. So there's actually a persona tool on HubSpot. They'll let your persona say, someone clicks this type of section. There, that's a persona, right? we're going to assume that they're that persona and you can actually have it use an automation to, to market as that type, or you can just break down our article types into a custom field and say, anyone who clicks on this type of article, check mark with this, that they're interested in AI. And when it puts this type of article, check if they're interested in investor fundraising or whatever type of news. And so then if you want to do something super curated, which is best practice, You'd say, those people that are interested in investor-type news, we're going to send all those people that have a checkbox for investor-type stuff. All the AI stuff, if I want to send something super curated. And then if you have advertisers, this is even better data, right? So you could say, I have 100,000 people on my list. Out of that 100,000, 40,000 of them really, really like AI. I do this because they clicked on it and we track it and measure it. The only people that are reading our AI has this much open rate for just our AI people. If you want to just send something AI related to our people that like AI and open this stuff on a regular basis, I'm going to charge you a premium just to send to our AI people to send out some curated content versus just sending out to the whole 100,000 people. That's exactly what I want to do.
- Speaker #1
But to do that, I would have to, I think I understand now, if I'm putting a link in my newsletter, I'm using Beehive. And I'm just, I'm putting, I got an article and says something is hyperlinked and it goes out to, let's just say the Wall Street Journal. And Beehive puts UTMs on it. They put UTM parameters and I can customize that if I want. But that doesn't get back to HubSpot or the CRM. So I would have to actually take that link and put it into HubSpot. And HubSpot would generate almost like its own bit.ly link kind of thing or something. And then that link replaces and then it can track everything across the board. Do I understand that correctly? Okay. All right. Make sure the audience understands that too. Okay.
- Speaker #0
That would be really cool.
- Speaker #1
That could be really, really cool. what you can do with that.
- Speaker #0
I believe you have integrates upon spot. So there might be some cross domain stuff that you, there might be some stuff you could do to kind of sync that up a little bit better.
- Speaker #1
Oh, if they have certain places where it will actually, you just put it in the, to the UTM and they pass it somehow. Um, and behind the scenes. Okay. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
We are does integrate across spot.
- Speaker #1
It does. Oh, I need to look into that. I just learned something. Norm. I learned something. I, I,
- Speaker #2
Kevin King learned something.
- Speaker #1
That could be very powerful to do that. And we need to do that with a Misfits newsletter too. Because then we know who's clicking on SEO stuff, who's clicking on AI stuff, who's clicking on domain stuff or TikTok stuff or whatever. No, that's definitely something we got to look at.
- Speaker #0
And even if you can't do it from like HomeSpot or Behat or whatever, you can do it the old fashioned way. Like there's ways to track it. Like so-and-so clicks on this, send. a signal to like a spreadsheet. They all, and you know, you can add rows to a spreadsheet using automation like Zapier and say, okay, all these people are looking at, have clicked an AI newsletter. So you could just, every time someone clicks an AI article, their profile gets attributed to that category and then use AI. You have a bunch of raw data, but AI is amazing because you could simplify it.
- Speaker #1
But Norm said HubSpot's expensive. You said there's a free version, but so what is HubSpot? Is this that multi-thousand dollar per month deal once you get up into the decent level of stuff? Or is it what's a basic, a decent HubSpot? I'm not talking about enterprise level.
- Speaker #0
Sure. So the free tool has a lot of great stuff in it, from tracking to landing pages to simple forms. I think there might even be basic one or two step workflows. Really great stuff, right? I think you can even hook up your ads for free. I think you can only do like five at a time though. I can't remember, but the starter, they have a starter packet. I think it's 25 bucks. I think you can get the whole suite for all different hubs, like 150 bucks a month. And then based on, yeah, based on the number of contacts you have, that's where it gets a little pricey. Based on the number of contracts you have, you can pay X dollar. If you have a lot of contacts, call them. They might be able to negotiate and get you better. deal under Comtax, or it might make sense to go to the pro level, which starts at $800.
- Speaker #2
Now, a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #0
However, and you get like social media management, which you don't have to pay for another tool for. So let's say, I don't know what the tools cost these days, 50 to 100 bucks. You get email marketing, which, you know, every tool is around the same price of email marketing. You get... marketing automation, you just get tons of functionality in the pro suite. Access to AI tools, AI content creation for emails, landing page creation. So use Type of Prompt and it creates a landing page for you. Lots and lots of tools. So you would need to have a lot of supplementary tools. So when you add up all the tools that you would need for what you would do with like a marketing pro, it ends up being a lot less. But the problem is that you don't get to pick and choose. You just get everything. So if you don't need that many tools, it might not be economical for you. But I like it.
- Speaker #1
No, it sounds really good. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for that.
- Speaker #2
So something else. You've worked with hundreds of clients. And there's people that make it. There's people that don't make it. Is there anything that stands out when you're looking at these businesses, these businesses that are ready to scale? Is there like two or three things that get your attention right off the bat that they're doing right to scale?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I think the companies that, let's talk about the companies that don't for a second. I know I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but I think. The clients that haven't worked out well with working with us, you know, fault or no fault, I think customers change. A lot of times clients don't want to, right? And so being able to look at the data and say, hey, we need to pivot a little bit or adjust is super important, especially as things evolve. The ever evolving landscape. I'm not an idiot, I promise. Then your people evolve, they just do. And I think people are just stuck on doing things the same way over and over and over again. And I think the companies that are willing to ship and at least try things, because sometimes people are like Shariabic syndrome, all I want to do is new things. That's another reason why people fail. There's no lack of focus. I think there's like a very, very good, happy medium between experimentation, evolving and knowing what works for your customers and really, really owning the data that informs that. So that's number one. Right. Number two is having a plan and sticking to it instead of random acts of marketing. The plan doesn't have to work. It just needs to be able to be measured. And I think companies that have discipline and are willing to just go the distance and test and see what works and see what doesn't have a lot better chances. Because, you know, then you come out of that test and say, OK, here's what works. And I think people are so black and white with it. Right. As long as it works, it's like, oh, it sucks. you might have been three feet from gold and didn't even know it. So it's not always, it didn't work. It's like, Oh, if we would have tweaked this one thing, we would have hit the goal. Or we were only, we were at 98 instead of a hundred. Can we still say it kind of worked? Like it almost got us there. Right. And so people just, it's just so like, people don't measure, people don't put a plan together. They don't actually define what success looks like before they start something. So then the bull posts constantly move. Because what happens is they're comparing themselves to other people and say, oh, this person I know has, you know, 10,000 something somethings. And it's like, well, maybe you need to get number one first to validate it and then get to five and then 20. So problem number three is not setting realistic goals and expectations. I think companies that do that well see huge gains and they're able to systemize and they're able to scale because there's a huge difference between growth and scale growth. You could say one, if you go from one to two, that's growth. If you go to two to five, that's growth. However, if it costs you more to grow, that is not scaling. Scaling is the difference between If you can grow without costing you more time or money or headache, you are scaling, period, right? If that's the amount of resource that it takes to actually grow does not change, but your growth trajectory continues to rise, then you are officially scaled. So you're just adding more sales, adding more revenue. You are growing, but it could be costing you more time, energy, headache, frustration, whatever. So I think that's the ultimate goal. Grow up by any means, you're scalable.
- Speaker #1
What role do you think AI and agentic AI is going to play in scaling and growth for companies?
- Speaker #0
Oh, my goodness. It's crazy out here. I can't sleep these days. I literally build apps. Like instead of me like looking for an app to like do a thing, I just build one in two hours for what I need using AI. I just literally prompt an app using software. And I'm like, My client, when you make an org chart, I built a fully functional org chart the way I want it with like job descriptions and clickable and interactive in two hours using AI. So like with agents and things like that, like actual agents, not like the fake ones, but like the real stuff, like it is scary how much we're going to be able to do. So if you have like legit repeatable processes, add this manifesto. I might publish it. I might not. It's about 30 pages about AI. and how you get ready for AI. Most people are just looking for AI to be a magic bullet and say like, press button, go. That's not gonna happen. If you have an actual process, an actual thing you do over and over again, right? Henry Ford, input, output. All these stuff can be agentized or whatever and done quickly. And you will actually start to see the reward of it all. Most people are just trying to figure out like, so I want AI to read my emails, but it's not doing anything. It's like a stick. do something, right? It's like, you're not going to do anything with it. You're not going to do anything with your email unless you know what you want it to do, right? I know that some people are failing with it, but man, people who like legit have like an email process, like, okay, anyone from this, anything that has a, like Google already does it for you. That's the thing you won't realize. You have Google Workplaces that already does it for you. If I have an airline ticket in my email, it puts it on my calendar. It doesn't ask. It just puts it on my calendar. for when I fly out. So it's automatically there. Like that to me is like not agenting, but like what agentics trying to do. Find rules where things are always the case. There are no variables. You can find those things where if this happened, then this happens, you'll be able to use agents to like transform everything you do. And I think the bottom layer of job, we're really, really at risk right now because you need some insane things.
- Speaker #1
What do you think about tying agents together? with MCP and some of the new technologies that are coming out, where maybe you have different tools, maybe it's the one you coded and there's different tools out there that are doing different things and you actually have them all tied together that were by themselves, they're pretty powerful doing a repetitive task, something like what you said, but when you put them together, they can actually feed off of each other if you code them right. And I mean, right now it's like, like you said, it's kind of like the fake agents. It's like make.com or NAN or whatever, but. It's changing rapidly. If you listen to the CEOs of the top companies, they're raving about it. What's your opinion on tying different software systems or processes or operations all together with agents and MCP where they can talk and interact with each other and still do their tasks? What do you think about that?
- Speaker #0
I think we've already leapfrogged that. You know, I think if you watch the Google I.O. Did anybody else watch that?
- Speaker #1
I watched part of it. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
I watched it three times. What I heard was we've evolved behind like chat functionality and we're now into reasoning. So a lot of what just our basic Gemini whatever is doing is able to reason instead of just put out a response, which is amazing. It's starting to learn from itself. I think we are being a little bit too micromanaging. And I think AI is becoming a bit of a teenager now. Like it was a bit of a toddler. Now it's become a little bit of a teenager. It can do a lot more without us having to tell it what to do. without having to build these really crazy agentic systems. I think it just needs our data. So what if it's a schema, right? A schema is more for AI than it is for search, in my humble opinion, when you structure your data, structure your process, and structure your system. I think in some cases, AI can tell us what it should be doing without us having to use agents. I think we're almost there. I think we're three months away from that.
- Speaker #1
Couldn't you tie a bunch of tools? I don't know. I'm just going back to the tool that does keyword research, you know, Ubersuggest or something like that. And then a tool that does image optimization and create your another tool that creates your ads for Facebook and bring them all together. And those are automated processes. Once you give it the prompt or the feet that say, hey, create a picture, this is what needs accomplished. And it can go do it over and over and over. But then in the middle, those are all integrated into the middle is a brain like what you just said. It's like its own little LLM and maybe it's humans. that are experts in each of these things have come in there and kind of babysit this LLM and kind of guided it a little bit or taught it even, or it's their teachings or whatever it may be. And so then it's almost customized and it's not the big data or it can go out when it has the big data, but it's almost customized. And then it's doing exactly what you just said. It's taken all these different data points, looking at it as a brain and going, oh, we need to do this, this, and this, where each one of these couldn't have thought of it on their own. And then it just spits it out and says, hey, you, Mr. Facebook, go do this, Mr. keyword thing, go do this, Mr. SEO schema thing. And maybe even bring in all these tools and you create a schema or something that's, maybe they don't have a schema, but you package it into a schema format so that they can all, I don't know. What do you think about something like that?
- Speaker #0
I think, yeah, I think I've been watching a lot of different podcasts and things like that about it. I want to learn about coding tools, for example. In the current identic climate, it. it's like, hey, check for errors. Hey, fix the error. You know, agent that checks for errors. Hey, agent that fixed the errors. This tool will literally just heal itself in real time. You don't have to want an agent to do all those things. Like I was, I could go like, I'm going to literally not sleep this weekend. So I'm going to move one of our big projects into this database. So it's like, I can have this tool just fixing queries in real time. I'd say, hey, ang-slow-query, for example, on our database, that's over five seconds. Takes five seconds to execute. I need to take like two or 0.2 seconds. It'll heal and just fix itself. I don't need multiple agents to do those things. It's like, yeah.
- Speaker #2
Back in the day when we were working with computers, you'd either build a computer. I remember that you would load applications where it would be config and batch, and you'd have to figure out which would make your computer go faster. Then it got to be 1995, the plug and play. Play where you just plug it in, it would install itself. I think we're there. We're starting to get to the plug and play. What I've been able to do on my side is I have one agent that's working under one organization. And if I bring in other agents, then that agent has everything that I need to have done in that agent. So it'll go back and forth between. the organization. And it's already under the hood. It's there. The next step, I think, is what you said, three months away, where it becomes more plug and play, where you don't have to be an AI engineer. You get a, you know, whatever it is, whatever platform you're on. And then all of a sudden, oh, I need this kind of like a chat GPT, a custom GPT, but it'll just be more advanced. We're kind of doing it right now. And Kevin, I mean, just think about it with, we've talked about, you know, some of the strategies that, hey, we'll create a think tank together. We'll bring in the eight people that we want to discuss and question the other person on the hot seat. And you come up with this great new, whatever answer you want. Like if you're looking for a title, a document, whatever it is, it's doing it. You know, that's the, that's the, not the scary part. That's the. in excitement of what's going on right now.
- Speaker #1
I think what Amara basically said is most people dabbling in AI don't know how to use the tools. They don't know how to actually get the most out of it and actually prompt it properly. And I think that's where there's massive opportunity. That's where the people at the top, you know, the CEOs of Microsoft, they get it. And that's where I think there's a massive opportunity. We had Justin on the podcast recently when he's like, hey, I think we have a three-year window here to actually make a lot of freaking money. and and then he also we were talking and he was like uh I said, so what's going to happen in the future? Like you just said, you know, people at the bottom, especially going to lose jobs, they're either going to get retrained or they're going to be sitting at home with a robot changing their diapers. And but I was like, well, who's going to make money? He's like, well, there'll probably be a universal income or there'll be something. And but the people that are going to crush are the entrepreneurial minded people, the people that look at this and they're not they don't not someone that wants to work for a company and just get a paycheck and go home. There's someone that's like, look, look at all these opportunities. by using these tools and these agents and these robots or whatever comes next. And you could do some amazing stuff that would have taken a billion dollar company before or an army of 500 people.
- Speaker #0
But going back to have a spot, tools like Google Workfaces and have a spot. I think that's an incredible job with AI right now. Like you open a contact record and it summarizes it right on the top. The whole thread. Like this isn't something that you have to set up. Right. It's literally there. Right. So that's why I'm like the agent thing, in my humble opinion, is only there because the tools aren't caught up yet. But this business of building agents and like selling them, I don't know that it's going to be necessary and necessary because a lot of these tools are figuring out how people use these tools, like figuring out the most common processes and just building it within the tool.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, the tools will be agentic. In and above themselves. Yes. It's just like when VO3 came out, a thousand video editing software tools or whatever got wiped out, basically. And so I agree with the agent. The individual agents here and there as a tool by itself are just a temporary band-aid.
- Speaker #2
And it's not that far away. It's not. Everybody's saying a year away, two years away. I'm thinking months away.
- Speaker #0
Months. It's happening literally. You don't need an agent to put a... flight on your calendar it puts the flight on my calendar when i travel that is not an agent that is a function of how google i have a google pixel phone right i see all the stuff it does for me on my day-to-day that i don't have to do just because it knows everything about me all of my data is in here i don't have to train it on anything it literally has i bought two phones i have two businesses So that I could have one trained on one version of me and the other trained on this version of me. For that reason, right? Because I have different things that I need. And I was sick and tired of having to context switch it all the time. I'm like, no, I'm going to train this phone to be this version of me. I'm going to train this phone to be this version of me so that it knows what to do. It's amazing. It's actually me. I don't need to build agents for that. It's already doing stuff.
- Speaker #1
So how do you, as marketers, as misfit marketers, how do we take advantage of what you're seeing and what you believe, what's in your manifesto of what we need to be doing, paying attention to?
- Speaker #0
Kevin, you just opened up a can of worms. What is in your manifesto? I'm in love with you, Kevin. You could have never asked me a better question. All right. So what is in my manifesto? So in our manifesto. So you know that evolution chart where like monkey to human situation, humanoid to human, right? I look at that like that, right? You go from manual process, like the wheel, for example, why did the wheel come happen? And that's a very important question. Why did we invent the wheel? Why did we invent the wheel? Because it made it easier to carry things from point A to point B, right? We need for carrying things on our back for a while. And then it's like, oh, if I like put things on around things, it makes it easier to move stuff. Right. If I make bigger round things. And so that wheel evolved. Right. And so transportation now we have this whole category that's opened up called transportation. Right. So now we take this wheel. Now it's part of this bigger thing called transportation. And now it's like I have a horse and then you have animals pulling things on wheels. And then you have locomotion and then you have cars. And so transportation evolved because of this very thing called the wheel. And so that's kind of how I look at AI. Right. fundamentally, why do we do the things that we do? If you just start there and go back to the basics, you can actually figure out how to use AI in your day-to-day life a lot easier instead of trying to like make this tool top of this tool. And now you've all been part of dysfunctional teams. You can have dysfunctional AI, or it's like, yeah, this agent doing that, but they're not, you can't really trust each other because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And you're not giving good instructions. It's not clear instructions. The data is not clear. All these things go back to the basics. Go back to how does one person or two people do these things? What is expected of person A? What is expected of person B? What is my input? What is my output every single time? Do I trust that on a fundamental level? If I just, you know. Went to my kitchen, opened the cupboard, pulled out a glass, put the thing on the water, filled it up, and handed it to somebody. Will someone be able to drink that water? Does that system work every single time? Now, how do I create a bot to do that every single time? It starts with a manual action. You have to trust that action because that trust has to create a result. Once you trust that result, you then be like, all right, cool. Let's use a thing to automate. And I think we get ahead of ourselves because the process isn't even there. So we're trying to automate dysfunction. So I'm not really impressed with a lot of things that are out there. I'm like, they're just automating dysfunction. And I tell my teams that all the time. I'm like, okay, is the process for that ready? What are we trying to solve for? Where's your reports? What's in real AI? Oh, I don't know. We just need to automate it. Let's just get this AI voice thing. So it's cool. I'm like, well, what is it going to say on the other side? Well, I don't know. Well, it's not going to know either. You know? So I think you just have to stop advocating automating dysfunction and then adding AI on top of it. Because that's how you start to distrust AI. And I think it's like bad. It's like body odor, right? When someone has horrible AI content on LinkedIn, I think people get inflamed for it all day, right? It's like, you and your stupid AI comments, you and your stupid AI content, get that away from me. But when it's great and it enhances the, I'm going to say it in a human experience, people are fine with it, right? So I don't know if that answered your question. That's basically what I manifest about, is like people want more human experiences with the efficiency of automation and AI, Not this, you know, dog and pony show of look what I can do with AI. It's like, yes, I would love it for you to put this, this flight on my calendar that we having to look at it. That's amazing, right? You will want to be able to trust that it's going to give you the result every single time, not 30% of the time, 100% of the time. If you can't show the result, you don't trust the AI and it all goes to pooey.
- Speaker #2
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Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description or notes below and mention Misfits, that's M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. Stackinfluence.com. So it's more like an example, like being like... everybody's like VO3 is a hot thing now and people are showing off. Look at this cool animation of this or this, this video, this doing something like, okay, that's cool. It's like what you just said. Yeah. That's almost dysfunctional that it's cool. But what's the purpose of this? Like you said with the audio, but if the purpose is that I'm a father of a five-year-old and a three-year-old and I want to create a custom bedtime story that involves grandma or something. When I upload grandma's picture and, And then it's some sort of story about grandma that. puts them to sleep, that's a good, and entertains them at the same time, that's a functional use of it. And so that's, is that just, I just made this up off the top of my head. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Yeah.
- Speaker #0
And it improves someone's human experience.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Improves it. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
As long as there's like some sort of human experience, objective tied to it, I think we're okay.
- Speaker #2
So where do you see that? What's the next trend? Where do you see this going?
- Speaker #0
I think true practitioners, like marketers that really understand the process and how we get there are going to fly. I think there's going to be, I think the demand for great marketers is always very, very high in the supply, unfortunately, on the lower side, because it takes a lot of time, experience, and all the things to be, to do marketing really, really well, consistently. And that's how One Hit Wonders, I'm talking consistently. I think that divides and it gets... even bigger because I've been hiring content marketers, for example. Now, why would I hire a content writer? Because I don't want to sit there and prompt, so I retire an article. I just want to do that for me. But none of them will learn content anymore. None of them understand how good content is made. So they're making crap content with AI. And so it's getting even harder to hire good writers. It's like, yes, I know you're going to use AI. Can you at least just make me confident that you know, like someone said it great, best. I need a calculator to multiply. I know the fundamentals of multiplication, but I also know enough to where if. 5823 times you know, 700, if the last number isn't zero, I know that it's more, I know that that number, that output is wrong because I understand multiplication. I can just look at it and know that the result isn't correct. There's people that have never multiplied in their life. And they're going to be like, yeah, that's right. It's like, well, you know how multiplication works. Anything with a zero and have to have a zero has to, right. It's just a general rule. And so that fundamental. understanding still has to be there. And I think because we rely so much on AI, we're in deep trouble. You are not going to overtrust it and not have that institutional knowledge to be able to course correct it. So the Internet's going to become a lot messier over time.
- Speaker #1
Well, that's why photographers and creative people who have been doing this for 30 years are they're not afraid of it. Because they're like, cool, now I can actually I know how to do lighting. I know how to what I. F-stops are, ISOs. I know how to get exactly what I want right now and actually make it look amazing. Because like what you said, they have that experience and that knowledge versus the new kid out of college is going to probably make me a picture with a duck flying across the water. And it's just, it's not, or whatever, it's not going to be the same thing. And I agree with you. That's a problem. And there's so much bad AI that's then new AI is learning from the bad AI. And it's going to create this like. garbage disposal of just crap and you know it's like what's good and what's not uh and and i don't know how we how we fix that uh but that that is a problem i agree with you 100 on that institutional knowledge and actual experience um
- Speaker #0
you know we're still humans helping other humans at the end of the day we know what humans want ai will guess maybe but you know when you like ai can't go out I'll have a beer for you with someone else.
- Speaker #2
Not yet. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Right. Maybe. I don't know. But like, I know, like, there's this laughter about, you know, they're talking about the IO thing. You use AI to go find the thing that you're shopping for. And then that AI talks to it and tells you how much it is. And then the AI is buying from the other AI. And I'm like, that sounds horrible to me. It does not sound like a benefit. First of all, there's actual like, like endorphins or whatever feel good stuff in your body that comes out from actually physically buying something. Like there's a There's a benefit to like you buying something that you feel as a human being. So like, you're going to take that away and give it to an AI. I like, okay. Like I'm sure there's some things that make sense for like replenishing sauce.
- Speaker #1
I have a, just to your point, just, uh, sorry to interrupt you, but I have a, I have a refrigerator. It's called a Rabio or Roxio or something. It was on Shark Tank and I bought it. It's like $1,700 and it's a refrigerator for your sodas and beers and wines or whatever, but it's. It's horizontal instead of vertical. Most you stack vertically. It's horizontal so that you don't have, oh, shoot, the Coke Zero is in the back, and you got to take four bottles or reach around and grab it. You just pull out these trays. But what it does is it has a camera on every single level somehow that takes an inventory. Without me telling it, it knows there's two Mountain Dews, three Coke Zeros, two bottles of this kind of wine, everything in there. And it inventories it, and it's in an app. And so that I could, in theory, actually hook that to. to instacart and say hey when the uh the coke zeros are starting to run low or it knows that every day i'm taking two out so it's got seven left so it's got a three-day window it goes and orders them from instacart and shows up automatically without me having to do it that's a good use of like what you just said of an automated thing but if i want to buy a new dog bed which i'm about our dog kennel which i'm about to buy now i found one i have these metal kennels kennels And they're just kind of ugly. But there's one that I saw on a TikTok video that's really nice. It kind of fits in with your furniture. It's like 500 bucks. And I'm going to buy it probably tonight and have it shipped to me. But I don't want the AI going and buying that. I want that's the endorphins. I mean, look, I'm getting this nice little thing. I'm going to buy it for myself and for my new little puppy and taking that away. I'm just using these as examples of it to illustrate what you're saying is, I think, spot on. I just want to illustrate that so it doesn't just get glossed over by people listening. and I think that's
- Speaker #2
very valid yeah there's there's human connection you still have things to do you'd be smart amara you'd be you'd be pretty smart you'd be no no no no lie yep yep you know what i discovered an old show i used to watch uh on amazon and i don't know if you guys watch this but it's freaking scary it's called humans oh it's take a look at it It's where we're at today. It's not today. It's where we're going. It's where you have these robots, very human-like. They can go out and do your shopping. They can do almost everything. Put it that way. I won't be a, no spoiler alert. But if you want to see where this is years ago. where we were thinking whoever created this was bang on. It's like Orwell, you know, coming up with 1984. And he had some, he hit, you know, maybe not a thousand percent, but he got a few things right. This, I think, is going to be very close. It's scary. It's scary in a wild way. Just, and. I'll just like, you see this in the first scene, they, the agents, and they actually call them agents by the way, but all of a sudden they start to communicate amongst each other. And it's very interesting to see what's happening. I do want to make another point though. Right now we have to look at the way we're hiring things, hiring people. Like if you're starting a company and you're fresh out a university. and you have a business major, all of a sudden, that org chart that we learned about is going to be completely different. You know, one of the main people you got to have on your staff is somebody that can understand AI. And that's going to be one of your chief hires. You know, operations, yes. But you have to have that person that has that technical knowledge. I think that's going to be... uh one of the first big changes we see uh coming out uh coming out of uh university is changing these org charts oh absolutely i'm doing that right now i'm like okay so which which person's gonna i have to build nine websites in three
- Speaker #0
weeks but i two years ago that was scared the crap out of me yeah right now i'm like i could probably get that done in a week that is scary that is very very scary I probably get it done in two weeks, right? Like that is very scary for web developers, graphic, that scares me for them. So it's like, I can do that. I don't want to have to do that. Who can do it at the level that I can with the tools given to them? Because trust me, I have people on my team. I'm like, hey, go write this article. And I'm just like, yeesh, don't write this article. And they did it in a, and I gave them the thing. And I'm like, how did you not end up with the same result? I'm like, oh, nevermind, you know? But it's now not only a norm, you make a valid point. It's not just the org chart, but your training.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Right. So it's like, are you training for fundamental knowledge? Are you training how to leverage our LLM, our knowledge bases, our institutional knowledge? Right. So that A, other people can learn in the organization and B, so that our tools are enriched with the right information, our services, customer feedback, all the things. I just built an AI chatbot with HubSpot for one of my clients. It is fantastic. It's performing better than our actual human agents at answering questions. Because we had 600 pages of documentation on our products and services, right? Wow. I can actually replace customer service agents on our live chat because it's amazing, right? So it's those types of things. Are you training people to... Like do the work or are you training people to train the software to do the work? Because you know how it works. And that's a gap right now. Because people know how to use it for themselves. They don't know how to use it for others at scale.
- Speaker #1
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite. podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #2
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #1
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.
- Speaker #2
There was Michael Gerber. He wrote the E-Myth. Back in the day, back in the 90s. And... The entrepreneurial roller coaster, he describes it as you're passionate about your product. You try to sell your product. You're selling your product. It gets a bit beyond you. You hire somebody, but you don't train them properly. So they suck at their job. You fire them because nobody can do it like you. And it just repeats itself over and over. I think that's the same thing with technology. Like you said, the next step, training. If you're not there and if it's garbage in, garbage out. Well, why is your company failing? Because you're not training properly. It goes back to the e-myth and that's it. Maybe it's, you know, the technical or the AI roller coaster now. Yeah. You know, it's something that you have to train.
- Speaker #0
You are so right because, but here's the thing that I think the listeners need to know. If you're relying on AI to replace people, like most executives are these days. It's really bad to train a bad employee, but the great news about an employee is it's very obvious that they're doing bad things in most cases, and you can see it and fire them. People overtrust AI, and how many records will it take for you to notice that it's doing the wrong thing? Because you just blindly trusted it as an autopilot and you're training improperly, or you got 10 people in there and one person or two people are training improperly, and the eight people are training it right. So now it's throwing money in the water. It's like, how do we manage that? How do we like recognize what stops are we putting in place to say, nope, it's too much. Like our margin of error is too high. We need to readjust. We need to pull it back, right? Like what controls are we putting in place as we let AI run, like re-arrange itself? Especially when it's eight talking to other AI, like, whew, it gets crazy. And you're dealing with thousands and thousands of data points. And so that's one of the things that I do in my processes, just not even AI automation. I put things in place like, hey, you come up with anything other than these results. Send me a red flag so I can keep tabs on quality. And that's just something I do because I know what happens when the quality gets bad and runs rampant. It's so labor-intensive. I'd rather fix it up front and wait for it to get bad. So again, a lot of these people who are inexperienced in technology and haven't really encountered that, are in for a rude awakening on how to train, when you're training AI improperly, and it just festers and festers and festers. So what was once valuable becomes bad. And then now... Not only do you have to fix what's broken, you now have to maybe even start over, which is crazy.
- Speaker #2
Well, look at that. We're way over.
- Speaker #1
It's the top of the hour. I think we could go like for another hour. This is cool. But yeah.
- Speaker #2
You know, it took years, years to get Amora on the podcast, on my podcast. And, you know, it's. probably going to take us years to get her back on this podcast.
- Speaker #1
Busy with a new VC and stuff.
- Speaker #2
But Amara, thank you so much for coming on. But before you go, I have a question for you. Yeah. At the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit, do they know a misfit?
- Speaker #0
I do. My friend, Tracy, she's amazing. Tracy Gaudiano, Gaudiano Media. She's fantastic sales, processes sales. She's also a HubSpot. partner of mine. So I will, I will send her your way.
- Speaker #2
All right. Fantastic.
- Speaker #1
Awesome.
- Speaker #2
Well, Kevin.
- Speaker #1
That was awesome. That was a, that was great stuff. Amara. I really appreciate it. Totally different than what I might've thought we might talk about, but it's incredible stuff and a lot of wisdom. I think people should listen to this podcast two or three times because there's you, you, you just were like spewing it out. And I think that's awesome. Appreciate that.
- Speaker #0
We'll see how soon it ages. You know, I think I said, well, that age well or didn't. We'll see in a couple of months.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, we will. We will.
- Speaker #2
You'll see if I age well. I don't know what I'll look like in a couple of months, but a more. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm going to remove you now, but it was a pleasure having you on.
- Speaker #0
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
- Speaker #1
I appreciate it.
- Speaker #2
I think. Oh, there's the button. Lawyer!
- Speaker #1
Oh, you hit the right one. I thought you hit the wrong one. It almost jolted me.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah. So how'd you like that? I told you.
- Speaker #1
You know, that Mara is brilliant. I actually have some idea that my mind is like racing right now on some of what she said on stuff. Some things that you and I have to talk about. But no, that was brilliant. Like, I wasn't joking when I said that. people need to go back and listen to this again.
- Speaker #2
Right from the beginning.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, right from the beginning. Yeah, from the schema to that this one was jam-packed. And when we turn these podcasts into a newsletter, like we're planning on doing, the Marketing Misfits newsletter, depending on when this podcast comes out, maybe it's already out or maybe it's coming in the next few weeks. Depending on when this podcast comes out, it's going to be a great newsletter too.
- Speaker #2
Newsletter is coming out in summer, isn't it?
- Speaker #1
It's summer. That's right. I don't know when this, we record these episodes. You guys listen to them every Tuesday, hopefully, but we record them in advance. So I never know what the exact date is when one's coming out. But yeah, the newsletter is coming out this summer for Marketing Misfits. You can find out about that at marketingmisfits.co, marketingmisfits.co.
- Speaker #2
You nailed it.
- Speaker #1
I know. Finally, it's taking me a while. And then there's something on the, something YouTubers or something. What's that thing?
- Speaker #2
It's called YouTube. And our channel is Marketing Misfits Podcast. Yeah, it's kind of long. Marketing Misfits Podcast. And that's for the longer version of these where you can go and see the edited version. Awesome. You're going to love them. But we changed something up. We changed it where we're going to take nuggets. And this podcast especially, we'll have to grab a lot of these nuggets. But they're three minutes and under. And... If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing and you just want to get inspired to listen to some really cool knowledge, go over to Marketing Misfits Clips on YouTube and you'll see a bunch of different clips out there. And the channel is doing exceptionally well. And by the way, I've got some news for you. As of right now, we have a new TikTok channel, which we did not have before.
- Speaker #1
Awesome. TikTok.
- Speaker #2
TikTok. Yeah. You know what that is? That's a...
- Speaker #1
That's a clock that goes tick-tock and then it goes boom and explodes, right?
- Speaker #2
Yes, and dance, and dance, you know, and you do your custom dances and stuff.
- Speaker #1
Oh, oh, oh, oh, awesome. I have to go check that out.
- Speaker #2
They say it's going to grow, but yeah, that's...
- Speaker #1
Well, we haven't had enough tick-tock people on the podcast recently, so it only makes sense that, like, it's a little kick in the butt to get our tick-tock going.
- Speaker #2
That's right, and it's up.
- Speaker #1
Oh, awesome, awesome. Cool, so check that out too, Marketing Misfits on tick-tock. And, uh, or if you want to listen to the podcast, you can do that on Apple or Spotify. Just make sure you subscribe no matter where you're watching on YouTube or TikTok. Uh, and, uh, give us a like, or give us a share, give us a little reaction, post something in the comments that says you guys suck. Quit doing this, get another job or, Hey, I really like this. Uh, this, this is really cool. Or if you've got any ideas that that helps us out too. So feel free to comment. And we're here every single Tuesday with another brand new episode.
- Speaker #2
All right, everybody. We will see you next Tuesday.
- Speaker #1
Take care.
