#2282 Neil Patel’s insanely powerful AI sales machine

Summary

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Startup Stories - Mixergy

Episode #2282: Neil Patel’s Insanely Powerful AI Sales Machine

Host: Andrew Warner
Guests: Neil Patel (Founder, NP Digital), Salo (Neil’s Team)
Date: October 24, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into how Neil Patel and his company, NP Digital, are leveraging AI to power modern sales, marketing, and customer acquisition for both their agency and clients. The discussion centers on actionable strategies for using AI to drive real revenue, cost-savings, and operational efficiency—juxtaposed with examples where businesses fail to see real ROI from AI. Plus, Salo walks listeners through an automated outbound campaign using AI tools—serving as a detailed blueprint for listeners.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real Value AI Offers Businesses

• AI Must Save or Make Money
  • Many businesses play with AI, but few see revenue growth. Neil and Andrew discuss that unless AI helps companies save money or make money, it won't gain lasting traction.
  • Quote (Neil Patel, 00:28):
    “If you pay an engineer at $100,000 a year and Cursor makes them 20% more efficient, that's $20,000 that I'm saving per year… I don't know what I pay per Cursor, per user, but it's definitely not 20 grand a year.”

2. Pitfalls: Why Most Businesses Don’t See AI-Driven Revenue

• Shiny Object Syndrome:
  • Many marketers use AI for content creation or tweaking ads without a real business strategy. The content is often mediocre, and without a plan, improvements don't materialize.
• Fragmented Data:
  • AI can't help if businesses don’t centralize and clean their data (e.g., Facebook vs. Google Analytics conversion discrepancies).
• Quote (Neil Patel, 02:19):
  “AI can help you gather the data, put in one place and analyze it. But if you're not sure what to analyze, you don't tell it what you're looking for… then what happens? Nothing.”

3. How to Make AI Work: Having Clear Revenue Drivers

• Diagnose What Moves the Needle:
  • First, identify what really drives revenue (SEO, ads, email, etc.), then use AI to boost or streamline those levers. For example, don’t prioritize TikTok if you sell airplanes—go where your target audience is.
• Quote (Neil Patel, 03:49):
  “Once you can figure out what's actually driving revenue, then you can figure out… what you think you can improve upon the most.”

4. Case Study: Med Spa SEO Recovery Using AI

• Step-by-Step AI-Enhanced Content Optimization (05:05–08:39):
  • Analyzed search console data for med spas, pinpointed keywords/pages losing traffic.
  • Used AI to generate concise, query-matching summaries and FAQs.
  • Added these to high-potential pages, leading to rapid upticks in Google’s AI overviews and increased traffic—directly contributing to revenue, albeit in single-digit percentage boosts.
• Key Takeaway:
  Focus AI content on high-potential but underperforming pages; concise, answer-oriented summaries work best for current SERP formats.

5. AI’s Limits and Where Human Expertise Is Irreplaceable

• Originality & Trust:
  • AI content struggles with EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). For deep, unique insights, human voices shine.
  • Quote (Neil Patel, 09:21):
    “You can have AI help you with tone of voice. You can't really have it help you with originality… it's hard to showcase [your expertise] with the AI written article.”

6. How Companies Get Featured in LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.)

• Third-Party Reviews & Structured Comparisons
  • Example: HubSpot sees 13% of signups from LLMs. TechRadar articles comparing CRMs in-depth (especially in tables) are more likely to be cited by LLMs.
  • Quote (Neil Patel, 12:39):
    “You would do it in a table format, pricing features, features specifically for construction that you have that the competition doesn't… That helps you rank better on these LLMs and get cited more.”
• Outreach & Social Proof:
  • Encourage third-party reviews, guest posts, and create comparison videos (which LLMs/transcription models can now parse for citations).

7. What’s Working for AI SaaS Adoption & Paid Usage

• Influencer-Driven Viral Growth:
  • Example: Cluli, an AI meeting tool, used mass influencer campaigns (even micro-influencers) to go viral.
  • Social democratization: Engagement, not follower count, drives reach.
• Quote (Neil Patel, 16:26): “In today's world, influencers really drive a lot of revenue… Social media has been democratized.”
• Focus on Revenue & Savings Messaging:
  • Demonstrate—on homepages, demos, and product pages—with real case studies how AI products save or make money. Few companies actually do this.
  • Quote (Neil Patel, 18:33): “If you can't help people save money, why should they pay you? If you can't help them make money, why should they pay you?”

8. Tactical Advice for AI Startups

• Concrete Customer Messaging:
  • Don’t just say “saves four hours”—show real dollar savings (e.g., lower grocery bills for meal-prep AIs).
  • When offering dashboards (e.g., Ozerrro Biz), guide users with preconfigured prompts and actionable insights—not just data aggregation.
• Quote (Neil Patel, 26:54): “We gather all your data in one place to figure out where the weaknesses are or the opportunities are… uncover them for you and tell you what to do with them.”

9. AI Agencies: Go Vertical & Build Case Studies

• Don’t Be a Generalist:
  • The best path for new AI agencies is to specialize by industry (e.g., plastic surgeons, home services). Tailored solutions can be templatized and marketed with focused case studies.
  • Quote (Neil Patel, 29:03): “I would verticalize… Go after businesses that, you know, you can templatize things and implement it and then just have them do better.”

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[31:25]–[47:15] Demo: Automated AI-Powered Outbound Campaign Blueprint

Presented by Salo (Neil’s Team)

What’s the Problem?

• Outbound sales had low ROI due to the manual effort—researching each account at scale was laborious and expensive.

AI Automation: The Multi-Tool Stack

• Scenario (Make.com):

  • Scraping: Target vertical (e.g., plumbers/home services) scraped from Yellow Pages or Google Maps using tools like Apify and web scraper Chrome extensions.
  • Enrichment: Each prospect’s website/company info further analyzed by Perplexity AI for a personalized understanding.
  • Content Generation: GPT used to auto-generate highly specific content calendars for each prospect, referencing their service, niche, and even brand name.
  • Custom Audio: 11Labs/ChatGPT TTS model used to generate custom, on-brand audio messages from Neil, attached to the email.
  • Email: Each enriched, personalized message (with content calendar and audio pitch) sent via Gmail, one-to-one.

• Salo’s Blueprint Summary:
  Automate scraping, enrich with LLMs, create unique tailored assets, and deliver via email—scalable, high-conversion “hyper-personalized” outreach.

Outcome:

• 10X Increase in Response Rate

  • Salo notes a tenfold jump in replies versus standard outbound emails.
  • Quote (Salo, 38:04): “The response rate from the old inbound process to this changed significantly… almost 10X the response rate.”

• Bandwidth Limiter:

  • The automation generates so many meetings their sales reps have to pause outbound to keep up.

Key Tips for Listeners:

• Blueprint/instructions available (link in show notes)

• Adaptable to Vertical:

  • Can scrape and personalize for any industry—just swap the data sources.

• Legal Caution:

  • Ensure compliance with spam and privacy laws (check per country/state).

• Quote (Salo, 46:39): “It helps fill the reps’ calendar in a way that we need to stop the automation because we don’t have the bandwidth.”

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “Just because I helped you create, you know, a thousand creatives, you have to give it direction and you have to tell it what you’re looking for.”
  — Neil Patel (02:19)

• “People want to hear what’s new and what’s working that their competition’s not doing. That kind of stuff is hard to get from AI generated content.”
  — Neil Patel (10:06)

• “Everyone talks about hours. It’s still useful, but you need a breakdown. Hours like someone saying, hey, I’m Andrew Warner. Look, I’m using this meal prep now. … Also check out my food bill.”
  — Neil Patel (24:33)

• “If you have an AI software… you still need to do things like influencer marketing, SEO, paid advertising… If you’re not leveraging the normal marketing channels, it’s hard to reach people.”
  — Neil Patel (18:33)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | Key Content | |-------------|----------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:28 | What AI Must Deliver | Save money/make money–the only reason companies keep AI tools | | 02:19 | Why AI Content Often Fails | Shiny object syndrome, strategy gaps | | 05:05–08:39 | Med Spa AI SEO Case Study | Practical steps and measurable impact from targeted AI content | | 09:21 | Human vs. AI Content | Where AI is weak and expertise is needed | | 12:09–13:22 | LLM Citations & Content Structure | Table-format, third-party reviews, and getting picked up by ChatGPT, Perplexity | | 16:26 | Influencers/“Democratized” Social Marketing | Even unknown accounts can drive viral growth if content resonates | | 18:33 | Universal Marketing Truths | Marketing basics still indispensable–AI isn’t a “silver bullet” | | 26:54 | Dashboard App Messaging | Sell outcomes, not features (e.g., cost savings/uncovered revenue) | | 29:03–30:49 | AI Agencies: Generalist vs. Specialist | Why verticalization is vital for smaller/new players | | 31:25–47:08 | Salo’s Make.com Automation Demo | Full walkthrough of scraping, AI enrichment, and hyper-personalized outbound | | 38:04 | Results of the AI Outbound Engine | “Almost 10X response rate”–why the approach works | | 46:39 | Automation Bandwidth Limits | Teams can get so many leads they outpace sales capacity |

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Actionable Takeaways

• If you’re building AI tools:
  • Focus your pitch and homepage on how you save customers money or make them money. Supplement with case studies.
• If using AI for content/marketing:
  • Use AI for targeted, summary-based content (for SEO/LLM visibility), but retain humans for strategic, experience-driven pieces.
• For outbound/SaaS sales:
  • Hyper-personalized campaigns, leveraging AI for enrichment and tailored assets, can 10x results.
• Launching an AI agency:
  • Verticalize—specialize in a sector you understand, build niche case studies, and go outbound with relevant proof.

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Resources & Further Info

• Automation demo blueprint: Link in episode show notes
• Tools mentioned:
  • Make.com (workflow automation)
  • Apify (web scraping)
  • Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini (AI content/LLMs)
  • 11Labs (voice model)
  • Invent AI (prospect data)
  • HubSpot, Salesforce (CRMs)

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This episode is a treasure trove for founders, marketers, and anyone in SaaS or agency services seeking to leverage AI for real-world revenue and efficiency—not just hype.

Transcript

[Andrew Warner]

Hey there, freedom fighters. I'm doing a series of interviews with entrepreneurs about how they are building AI based businesses. It's called the Next New Thing in this. Towards the end you're going to hear that we're doing a demo. I think I did a pretty good job of describing what you're seeing on the screen, but if you want to actually see what's on the screen, go to the next new thing.

[Neil Patel]

AI.

[Andrew Warner]

Let's get to it. You said the two things that will get AI for companies to pay for it and use it is saving. Save the money or make the money.

[Neil Patel]

If you pay an engineer at $100,000 a year and cursor says makes them 20% more efficient, that's $20,000 that I'm saving per year. I don't know what I pay per cursor, per user, but it's definitely not 20 grand a year.

[Andrew Warner]

You gave me a search to put in and so I'm putting it in right now on ChatGPT. It's best CRM for small business. The top result is HubSpot CRM.

[Neil Patel]

HubSpot. Roughly 13% of their signups come from LLM platforms. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, et cetera.

[Andrew Warner]

Can you describe what it is that you're doing to get customers using this AI automation process that we're gonna go through?

[Neil Patel]

Think about your ideal customers. Imagine scraping yellow pages and their website, gathering their email information and phone numbers. Shooting them off an email with something that's value add.

[Andrew Warner]

Neil Patel is the founder of NP Digital, the worldwide digital marketing agency that works with Intuit, Cartier, Canon and so many startups that you know and love. Let's get to it.

[Neil Patel]

The next new thing.

[Andrew Warner]

Neil, you give a lot of talks about AI and marketing in general, and you gave a talk at HubSpot recently where you asked the audience a question that had a shocking response. What was the question?

[Neil Patel]

When asked how many of them are using AI or ChatGPT, almost everyone raised their hands. When I asked how many of you guys are seeing an increase in revenue? Literally no one raised their hand.

[Andrew Warner]

Wait, Neil, when you say using these tools, you're saying they're using AI for marketing purposes, for business growth purposes, and they're still not seeing any growth in sales. That's what you mean, correct? Oh, oh, okay. So they're actively trying to get revenue from it and not. And it's because they're getting into shiny object syndrome. What are they doing that's trying but really not getting any revenue?

[Neil Patel]

Sure. So a lot of people are using it for content creation, which it just produces mediocre content. A lot of them use it for adjusting creatives for their advertising. But if you don't have strategy behind it, AI can create a thousand variations of a creative. But again, if there's no strategy behind it, it doesn't mean that the numbers are going to work for you. From a ROI perspective, Just because I helped you create, you know, a thousand creatives, you have to give it direction and you have to tell it what you're looking for. Or another example of this is most organizations, SMB or large have data in different places. You have data on Facebook, you have data in Google Analytics, you have data in Google Data Studios. You have data on your own servers, right? You have data in your own CRM or your cms, and the list just goes on and on. But the data is fragmented. So AI can help you gather the data, put in one place and analyze it. But if you're not sure what to analyze, you don't tell it what you're looking for. You don't know what changes to make based on it, then what happens? Nothing. And what was. If the data is not even accurate, which is a bigger issue because they're pulling them from all different places and different sources, Facebook will count a conversion differently than you may see on your end. So when you start sending it multiple data points, like, here's my Facebook conversions, here's the Facebook conversions. Google Analytics is telling me, what number do they go with?

[Andrew Warner]

What do you tell them to do? How do you solve that problem for them?

[Neil Patel]

The first thing is they need to understand what actually moves the needle from a business, from a revenue standpoint. So you take all the marketing things that you guys are doing. Is it pay per click advertising? Is it SEO? Is it GEO, like ranking on ChatGPT? Is it social media marketing? Is your ads? Is it your emails? The list goes on and on. Once you can figure out what's actually driving revenue, then you can figure out, all right, what out of that arsenal that we're using to drive revenue, is it doing well? And what do we think we can improve upon the most? And you have to look at both what isn't doing well and what you think you can improve upon the most. Because if something isn't doing well, like TikTok and I'm Boeing, I'm just using a hypothetical here, and I'm selling airplanes. Well, no matter how good at TikTok marketing I get, I don't think TikTok's gonna help me sell more hundred to 200 million dollar airplanes. Right. It's the wrong platform to sell something to very few people. LinkedIn may be better, maybe trade shows will be better.

[Andrew Warner]

Give me an example of someone who you'd worked with that was able to make a change and actually get real numbers out of AI?

[Neil Patel]

Sure. So we had med spas, right? Like Botox, facial skin injections, laser treatments, whatever they are, I should know them. But I don't know all the med spa related terms.

[Andrew Warner]

I don't. I'm a naturally good looking guy. I can't relate, but I get it. But you're saying they have a series of these places.

[Neil Patel]

Uh huh.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay.

[Neil Patel]

Throughout the United States.

[Salo]

Okay.

[Neil Patel]

They were getting a lot more traffic from SEO and they came to us and they're like, our SEO traffic's down, we're not generating as much revenue. It used to be a key driver for revenue for the organization. Okay, all right, sounds good. So then we started pulling all their search console data, had AI analyze all the keywords. What are the pages that used to rank for those keywords or still kind of ranking, but you're not getting as much traffic. What are the pages that went down? And when we look at the terms, what were the terms that are doing well, but the ones that aren't doing well as more anymore, and what are those specific pages and where are their rankings currently? So we looked for the pages that were on page one, doesn't matter where, but they aren't doing as well and aren't generating as many clicks, but they're still on page one for those keywords, it was a long list of them. So we took AI, we took those main queries and we had AI summarize the answer based on the content on the page for that exact query. So I'm going to make up the answer here because I don't know much about MedSpace.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay.

[Neil Patel]

All right, so here's a hypothetical. How do I reduce the wrinkles on my face? Oh, there's a blue light laser that you can use. It's a 30 minute treatment. Or there's a blue light laser with very little downtime that can help reduce the wrinkles on your face.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay.

[Neil Patel]

Okay, so you're getting very specific. Yes, the article goes in depth on this blue light. And again, just for a disclaimer here, I'm making this up. And we had AI summarize in key points. So think of like FAQs or key points like CNBC has at the top of their articles when we were reading their financial articles and we ended up breaking them down in either FAQ sections for some pages, depending on how technical it was or if it was a general question. Some of them were key points at the top of the article. Within 24 to 48 hours, quite a few of those pages started popping up in the AI overviews on Google. Caused more traffic, caused more revenue. The revenue wasn't astronomical like 20, 30%. It was in the single digit percentiles from some of the changes we made. But it all adds up. That's the example of using AI to help you get better search results for the new way search engines work that a lot of businesses haven't adapted. And AI can do that really easy because it's summarizing already the content on your page and breaking it down in a really digestible sentence. Because if you look at AI overviews, the last thing that they want to do is answer the question with a three paragraph answer. It defeats the purpose of an AI overview just giving you the answer as quick as possible.

[Andrew Warner]

And so what you're saying is understand the queries that people are asking and then create those exact answers on your site and even have AI create those exact answers from your existing content. Did I nail that?

[Neil Patel]

You nailed it. But the key was we did this for pages that were already doing well, but they aren't doing well right now. So they used to do well in the past, but right now they're struggling. So we adapted them to the new way people are searching and the new way search engines are trying to display content.

[Andrew Warner]

Interesting. The reason I'm saying interesting is because I thought you were saying that AI writing is mediocre and I thought you were going to say have human beings sit and create those summaries. No, AI is good for that.

[Neil Patel]

AI is great for that. But on the flip side, if I wanted to write a whole new article on growing a business in an AI world, you can have AI help you with tone of voice. You can't really have it help you with originality. You can't have it include stuff from your own experience, or as Google calls it, double E, A T expertise or experience Expertise, authority and trust. Right. It's hard to showcase that with the AI written article. And it's just like these interviews that you do someone, I'm guessing this interview because you're asking me AI related questions you're trying to figure out for your audience, hey, how can you grow in this new AI world or use these AI tools to help you grow. If you decided to have chat, GPT, you know, or Any one of those other AI tools help you create a podcast. And there's a lot of tools out there and a lot of people are just creating, quote unquote, AI podcasts. I'm not talking about the subject of AI, but they're having AI create the whole episode. You're not really going to uncover, from what I can tell, and I watch quite a few of these AI podcasts. You're not going to really uncover anything. That's revolutionary. Maybe some people haven't been keeping up with it for the past few years, so they're learning something revolutionary. But what AI is doing is it's scouring the web from their trillions of data points and they're regurgitating information that they're finding out to you in a form of audio, if you had it, create an audio podcast. But people want to hear what's new and what's working that their competition's not doing. That kind of stuff is hard to get from AI generated content.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, you gave me a search to put in and so I'm putting it in right now on ChatGPT. It's best CRM for small business. The top result is HubSpot CRM. Did you lead HubSpot CRM to be that top result or did you just know this?

[Neil Patel]

I didn't do anything. But when I was speaking at Inbound, the HubSpot event, I was with Kip, and Kip is the CMO of HubSpot. He ended up talking about how roughly 13% of their signups come from these LLM platforms. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc. Okay. And I know what HubSpot's been doing because they've talked about it publicly. We've been doing similar stuff for our customers, we've been doing similar stuff for ourselves. And when there's articles around the web that break you down in a structured way, think of like a table format, breaking down the data between you versus a competitor. And that article, I believe it's what TechRadar, one of those websites that you're jumping ahead.

[Andrew Warner]

The other thing that you sent me was I said, how did this happen? And what you said was, they create these articles, or it's because of these articles that will compare all CRMs for small businesses that are written exactly like that. ChatGPT read that and use that to come up with the answer. And what you're saying is, there's a TechRadar article that you showed me that went into this and it is actually cited by ChatGPT and the tech Radar article is basically a review of all these different tools.

[Neil Patel]

That's correct. So that wouldn't be an article that they created, but there are articles and I believe they said they created around 300. Don't quote me on this, but I got that somewhere from the Internet. It was around 300 and. And let's say if you want to compare best CRMs for construction companies and you write your own article for that on your own blog and you go super in depth, that's a great way for you to drive more signups. Right? And you would do it in a table format, pricing features, features specifically for construction that you have that the competition doesn't have, summarizing it all, giving examples and case studies and reviews and going super in depth like that. That helps you rank better on these LLMs and get cited more than the competition.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, so my question for you is going to be this post that ChatGPT is citing is on TechRadar. Would HubSpot go to other sites, not just their own blog, and have them write these types of reviews and comparisons so that ChatGPT has a third party resource to draw on.

[Neil Patel]

So I can't speak for them, but in general, if you're doing marketing as a company, you'd want to do outreach and give me. If someone has an article on CRM, you would want to include you and break down why you're better and give them the pros and cons and show them the ratings and reviews. That's one way to get cited more. You would want to create your own articles. You can guest post and disclose that it is a guest post as well. Right. But those are some ways that you can end up encouraging or having more sites talk about you, which then helps you keep in mind these platforms also scour the social web. How good are they at really dissecting video? It's yet to be seen per LLM platform, but I would also have comparison videos breaking down you versus the competition because you know, like those SRT files or transcriptions, a lot of it's done through AI and it's pretty accurate. You bet they can decipher a video and know exactly what it's about and show you that timeframe depending on the platform you're on. I've seen them, when I ask a question, just pull up a video. But it starts at the time where it's talking about that versus showing me the whole thing. Right? These are all examples of ways you can get your business more sighted.

[Andrew Warner]

How many AI software companies have you worked with Roughly a lot, because dozens.

[Neil Patel]

When you say AI, a lot of the software companies we work with are publicly traded. And you know this better than anyone else. When you look at the stock symbols and the earnings calls, what do they all talk about? Oh, look at this new AI feature. So even if they're 10, 20 years old, they all have AI. And so I would say the majority of the software companies you work with, which is way more than a dozen or even two dozen. We probably work with more than a dozen or two dozen. Just publicly traded software companies. Right. They all have AI features. Okay.

[Andrew Warner]

And you've also worked with smaller players in AI and you've advised a lot of companies. The thing I'm getting at is what's working because I see so many people vibe code software and then struggle, once it's cool, once it's exciting to get people to use it. So give me some direction of what actually ends up getting usage. And paid usage is more important.

[Neil Patel]

Yeah. So one of the big things, and I believe it's called Cluli, was that the SF company that raised money, that's.

[Andrew Warner]

The tool you told me to install. It basically sits on top of every meeting that I have, and it summarizes it for me and it gives me a transcript and lets me ask questions and look up things. Like, if you had mentioned a company here, Cluli would have made it easy for me to find out what that company was about without having to go to ChatGPT.

[Neil Patel]

Yes. So what they've been doing, and this is a great way, is in today's world, influencers really drive a lot of revenue. And when you look at Cluli, what they did is they recruited tons of influencers. They had them go and post short clips, and some of them go viral, some of them don't. It's not about follower count. If Andrew has more followers than me, it doesn't mean his video is going to get more views than mine. Social media has been democratized. Just like, you know, you see that person back in the day, she said, I'm looking for a man in finance. Six, five. And there's something else with the song. She didn't have tons of followers. She got tons of followers after. Or that person whose car or truck broke down was drinking cranberry juice and. And longboarded to work. You must have saw that.

[Andrew Warner]

Yes, for sure.

[Neil Patel]

And it went viral. So the way social media works is if you have a hundred followers or zero followers and you put something and they show it to a few people and they all engage, they keep Showing it to more if your engagement ratio is extremely high because they know that other people on the platform will like it.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, so what you're saying is the thing that works for these businesses is to get influencers to create videos. In fact, we shouldn't even call them influencers. Just create anyone with a social media account and some creativity to create videos about them.

[Neil Patel]

And then within your field though, not anyone. See, cluly is applicable to everyone, so it's a little bit easier for them to do this. I'm in B2B. I would not have everyone do that. I would have everyone who has more of a B2B account, whether it's a thousand followers or a hundred thousand. I would try to convince them to create a video.

[Andrew Warner]

Is there a platform you use to do that?

[Neil Patel]

No, we manually recruit and just manually recruit.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, but here's the thing that I'm getting at. When we were talking in private, you said, Andrew, the two things that really will get AI to not just be played with, but for companies to pay for it and use it and continue to use it is save them money or make the money. And you said, of the two, I would pick which one actually first, why those two?

[Neil Patel]

Okay, so let's go back actually a little bit. So if you have an AI software, no matter if you help people save money or make money, you still need to do things like influencer marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, the list goes on and on. If you're not leveraging the normal marketing channels, it's hard to reach people. Now when you go back to your software solution or whatever product you created with AI that you're now selling to everyone, if you can't help people save money, why should they pay you? If you can't help them make money, why should they pay you? Because what we see is if you can't help with those two things, you can still get signups, but your churn tends to be higher. So if you look at the softwares we use a really popular one. I don't know why I'm blanking on this name. Our engineers use it to help us code. It's the most popular one out there. Cursor. Like a cursor. There you go. I think they had like a 5 billion plus dollar valuation the last I checked. And everyone who's coding on our end, it doesn't matter if you're coding on WordPress and building themes and pages, everyone in our corporation uses cursor. The people who refuse to use cursor and didn't Adapt are no longer there. Just being really blunt, right? Because they're not as efficient as the ones who are using it. But Cursor works really well because it saves us money. The same engineer can get way more done per hour. And then you don't need as many engineers, plain and simple. All right, if you pay an engineer, I don't know what an engineer costs us, but let's just use basic math of $100,000 a year. And cursor says makes them 20% more efficient. That's $20,000 in income that I'm saving per year. I don't know what I pay per Cursor per user, but it's definitely not 20 grand a year. Right. So I'm paying less than what I'm saving, which. Which makes it easily worth it for me. I don't ever think about renewals or what it costs. It's just automatic. Done. That's an easy way to keep selling people. And if you look at the marketing, it's not that great. What's made Cursor really amazing and go viral is it just saves people money. So everyone who has engineering teams just uses it. Because who doesn't want to save money? It's really that simple. The second one is making money. If you create something that helps people make more money. Let's say we have a software solution called ubersuggest. We're working on eventually making marketing more automated. We haven't cracked the nut yet. Just being very transparent. If hypothetically, our solution said, oh, you're now using our tool. It's hypothetically. You know, let's fast forward and assume this is reality. It started ranking people better on Google and driving more conversions by 5%. Their rankings went up, which means their traffic went up another 20%. You start seeing all the compounding 20% more traffic. All your conversions went up by 5%. Your conversions on your paid ads maybe go up another 4 or 5%. People like, oh, cool. In total, this helped us generate a million more dollars. Hypothetical example. And it only costs us $3,000 a year. The word will spread like a wildfire. And you don't have to do any marketing. After you get your few ideal customers on board, they'll share with everyone just because it is producing amazing results.

[Andrew Warner]

This is. You said ubersuggest is the tool that's not making money now.

[Neil Patel]

No, no, it's not. It's making money. It's a marketing tool. We have some AI features. Like, we can track your rankings on ChatGPT. But what I said Is we're trying to go down the route where we try to Automate marketing for SMBs.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay.

[Neil Patel]

Right now the tool does not automate marketing for SMBs, but that's our goal. It's a tough goal, but that's what we're trying to get to. A lot of other industries with AI are pretty black and white, as you know, with marketing, there's a lot of creativity and gray areas. So it's hard to automate everything because it's very subjective.

[Andrew Warner]

Yeah, I hear you and I could see the. I can see the challenge with that. But are you saying this seems a little obvious then, isn't it? To either make companies money or save them money? Where are people missing the point on that?

[Neil Patel]

Okay, you have a community of people who have companies and they've released it. Tell me how many of them use that pitch within their homepage or within their demos or product pages and show case studies of that. Show me which ones do it because I bet you the majority, 90 plus percent don't.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay. I think when you and I were doing the pre interview for this, I showed you a consumer product which would basically help someone. Meal prep. That doesn't apply. Let's look at one of my listeners, Francisco.

[Neil Patel]

Yes, the meal prep one does. How the meal prep, it can break down how to do all the recipes. You save time. B, if you look at, you can use stats and data talking about how much money people waste on food that they don't eat, that they buy from a grocery store. Cause there's a lot of wastage. Food goes bad after a while. If people use a meal prep product and it shows not only how they're getting healthier, they're saving time, but they're saving money because they're buying the right amount and eating everything and how that's saving them money on a monthly basis, that's a huge win for people. Grocery bills are super expensive. I went to the grocery store the other day just for the sake of it, because we needed some stuff. Wife had me go on the way back from dropping the kids off to school and I bought this stuff. I was like, 300 bucks. I was like, what the heck? You know? And I was at Whole Foods and I have a prime membership code and I gave it to him. I got a little bit discount, but it's still 300 something dollars. I was like, this is how expensive groceries are. And the person at the till was just like, yeah, they're expensive. I'm like, I don't understand how people could afford this.

[Andrew Warner]

I'm on the site right now. It's Safi AI. And on their homepage it says, save four hours every week. Let AI plan your meals. And you're saying forget the hours.

[Neil Patel]

No, no. Hours is one. You need to talk about hours. And you can also talk about food costs.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, Right.

[Neil Patel]

If you don't have those two things, it's a harder pitch. Everyone talks about hours. It's still useful, but you need a breakdown. Hours like someone saying, hey, I'm Andrew Warner. Look, I'm using this meal prep now. I'm healthier, I have amazing hair. Look at my skin is glowing. I got a six pack. And also check out my food bill. We were spending look at my credit card bill. We were spending on average $1,200 a month at Ralph's. Now we're spending $832. I'm more fit, I'm more full. We're actually getting more food. We have less wastage.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, I have another listener who is, who's creating a dashboard with AI. It's pretty cool. What it'll do is it will connect into your QuickBooks, into your Stripe, into.

[Neil Patel]

It's centralizing all the data in one place for all the important metrics for you.

[Andrew Warner]

You just ask a chat and then get the results. And then you also have a dashboard. How could he lean into this?

[Neil Patel]

Yeah, sure. So the biggest problem with that tool is it's a dashboard shows you all the data in one place, which is cool. But most businesses don't know what to do with it. So the solution of asking a chat questions is, is helpful because it hopes to uncover things that they can change or improve within their business. But most people don't know what to ask or what to do. So what you need to start doing is based on the data that they're plugging in, come up with predefined prompts or questions people should ask to help them cover insights and then tell them what to do with that data. So yes, you can still have it where they can ask whatever they want, but you should have some pre configured prompts that you know they should ask based on the data sources they passed in and even suggesting what they should do with that data based on the results that it's showing.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay. And I'm looking now at his homepage, it's 0z e r r o biz and it says all your business data in one place. And to me that is scary because you're right, I don't want more data and I don't necessarily need it in one place. It's nice to have. What is more important for me is if he on the site said, all your data in one place so you can find cost savings, so you can see immediately where you can. Where you can earn more. Something along those lines is what you're.

[Neil Patel]

Saying a little bit different. We gather all your data in one place to figure out where the weaknesses are in your or the opportunities are in your business, uncover them for you and tell you what to do with them. Okay, so some of those could be cost savings. And then you would give examples. So and so had all of this. We uncovered $6,732 a month in cost saving. So and so had this, and we uncovered how they're doing X, Y and Z inefficiently. Our platform recommended how to change it and how they can do it or who they can hire to even do it if they didn't have it. They implemented it themselves. They saw revenue growth of $32,162 per month. You know, I'm giving hypotheticals here, but those are the examples people need so they understand how powerful it is. Telling people all your data in one place. Cool. No one really will log in or do anything with it. That's the real reality.

[Andrew Warner]

All right, I should say that's Francisco Sara Villa, and I want more people. So if you're listening to me and you're building something in AI, let me know what it is so that I can bring it up in future interviews and use it to guide. Neil, one more thing. And then I want to talk about the demo that we're going to do. I'm also seeing a lot of AI agencies. Neil. The weird thing for me about AI agencies is that they're not doing what you do, which is to say, we are the marketing agency. Instead, they say, we are the AI agency. We will go into your business, we'll study your whole business, and we'll look for opportunities to improve using AI. And I don't know what to make of this, because on the one hand, I see people like Noah Fleming, a past interviewee who spent time with me helping me understand this business. He's excited about it. He's getting customers who are paying. He's getting to try different tools. And I think, actually Alex Lieberman, who I interviewed recently, same situation will go in AI or business, and it's doing really well for him. On the other hand, to me, as a customer, I can't ever imagine hiring someone to just look at the whole business for AI. Can we just pick a spot and focus. Why do you think these agencies are not picking a spot? And do you think it makes sense to build an agency like this?

[Neil Patel]

It makes sense because there's a lot of money to be made. I wouldn't necessarily pick a spot and maybe we're saying the same thing, but I would verticalize. So if I was a company, I'd be like, we help your home services business, you know, adapt with AI, you know, meeting up with an architect next week. One of the most well known architects globally. And you know, I know him for a few years now and he's like, hey, can I pick your brain? My mother in law was watching TV and she accidentally clicked on something about AI and I heard your voice, so I watched it and, and he's just like, I want to figure out how to get our architect company to be more, you know, adapt with the future. And the point I'm getting at here is there's a lot of organizations that just need help. And you can generate revenue from helping any type of business leverage AI and cut costs because a lot of people have just tons of employees and they're not technologically advanced. And what I mean by that is, look how many corporations are still not on the cloud. It's actually a big number. Right. We meet up with so many large corporations that are worth billions of dollars, that still have divisions that aren't on the cloud and they need to eventually move them on the cloud. And we would all assume everyone's on the cloud, but not fully. And what we're seeing is there's good revenue opportunity. But the McKinsey's of the world, the Accentures, are cleaning up and making a lot of this revenue. If you want to do well as a smaller business. We think it is a very tough market to get into unless you have a lot of connections on the C level. And you're better off verticalizing and going after specific categories like the medical industry, like plastic surgeons or dentists, or you know, going after home services. Go after businesses that, you know, that are, you can templatize things and implement it and then just have them do better.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay. And essentially sell the FOMO of AI, which people are all excited about, but just for this one vertical.

[Neil Patel]

Yeah. Because then you can create a lot of case studies and then you can do outbound and get a lot more of them to join, which funny enough, I know Salo's going to end up doing a demo.

[Andrew Warner]

Yes.

[Neil Patel]

Using that process to go get more of your ideal customer profiles. Showcase the Case studies and just. It's like fishing with dynamite.

[Andrew Warner]

You do this internally. Salo, from your team, is about to show us how he does it, how you all do it at your company. Can you describe what it is that you're doing to get customers using this AI automation process that we're going to go through?

[Neil Patel]

Think about your ideal customers. Let's say it's home services, because we were talking about that. Imagine scraping yellow pages and their website, because sometimes the data is off. Getting all the home services companies gathering their email information and phone numbers, shooting them off an email with something that's value add. Let's say if we're pitching marketing, we can give them a whole content calendar, maybe even create some of the content with AI, Some not going to be the best or perfect, but it gets someone interested. And then saying, look at what we've done. For other home services companies within your space, love to talk to you. Let's get on the phone and schedule something.

[Andrew Warner]

And it's. You're basically scraping the yellow pages for, let's say, plumbers, if that's who you're targeting. I don't. And then you start sending this out. What Salo has got, though, is what I think is an automated voicemail message from Neil Patel too. As part of this automation.

[Neil Patel]

I think 11 labs is the voice one. But I could be wrong.

[Andrew Warner]

I'm pretty sure that's the one that you're using. But the point is you've simplified it here. We're going to go in more detail, but the whole idea is, and this is what's working for you right now for getting customers, it's scrape the yellow pages for the contact information. Can I say this? By the way I'm looking at your face, I know there's certain things you asked me not to reveal. Okay. Get the contact information of the. Of the people you're going after. Create an email that looks customized and actually has a broader understanding of how you've helped other businesses like them. And then you have this whole automation that includes voice, text, email, whatever it is that's involved. We're going to look at the whole thing. How effective is it for your business?

[Neil Patel]

It's effective, but it doesn't drive the majority of revenue. But every little bit adds up. I don't want to tell people that they can just do one thing and it's going to change our business overnight. We generate a lot of our revenue from large publicly traded enterprises through RFPs. You're not going to get those from sending these kind of Emails. But the point I'm getting at is people are looking for a silver bullet in business, you and in marketing. That's the wrong way to think about it. Every little bit adds up and then it starts compounding and that's what really grows a business. It's just doing and grinding a lot of things out and over time it adds up. But I will tell you this, if you're going to use this strategy, make sure you talk to council. We have in house counsel there's different laws on what you can do in different countries and the US is a little bit different because it's a state by state and everyone has their own rules. So you just got to make sure with your lawyers on what countries are. I mean what countries or states you can send messages to which ones you can't and just follow all those. That way you don't get sued. Okay. All right.

[Andrew Warner]

And we're just going to understand how this works. People will be able to copy this if they want, but the idea is don't copy it exactly. Understand how it works, implement it in your business. And that's what you all did. We'll talk about where you got this, what changes you made. Let's bring Salo on and I'll. I know you've told me. Look, I'm not in the weeds on this and so I'll let you go because he's going to do this. Thanks Neil. Thanks for doing this.

[Neil Patel]

Take care everyone. Thanks.

[Salo]

Take care, Neil.

[Andrew Warner]

Hi. I'm excited.

[Salo]

We have different acquisition channels so we work with ads, we work with inbound, a lot of organic traffic, social media, etc. And outbound for a very long time was a time consuming effort with low results. And the reason why is because you cannot put a single person researching, trying to do such a hard work in spending a lot of time on a single account and trying to get the attention of the prospect at scale like this is too expensive. Right. But then with the AI and the automations and all the APIs that are available for us, we can combine that all together and put in front of the prospect something such unique that they will give us their attention immediately.

[Andrew Warner]

And you're going to give us this template.

[Salo]

I'll give the blueprint at least how to get the blueprint because this specifically we got from this person called John Cataliffe.

[Andrew Warner]

Let's take a look at your screen. This is make.com that you're using for this.

[Salo]

Yeah, this is make.com.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, what are we looking at? Walk me through step by step through what I'm seeing.

[Salo]

Absolutely. So we are inside make.com. this is one of the scenarios in here. Like every dot here is kind of a component of this automation. They go one by one, they are sending information from each other and they are building something as they go. Like the purpose of this automation, if I can tell, like I will break down in three parts. This part here is where we are scraping the web trying to get prospects information. And then the second part is here is because we now have the prospect information. Let's say we're looking for plumbers, right in la. So we go to yellow pages, we try to fetch as many information we can from this company and then we give this information to Perplexity AI for the AI to understand. Each of those companies, they all have some sort of singularity. Right. So Perplexity is capable to come up with a very good description and understanding what this business is about. And then we send that to content makers, or we, we call it the makers. And here we are using ChatGPT to create something unique for this company. And basically what this, this automation do is content calendar for social media.

[Neil Patel]

All right, got it.

[Andrew Warner]

So you're saying, let's suppose I'm going to use the people who spray for bugs because we have so many of them here in Austin and I've noticed that every one of them seems to have their own approach. You might use Perplexity to understand one of them. Let's say Aztec. And you see Aztec is the organic pesticide company. And so your message to them will say we see that you're an organic pesticide company. You probably want to use social media. We created a calendar for you of what you should be posting because we know that you're organic and that's that customization that a human being couldn't do but would make sense for them.

[Neil Patel]

Exactly.

[Salo]

And not just that. If you go and look, if you are curious enough to click on what we will be sending to you, you will see like each piece of content are mentioning their names, are mentioning their services is highly customized.

[Andrew Warner]

I see.

[Salo]

So they're impressed. And the response rate from the old inbound process to this changed significantly. I think we can say almost 10x the response rate.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, so you're using Perplexity to understand them. You then pass it on to ChatGPT and you say, hey ChatGPT, this is the person I'm trying to target. I'd like you to create a. What's it called? I'd like you to create a content calendar based on These specifications. Then what's next? What's the green circle to the right of that? Yeah, what's that?

[Salo]

Exactly. So those are aggregators. And because we are doing it at scale, so we are basically, we have a composition of maybe 10 business or maybe 100 business, depending on how much bandwidth you have on your team. But the good part is the last part here. We're using Gmail to reach out to people one by one, which is amazing. We're not blasting a generic message and trying to come to get people's attention with a generic content. We are creating something unique for them and we're messaging them one by one. And the last piece here is something very intriguing, which we're not just sending a text. Email. Attached to the email, we include the audio file. And the audio file is highly personalized. You can write down the scripts that you need on your own and you use. Here we're using TTS model from ChatGPT, but you can use 11 labs and any other voice model to create something with your own voice.

[Neil Patel]

Got it.

[Andrew Warner]

Could you click on that? And so you're saying, look, I'm attaching to them a message, an audio message that says, hi, this is Neil Patel from NP Digital. I notice your business isn't very active on social media, so we'd love to put together a free content calendar for you with posts and images. Just let me know what you think. And so that is the voice that goes out, and you also have the attached calendar, and that's. And this voice goes out in. In what, a Google Drive link for them?

[Salo]

Yeah, Google Drive. Or you can create like a small MP3 file and send together.

[Neil Patel]

Okay.

[Salo]

You can choose whatever is the best.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay.

[Salo]

What we found was, because we're sending one by one, the size of the message doesn't matter too much. But if you're blasting emails, you want to make it as lean as possible. Right.

[Neil Patel]

So.

[Salo]

But in this case, doesn't really matter.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay. And I like that it's Neil customizing it to them. What are these JSON purplish circles that keep going up?

[Salo]

So JSON is a language where you can modify and you can establish the right way for the AI to process the information. So let's say on the first node here, I'm getting 10 lists of business from Yellow Pages. So you can do that, but the results of that are not every time they are not 100% structured. So you use jsons to put them together in a good way for the AI to understand it better.

[Andrew Warner]

Got it. Okay. And so at Every step, what I'm seeing is you're doing a thing and then you're using these JSON circles to organize it properly for the next step to be able to digest it. In this, you are not. This is not the scraper in here, right? It is the scraper. Which one's scraping? That's the scraper that we're looking at right now.

[Salo]

Yeah, well, to scrape information, we are using apify, but we are using several other scrapers. So there is even a chrome extension that you can use to scrape things. So scrapers today are very popular and they're all around. So let's say you want to scrape Google Maps. There is this little tool here. Let me see if I have it installed. Yeah, the ultimate web scraper. Like this. This tool here. Like, you go to Google Maps and you select, let's say, a segment lawyers in New York and you want to target them. They have their listings right on local places and Google Maps has shown it all. So you set up this really quickly just by clicking on the map, and the tool starts scraping all the results for you. So basically, in the end of five minutes, you have hundreds of contacts that are potential people that you can reach out. And this is not illegal because you can do the same process one by one by hand. You're just gaining time by doing that.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay, all right, I could see how this works. I understand this whole thing. What are we giving people who are listening to this?

[Salo]

So we point people to this link where they can download the blueprint. But basically I want to give them a sense of just simple steps on how they can customize that. And by the way, you will need a lot of APIs to make this work. And by the way, here is just an integration with apify. It's not any. Anything complex. You go there and you get the API key, you connect with make. But basically you can skip this. This process of scraping if you have a list. All right, so let's say there is a tool called Invent AI. And this is a tool that we use to identify M and A targets when we are buying companies and etc. You know, so in this, to provide you such a great level of details of prospects and etcetera, we can use a list coming from this to. To. Instead of using just Yellow Pages, this is another source. Right, but because Yellow pages is so easy to understand, I think this example is perfect. Basically what we're doing here is we are deciding a location that we want to target and industry on this case is plumbers. It's not our best ideal customer profile. But you know, like this is just an example. So if you set up this for you for your business like immediately, you can have a list of a lot of potential customers that you can target.

[Andrew Warner]

Okay. All right. And that tool that you mentioned is Inven AI I N V E N A I for anyone who wants to get it. All right, this is fantastic. We'll have this here in the show notes and we'll also find other ways for people to get this. Thanks so much for doing this. I love that you're willing to share and be this open.

[Salo]

Absolutely. And well, if you want to go in a little bit more details in other steps like basically you have all the scrap information you have then here, perplexity, understanding, summarizing it for you. Here is ChatGPT creating the content calendar. And here is again ChatGPT we're using Dall E model to generate the image and all the other steps is just like then you create a content calendar in Google sheets and then you send the email. And a cool modifications you can do is integrate that with your CRM which is another sophistication level that probably you should do. So in our case we are integrating with HubSpot on marketing hub but also with Salesforce. Some of the steps we change the model. Here we're using Gemini sometimes instead of just asking perplexity, here we are combining other models that can even watch videos and maybe putting more details on the deliverable that we are getting to people in some units like some divisions like Brazil. Instead of using Gmail we are using WhatsApp. And I'm just putting out some ideas on how your audience can customize this for their own use cases.

[Andrew Warner]

How many customers would you say you get from something like this from one of these automations?

[Salo]

I would say that helps fill the reps calendar in a way that we need to stop the automation because we don't have the bandwidth.

[Andrew Warner]

Meaning more customers in your sales reps.

[Salo]

Can handle a lot and outbound because of it is becoming one of the most prominent sources of acquisition right now. It is not the best yet, but it's going much better than it was.

[Andrew Warner]

All right, thanks for doing this. Thanks everyone. Keep telling me what you're working on. Keep telling me who I should be talking with. Bye bye.

[Salo]

Bye bye. Take care.