The Best Strategy to Sell AI Automations & Get Client #1 (Q&A)

Hey everybody. If you're not familiar, my daily updates channel is where I post more casual day-to-day content, and I answer specific questions from viewers directly in the comments. I've recorded one video a day for over 120 days in a row, and it's become a pretty sizable resource with a very detailed series of step-by-step guides and more or less everything to do with automation. So, for today's video, I pulled together a short list of the most asked questions from those recordings that I think will help the largest number of people right now. Each of these questions represents a very common roadblock I see with people when they're building their automation businesses, and I just wanted to bring these answers to a wider audience here on my main channel. Also to remind you if you guys have questions of your own that aren't covered today, I do personally read and respond to every comment over on the daily updates channel. You can find a link to it in the description. Let's dive in. From

Gabia, he says, "Hey Nick, know you're not a big fan of ads and it's not your area of expertise, but what's the main difference between your cold email system versus a paid ads campaign that uses a full funnel to your offer in terms of return on investment? Do you think you get a better outcome using cold email? Is that why you recommend it? Or what would be the best outbound strategies to get clients based in your experience? I'd love to see an example of, let's say, a $100 a month budget. " Well, if I didn't think that cold email was typically the best thing for beginners to do, I would not be talking about it all the time. Obviously, I bootstrap the vast majority of my business is using cold email. Hence why I try and get every human being that I know to use cold email. I think that, you know, the cost per acquisition, which is the metric that basically anybody in marketing cares about, this is equal to CPA, if you've ever seen this, is so much lower with cold email than with ads in 99% of cases that it's not even funny. Why? Because with cold email, what you're doing is you're trading the inherent scalability of an ad campaign, the VSSL and the automated ad tweaking that Google and Facebook does and you know some tripwire offer into your funnel that sends them some automated resource. You're trading all of that like systematized productized automatic thing for time that you or a salesperson spend actually like communicating with the prospect one-on-one. And because you're trading that time, obviously, you know, the cost per acquisitions can be significantly lower. you can get like $50 on like a $5,000 product with ads, you know, you might be spend and you know, it depends on your funnel and stuff like that obviously, but I don't know, maybe you spend like $350 on $5,000 LTV. So obviously this is way less than this 17th, but you're probably going to have to spend like more than seven times the amount of time in order to make up for the money that saves you in time. Okay. And in terms of your $100 a month budget, yeah, if you got a man, like you can't really run an ad campaign. Well, you can, but the amount of time and energy and money it would take just to like train the ad campaign, it probably take you a very

long time. For everyone keeps telling me to write personalized emails, no one tells me how to do it properly. I've got the data website, LinkedIn, but I still screen not knowing what to write. How would you approach it? Not just say something unique about them. I need a real usable direction. You get actual data from the customer, LinkedIn, website, personal pages, whatever. And then you don't actually just give it to the A and say, "Okay, write me a personalized email. " What you do is you write a template and you use things like instead of who are interested in and then in brackets you say specific thing about their offer and you extract that data using a then you paraphrase it and you stick it in there variables and then you weave that into like a template that you've already written. So it seems personalized and it makes use of paraphrasing. David Dia says what do you

think about cold calling for outreach? Doesn't have better conversions versus something like cold email or loom videos and emails. It seems like there really isn't anything to mark you as spam. Maybe I just don't know that there is. There definitely is. Do you recommend it over cold email? I'm also in Europe so not sure how it works to call Americans with price and stuff. I have about 200 bucks. What's the best outreach method you'd recommend? And would it generally always involve an Apollos script or similar besides Upwork? Let me run you through the logic on cold calling for outreach. Let's go down here and we should probably extend this now. So why I don't cold call anymore. I used to cold call a lot. For those of you that don't know, I used to cold call 50 to 80 people a day when I had my auto dialer. It was substantially more than that, but uh we don't autodial these days. So why I don't cold call anymore? So, there are a couple of main issues with cold calling. The first is you don't get a pickup. So, if you call 100 people right now, depending on the quality of your list, maybe 30 of them to 50 of them just won't pick up. So, you just spend time researching a company, doing whatever the hell you've been doing, and then you place a call and it just goes and you just don't ever reach somebody. So, if you do a 100 calls, let's say this just happens, and my numbers have been changing here. I know that I've done this a few times now. So, you know, don't take me with the numbers at face value. Just try and understand the shape of what I'm trying to say, which is that there are a few problems when you cold call. And the first is that you just don't get a pickup. So, you've wasted a percentage of your time. The second thing that happens, let's say the remainder 70%. Is you don't get a decision maker. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say you're cold calling dental clinics or something like that and you're trying to do some offer and I don't know what your offer is, but you find well maybe more than this depends on the industry, but when you call 50% of the time after you make it past the first hurdle, which is not getting a pickup, you just go straight to the front desk and the front desk says, "Hello, blank Dental. How's it going? How can I help you? " What are you going to say to them to try and get to the decision maker? Hey, is Paul Mark around? It's like, uh, oh, Mr. Mark is just taking another call right now. Can I send him a message? So, what do you do? You give the gatekeeper a message if you're a beginner cold caller. And then she promptly takes said message and throws it into the garbage because she knows that you're a cool caller. That's what a gatekeeper does. So, you can get really good with this stuff, don't get me wrong. And you know, me and my business partner at the time used to have all sorts of strategies we used to get around gatekeepers. We made the gatekeepers our friends a lot of the time. we found names of other people in the organization and we use things like oh you know Sally just told me to give Paul a call about the incoming shipment or something like that and then oh okay one sec let me write you through and then you know you tell Mr. Mark, I just had to fib a little to your gatekeeper because X, Y, and Z. And then, you know, you can make it through and it's pretty fun. But why play these games? These games don't make you money. And then the third is after you don't get the decision maker, time with the person because they're busy or there's just some other excuse. So, think about this. You just sent 100 cold calls, right? And I mean, how many of these are just wasted right off the bat? I don't know. I feel like 80% or more. So, I mean that's like negative leverage, right? That's one in five, you know, one in five calls actually do something, which is crazy. Wouldn't you rather send Loom videos? I know I would. Much bigger fan of sending Loom videos. Why? Cuz you just eliminate the whole you don't get the time thing because you can just pump people into like automated follow-up sequences. If you don't get a pickup, it doesn't matter because your thing is still in the inbox. It's not like when you call somebody, the call is just waiting and it's hanging around and eventually they can get to it. No. Right. That's a kind of voicemail. Last least, you don't get a decision maker. Well, you can send directly to the decision maker. You just avoid a lot of these and then you don't get the time. Well, it's not synchronous. It's asynchronous. Meaning that like it just doesn't matter if they have the time right now because if they don't have the time, then they can look at it later when your follow-ups heads. So, as opposed to like one over five calls actually do something. I want to say like three over five Loom videos actually do something if you are smart and you do smart follow-ups or whatever. And to me, that's like 3x leverage. And then you also don't have to like sit down. You do it in a specific batch. You could just like bang out Loom videos anytime you have a second or two. So that's what I would recommend. You just have an ongoing list of leads and clients and people you want to talk to and then you do batch. You do a big chunk in the morning or whatnot and you try and get through as many as possible. But then like you are waiting for a call and it's 1:25 and your call's at 1:30. Well, it's like oh you know it's 5 minutes perfect for a Loom video. You can actually like maximally utilize your day. You can't really do that with cold calls because you don't know how long the cold call is going to take but you know how long a Loom video is going to take. That's a really understated benefit. Because of that, you could probably send like 20 30% more outreach a day. And you could fully utilize all that sunk time. Not to mention, I think it's just a lot easier for beginners to get really articulate at um talking about an offer when the prospect isn't really in front of them because they just tend to be really worried and they really get stressed out. So, there's a multiple benefits, but yeah, I would definitely go with the Loom video approach if you're going to do this sort of stuff. All right, so those are my thoughts on cold calling.

Quick question. What should I do when a client asks me about my past work and I hardly can trust that I'm capable of doing the job? Ask because I recently had a conversation with the prospect and they asked me, "What work have you done when I completely blank? " What should I do in such situations? And of course, I can't say I built some automations and watching YouTube videos. Hey, you can for sure. I mean, you know, don't say, "Hey, I watched YouTube videos and I built automations. " Instead, say, "Yeah, you know, I have built similar systems. I built them for like a software development agency. I can run you through the system if you want. " And then show them said system. What you don't tell them, obviously, is the fact that you just built them for yourself. You're heavy on the implication there. So, is it the most honest way to frame things? Probably not things, but it is still technically honest. you did build it for a software consultancy or an AI consultancy or consultant or however you want to pitch your own business. But yeah, so long as you've built all these things for yourself first, like you're pretty good, right? You have actually gone through and you've done the building. So that's the simplest 0ero to1 hack. The second that you've built it for yourself, you have technically built the system and you can just avoid all that BS. The second thing is, you know, how can they trust that you're capable of doing the job? Do you just offer a guarantee? Offer a guarantee on your service. Just say, hey, you know, forget trust. I don't want this to be like a sales pitch. I want you to feel this on both an emotional level. Well, I want you to like me and I want you to feel like I'm going to do a good job for you, but I also want you to understand this on a logical level. Like, if I don't do a good job for you, you're not going to pay me anything. So, I really want to align incentives. I want to make this a no-brainer for you. I really believe that I could do what you're asking and not just do it, but do it extraordinarily well. You know, hopefully I've now fulfilled the logical side of your brain. And also that like, you know, I want to make sure I like Nick side of your brain, too. How we looking? Right. Like, just get down to brass tax, offer a guarantee. Guarantees are they seem scary for a lot of people, but they're actually the simplest and easiest way to make more money. They increase conversion rates like 300% or more on the front end. They, you know, have refunds of course as part of your guarantee. If you're offering a refund, you're going to have to give some, of course, from time to time, but it's usually like 10% of your margin. So, mathematically, like, think about what you're doing for guarantees. Guarantee will give you 300% of your top side and then maybe minus 10% of your bottom. So, if you start at like let's say 1, 1* 3, that's three. Then you minus, you know, 10%, that's uh 0. 3. So you're still operating at like a 2. 7x. That's just right off the top. And I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass. But hopefully you get the point that I'm

making. Alreso says, "Hey Nick, I'm struggling with the chicken and the egg problem. You always say sell first, build later, but also recommend showing prospect solutions you built for similar clients to build credibility and close deals. " So someone just struggling with zero case studies or portfolio pieces. How are bridges gap? Should I build a few demo systems up front even without clients have something to show? Or is there a way to sell confidently without prior build? Also, how do you pitch them in a cold email? is for a beginner definitely sell first build later. You show prospect solutions you build for similar clients build credibility and close deals. Like think about it this sell first build later. Like you make an Upwork application and you build a draft of the system for a client on the Upwork application. You pump it into the make AI and you're like hey the you know I want a system that generates an email from X Y and Z and it does like a pretty good job because 8020. Then you on the Upwork app you tell the client hey you know here's a system that I just built a moment ago for you. It does X Y and Z. Here's how it works. Happy to flush this out more. uh happy to give it to you for free. Not even going to charge you anything. I just want to get in the room with you basically. Um and then, you know, run you through how I might be able to help you. Then the next Upwork application, you have somebody asking for a system that's similar. So now what you say, here's a system that I just built earlier today for a B2B consultancy. Just built it for them not even like 2 hours ago. So really, really crazy that you asked me for a similar system. Just wanted to run you through what that looks like. I'm happy to give it to you for free. Happy to walk you through everything about how it looks like or flesh it out more in detail. just really want to get in the room with you. Does that work? Then the third time it's like, hey, you know, I actually just built the system for two people, you know, and the fourth time I built the system for three people. So, I guess the point that I'm making is like it's not mutually exclusive. You don't have to just do one thing or the other. You don't just have to sell first and then build later, build first and then sell later, right? Like obviously it's a nuanced problem. And if you look at Maker School, I talk a lot about this. The benefit to doing that Upwork application approach is, you know, you just end up with a massive library of

stuff. Seb says, "I'm so glad I found this account. of a meaning to ask a quick cue. We managed to land quite a bit client some time back and our goal is to slowly pivot from done for you offers to more of a done with you consulting offer. So we want to come into our clients business, analyze everything, help them optimize and streamline their whole business, that being creating processes but also hiring setters and optimizing their funnel. My question is how would you go about executing this kind of pivot? How big of a team do you think we'll need to fulfill effortlessly? Well, I mean you know this really depends on how many clients you are doing the fulfilling for? Right. I don't do done with you consulting offers. Well, I mean I guess you can kind of think of my coaching program as a done with you consulting offer. Sort of. Not really. But I guess it kind of is. Yeah, I just hyper leverage my time. But like I treat agency services and fulfillment is like very different from this coaching stuff. And like if I'm doing agency services, man, like I'm always going to do done for you offers. That's the whole idea. So I'm not a done with you offer pro or anything. You know, I don't like come into people's businesses and then also have them do work alongside me. Maybe I guess I do now that I think about it. Especially for like the larger partnership deals that I Okay, maybe let me dial that back a bit. I think my issue here is just the terminology you're using this DFY, DWI, stuff like that. Like I don't really think you can very cleanly break it down like a lot of people try to do here and I guarantee you're from the info product space if you're talking in this way. Okay. So hiring citers and optimizing their funnel. My question is how'd you go about executing this pivot? So this pivot here is basically just going from a builder into uh basically like a fractional exec if you think about it. What do I mean by this? I mean, you're going from building the stuff and then giving it to them to actually having some sort of ongoing management and I imagine training and then optimization and streamlining. So, this is a much broader scope, right? Like if before your scope was over here, now your scope is over here. And because it's so much bigger, there's obviously a lot more that goes into it. So, how would I hire a team to do this? Uh, I usually just do things on my own. So, but how would I hire a team to do this? Depending on the size of the deal, I would probably leave the coms to myself. So I would do the account management myself until I hit like 100 grand a month with this done with you consulting offer. I would explicitly define a road map or a transformation roadmap in something like whimsical or lucid chart or something. So step-by-step series of things that you do. Productize it so you have this massive bullet point style list of just like here are all of the things that we're going to do. Once you have this big productized list, you know, it'll be very simple and easy for you to see, okay, these tasks you can group, these tasks, you can group, and then you can find a role that effectively encapsulates the group tasks and hire them. So, you're going to need somebody to do account management, which is basically like client, customer success, whatever the hell you want to call it. You need somebody to like check in on the person, make sure that they're doing their end of the stuff, okay? Because clients are usually the bottleneck with any sort of done with you offer. Then you need people to sort of do the operation side of things. So hiring the setters, optimizing funnels and so on and so forth, you know, depending on the work that you want to do like hiring setters sort of like a different skill set than optimizing a funnel. So depending on exactly how you want to break down that productized list of steps that I mentioned to you earlier. It's going to depend on that. Then how big of a team do you think will need to fulfill effortlessly? I mean just based off what you're telling me like you be the account manager or maybe you know you or the other person, the team member is the account manager. So you do the comms with the client. Then you have like an ops person or maybe you're the account manager, your partner. It sounds like you have a partner. You say we is your ops guy. And then you have some sort of builder who helps do the building. That's a team of three. You could easily scale to 100 grand with an offer like this for a team of three, assuming that you're working probably in like the info product space. I mean, you mentioned DFY DWI. I'm just throwing at the wall here, but I bet you you're an info product guy. Okay. Three people, $100,000 a month, easy money.

Hey, Nick, assuming I'm offloading subscription costs to the client. At what point do you mention this in the sales call and process? When such how do you set up the client's API keys, web hooks, etc.? One last cheeky cue. If I'm building an automated cold outreach system for a client using instantly, do you get them to go through the whole process of buying domains and waiting out the whole 21 to 30day warm-up process? Or is there a more efficient route? Yeah, for sure. No problem, man. Sauce. God, let me give you some sauce. So, at what point do I mention this in the sales call? I'm pretty upfront with it. I mention it during the sales call. I mention it in the proposal that I send over. In terms of setting up the client's API keys and web hooks, I just say like, "Hey, on the kickoff call, we'll get you signed up to everything. I'll actually guide you through the setup and sign up process step by step. And by the end of the call, I'm going to have everything that I need, including like account access to all these platforms. So, I never have to ask you for any of this stuff again, and then I can just proceed forward and deliver a really high quality project. I'm doing this, and I like frontloading this because in my experience, this is just the biggest bottleneck in successfully managing an automation project. So, you're hiring me for a reason. That's to free up your time, give you some peace of mind. Uh, that's what I want to do. Let's sort it out. it'll take us 20 minutes, no problem. You know, and then people are like, "Okay, that sounds great. Let's do it. " So, you just do all that stuff on the kickoff call. In terms of process of buying domains, waiting the whole 21 30-day warm process. No, definitely not. I don't actually do this myself anymore. What I do is I do pre-warm domains with instantly Zap mail, puzzle inboxes, bunch of providers, and they actually just give you like emails that have been warmed up out of the box on domains that are pretty general. So, you can kind of like weave it into your offer. Like I got one that I think was called send click, you know, and it's like, well, my company's name is leftclick. So it's like, all right, there's some association there. And then I just start sending immediately. So money changes hands. Literally the second that happens, you go and procure like 20 domains for them. You pay a premium for these domains, of course, but the second that this happens, you go and you procure 20 domains for them. Maybe not the second money changes hands, but the second that like you get them on a kickoff call or whatever, which maybe is within 24 hours, you buy all the domains and you actually start sending that day. Because by sending that day, you don't have to wait 21 or 30 days. You could actually literally like kick off in the morning, start sending a bunch of emails, and by the evening have like 10 leads for them. You know, it depends on your level of copyrighting. But if you duplicate one of my campaigns and like, you know, take a similar approach, you could probably actually get some leads in the first like few hours. And then by the end of the day, think about it from the client perspective. Just paid you money, we kick off within, I don't know, 24 hours, and then by the end of that kickoff day, I'm already generating you like 5 to 10 leads. Like, think about that from the client perspective. It's like a godsend. It's like, "Holy who is this person? How can I pay them more money? " Most clients get like three leads a month. You're going to get them like 10 leads in their first day. Depends on volumes. Depends on your ability to do this. There's a lot of variables here, but that's how I do it. Hey, Nick. I'm

back again after I took your advice. I'd be stupid not to watch the MMW playlist and then your other videos for strategy. Ready to start my agency now and even more certain you're the best YouTuber? Thank you. It's constantly changing, advancing with the nature of AS. Have a couple questions. Should I pivot to making custom SAS products? higher perceived ROI if you're getting custom branded clean use interface more perceived ROI more money. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Um I don't think you should like do entirely just custom branded SAS products, but you could definitely float it by people. You could ask, hey, like I want to build you an app. Hey, I've already built you an app. Here's what the app looks like. Give it a try. Add it to your mix. You know, nothing's 100%. Throw a bunch of stuff at the wall. See what sticks. Maybe the app thing sticks for the particular market that you're tackling, but maybe it doesn't stick for others. Instead of offering one-off systems, no. No, definitely just do like one-off systems to start. Yeah. Okay. Once you have client experience. All right. Yes, definitely. I mean, like staying ahead is just a big worry that I think a lot of people are. They're just worried about like, oh, like there's so many tools coming out there. Industry is changing so fast. Need to stay ahead. You know what's really interesting? All of the most valuable skills that I have were not me learning a new technology at a particular time. To be honest, it's just like me mastering the fundamentals, which are things like, you know, psychology and business skills and whatnot. So, no, I don't think you're like running the risk of like not being ahead enough. I think that you don't want to run into that trap where you're just constantly stressed out about, oh my god, I need to be ahead. I need to learn this new thing. that new thing. Like, it's not changing that quickly. You could totally just do the same thing that people were doing 3 years ago and find success today. It will be a little harder for sure cuz the tactics are a little bit different, but it's still doable. And for you, the most important part is just getting out there and making a little bit of money initially

right? And there you have it. I hope these answers help clear up some of the questions you guys have been having about starting and scaling an AI automation business. If you guys enjoyed this format, you guys want more direct answers to your questions, I do literally check every single comment on my daily updates channel. Have never skipped one and I never will. Just head to the link in the description, subscribe, and then drop your questions. I promise I'll address them in the upcoming videos. I always do. For those of you guys that are serious about accelerating your journey and want to join a community of people that actually make real money right now with a automation, check out Maker School. We have over 2,500 members who typically get their first clients within the first or second month of joining thanks to my 90-day accountability program. Otherwise, hit that subscribe button if you haven't already, and I'll see you guys in the next video or over on daily updates.