The Entrepreneur’s AI Advantage: Run Your Business With an AI Teammate

In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett and Alex Panagis explore how entrepreneurs and online course creators can use AI to improve marketing, increase sales, and streamline business operations. They discuss how AI is revolutionizing entrepreneurship by helping entrepreneurs produce SEO-friendly content, attract new clients, automate tedious tasks, and build more effective processes without sacrificing the interpersonal relationships essential to long-term company success.

Chris discusses his strategy for AI-powered marketing, emphasizing three key tactics: relationship marketing, outbound marketing, and inbound marketing. He describes how business owners can utilize AI to pinpoint client problems, establish content strategies, come up with ideas for blog posts, carry out SEO research, and provide useful instructional materials that draw viewers via Google and AI-powered search engines. Alex stresses the need of releasing unique, superior material that benefits AI search engines as well as prospective clients. They also look at how AI may help with relationship-building, lead creation, and tailored outreach while upholding trust and authenticity.

AI for sales and conversion optimization is also discussed, covering how to create successful sales pages, enhance messaging, comprehend client wants, and choose the best sales tactics for various pricing structures. Chris describes how course designers may utilize AI to create attention-grabbing headlines, convey the advantages of their products, include testimonials, and establish credibility with potential students.

Before devoting a substantial amount of time and money to development, Alex emphasizes the need of consumer feedback, testing, and business idea validation. Lastly, Chris and Alex talk about AI automation for company operations, demonstrating how business owners can utilize AI assistants to streamline customer service, record SOPs, oversee workflows, and boost team output. They stress that rather than taking the place of human knowledge, AI should work in tandem with company owners to decrease administrative tasks and concentrate on strategic choices, customer connections, and innovation.

This episode offers useful advice for online instructors, coaches, and company owners who want to use AI to expand their online course business, improve their digital marketing plan, and scale their operations more effectively.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

today, Alex, I wanted to get into the AI-augmented entrepreneur. So the entrepreneur is interesting because it’s almost like a product in and of itself. It’s like the business of being a coach, selling courses, having an education company. There’s a lot of entrepreneurship aspects to what we do. It’s almost like you have to build two businesses, your actual product, and then the business itself is a product.

And that’s what I’d like to get into with you today about building the business, b- being the entrepreneur. And within entrepreneurship, there’s three main areas I think about, which are marketing, you know, getting customers; selling, actually closing customers; and then the operations aspect, which is actually running the business.

And we’ll get into all that into more detail, but generating leads is something every business needs to do, so marketing with AI. And one of the interesting things I’ve found, both at Lifter as a technology or software company, but also I see happening with LifterLMS users who are building education companies, is the ground has shifted underneath us.

The main bottlenecks used to be commonly in the technology department. So in software, like we mentioned in the previous episode, actually creating software has really accelerated. So waiting for developers or engineers or trying to figure out how to build a website or a learning management system, if we’ve never done that before, has actually gotten much easier, less friction with AI.

So in my experience, the bottleneck in business has really moved off the technology to actually attracting customers, which has actually gotten harder Because of AI as well, because customers, they need more reasons to buy your product because of all the AI capabilities they’ve unlocked on their own.

So it’s an interesting thing. So tech- in my view, technology is no longer the main bottleneck. It’s actually getting customers or marketing. And we’ll talk about closing or selling in a little bit. But there– When I think about marketing or if I’m teaching marketing to somebody, I have a main framework I use, which is there’s three types.

There’s inbound marketing, which means content marketing basically, like creating content that attracts your prospects via search engines or even being included in AI results and things like that. Then there’s outbound marketing, which is actually going out and finding customers, so it’s more active.

S- so inbound is attracting, outbound is hunting basically, and then relationship marketing is the third, which is farming, which is, building relationships over time. That’s– It’s the least scientific, but in my view actually one of the most important. And we’ll go into these each in detail and how you can use AI in these different marketing contexts.

But before I get into it, I just wanted to say, in my experience, most business owners or education entrepreneurs are really good. They have a strength in one of those. I think my general advice is you should do all three, inbound, outbound, and relationship. But you’re gonna find similar to your personality type or whatever or just your experience, your– you– one of these is gonna be your superpower, but don’t sleep on the other two and at least put in some effort over there So inbound marketing is actually my superpower in terms of which one I’m the best at, that just works for me.

So creating content and attracting customers. And what you can do with AI, creating content, AI can really help you accelerate. And there’s lots of different types of content. We’ve talked about, media production in the previous episode, like videos and audios and podcasts and things. But before we get into things like creating blogging, blog posts or web pages or, putting content on other people’s websites, inbound marketing is something that can be extremely accelerated with AI.

But at the highest level, the challenge when you’re prolific, let’s say within your content marketing matrix, you’re also gonna find a strength. Oh, I’m more of a writer, or I’m more of a YouTuber, or I’m more of a audio person, podcast person. And again, play to your strengths, but don’t sleep on the other forms.

And for me, I’m more of a video guy. But it’s all changing because, like I mentioned, I’m a slow typer. So now using something like Whisperflow and then just brain dumping and getting AI to clean it up using the Chris VoiceWriter skill we talked about before, my, It’s not really writer’s block, but just my slowness in writing has actually been solved with AI.

But before, before we get into those kinda detailed tactics, one of the most important parts of content or inbound marketing, which ties into what we talked about previously with customer avatar development, is I like to build a content matrix f- of what we’re going to make content about. So for education entrepreneurs, to get really tactical here that’s built on…

In, in general, you can break these rules, but I like to find the five main pain points that my- whatever the target market is, has. And then I use a concept called mind mapping to kinda brainstorm, but there’s five hubs. And even this series we’re doing right now is using that content marketing five pain points.

Education entrepreneurs have challenges across subject matter expertise or being the expert, teaching technology, entrepreneurship, and community building so that you can see that… And that’s what we’re doing here to create video content. So that’s how I think about it And if you look at your niche, I’m gonna do an example on the fly to just give an example that’s not in software or entrepreneurship.

But if I was doing a content map to kinda build my container or my frame of what I’m gonna focus on I would develop the five main pain points which are often shadows of opportunity. So I’m gonna choose something I know a little bit about so that it’s a good example. So on the side I’m a beekeeper.

I’ve been beekeeping for maybe seven years, and beekeeping is actually a huge niche. I’ve actually done online courses for beekeepers before with a subject matter experts who are, like, exceptional beekeepers, and I would show up, I would film their in-person workshops at their apiaries, which is a bee farm, and then I would convert that into an online course.

So I’m, like, wearing the technology hat, showing up, helping, in my entrepreneur help hat, helping the beekeepers produce content. But– And that’s how I actually got into this course creation space. I started doing it in organic gardening and topics like permaculture and beekeeping and so on. But anyways, beekeepers, what are their five main pain points?

The first is just all the equipment. You’ve got hives and tools and suits. You don’t wanna get s-stung. So that’s like their version of the technology hat. There’s gear. The next thing is bee behavior. Like, understanding bee behavior. What’s going on? Why are they swarming? Why aren’t they building honey right now?

Or, where did my bees go? Or why are they being aggressive today but not yesterday? So that’s a major area. As a beekeeper too, a third thing is just business. Beekeeping is actually expensive and if you’re not figuring it out, you tend to spend a lot of money without getting a return.

So you make all this honey or other bee products, and then you need to sell them and build a business or whatever, so there’s like an entrepreneurship as-aspect to beekeeping. And then in addition to that, there’s other pain points like working around the seasons. What do I do in the winter?

What do I do in the summer? What do I do when the nectar’s flowing and they’re building honey really hard or whatever? So that’s four. I’m gonna s- I’m just gonna skip a fifth since I’m trying to create a content map on the fly. But within that content map, I- we found some major pain points: gear, behavior entrepreneurship, and weather.

And then within those There’s like basically sub-pain points. So like on the gear side just like the hive itself, like the wooden boxes. There’s different types of wooden boxes. There’s different sizes for different reasons. There’s different methods that you can choose to make different types of hives.

So there’s like this sub-pain point on choosing the hive setup you’re gonna use. And within that, like even what I’m doing right now, I kinda came up with four pain points. I could go to my AI tool and be like, “What’s– I need a fifth major pain point that has a cluster of sub-pain points.” And we don’t have AI in front of us right now.

We could spin it up, but I’m not gonna do that. We, It would help with that gap analysis and give me, oh there’s this other thing that beekeepers really need to figure out that you could create content around. And then, when we get to like that equipment or gear niche, I would brainstorm things like, okay, there’s hives, there’s the bee suits, tools, and like what else?

And it’s gonna give me like 37 more ideas, and I could literally create a content map of hey, I wanna commit to writing. I wanna publish like one useful blog post a week that gets… answers people’s questions and lets them know there’s more inside the actual membership or the course or whatever.

And AI can just help build all– They can help you plan the architecture, even project manage it. Like you can do all that in a spreadsheet, and then now you’re building a system. AI can help you write the content, make the featured image for the content, and so on. And then there’s, concept called a content brief.

Okay, we’re talking about hive boxes. What do we wanna cover? And this is where you can use things like skills To develop like, hey, to make a really SEO or search engine optimization optimized piece of content, I like this structure where I need a table of contents like a AI instant answers kind of intro to the post.

I wanna use examples and stories, and I need links to high-quality resources and other things. And I kinda do some competitive analysis, which I can accelerate with AI. Hey, what are the top three ranking pieces of content about beehive boxes? How long is their post? What are they talking about?

What did they miss? How could I make something better? And so on. And AI just f- really helps with that acceleration. And then you can get into the multimedia content and blend in other skills in the series. Hey, for a high-value post, I also wanna have a YouTube video embedded in the post. I need a script or outline or slideshow presentation for that, and so on.

But before I move on to outbound marketing, I’ll pass it over to you for content marketing and hear your thoughts. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts. So I think I find myself more– the fight for attention is becoming more difficult. I think it’s a combination of people’s attention time being spent using the AI tools, as opposed to consuming content.

They’ll just consume content in AI. But then it’s also just a lot more people creating stuff because of AI. And I think– So I look at everything through, and I would encourage people to do the same. Depending on your target market, it might be easier to put yourselves in the shoes of who you’re targeting, depending on how well you know that audience.

Though I would hope that a lot of the people here are, like, listening and the people in this room as well we’re marketing to people who we can quite closely relate to. So I like to pattern match what I find gets my attention and triggers an emotional response for me. Like, when I’m like we talked about Jason Cohen’s Hidden Multipliers book.

He also recently started a podcast where he does an interview show, and he gets founders on, and it sometimes awkwardly, pushes them and asks them the hard questions. And I realized yeah, that’s the type of content that I like consuming. And it makes me challenge yeah, I’ve…

when we do podcast interviews, do we not ask enough hard questions? And whether or not could that format work? And I’m not saying that it’s a matter of, find something that someone else has done successfully and directly see how that maps over to something that would work for your business.

But I think there are elements of clearly people like that format. And even if it’s not a huge number of views, it’s just the amount of engagement and the amount of passion in the people that do watch that is definitely there. It’s another thing that we see at LifterLMS we’ll focus on producing content for very niche things that- from a pure numbers point of view, you might look at it like it’s not particularly important, but we know that that is actually our most important p- potentially one of our important demographics and least price s- sensitive segment.

So producing this, even if it doesn’t reach many people has outsized benefits. So I think that’s one element of it. And I think from a writing point of view I always think back to, … I used to, and I still am, but Gary Vaynerchuk was very much a prominent figure early in my business career, and I watched a lot of his content.

And I always thought, because I- when I started, I was a lot more of an introvert than I still am now, and my mindset was, yeah, the type of stuff that he preaches that you should be doing to fight for attention and the social stuff, that’s great for most people, but let me focus on the stuff that works really well.

And in comes strategies that work for the introvert. So technical marketing, like SEO, like what you can do to get pages ranked on Google, and that used to be a lot easier. Now it’s becoming much more difficult, but I’d also argue we’ve entered a stage where it’s table stakes. So a lot of companies think that, oh, what we really need this is our grand, new strategy.

We’re just gonna do LinkedIn, and we’re gonna try to have surround sound LinkedIn posts by getting everyone on our team to post on LinkedIn, which, to me, is also a great idea. Naturally, everybody on your team should be doing that, depending on whether your market is on LinkedIn or which- whichever social platform.

You should get your team engaging, talking, and behaving as members of a community and of an industry. That makes complete and total sense. But that doesn’t mean that the evergreen content that you have on your site and publishing in-depth resources is a strategy that’s completely gone. The same way some people like to read a book, some people don’t, read clickbaity posts on LinkedIn, but they do want to download a guide.

So if they’re reading about, WordPress hosting, for example, you might have … Y- or that’s such a … I think it’s a great example because you have so many different buyers on the enterprise side, you’ll have somebody within the organization that wants to have a one-pager or in some cases a more detailed technical document that covers how this specific thing works so that they as a technical or non-technical person can take that to the other person that they need to present it to.

And I think that’s, like in my view, producing this is foundational now more so than ever because you not only want to produce it for the customer, but you wanna produce it for AI. So you have the best chance at succeeding, I think f- from a marketing and generating inbound point of view if you produce as much high quality with human-in-the-loop review content as possible, because you can then cover all of the like nuances how your product or your course or your service differs from these other products and courses so that AI truly understands what it’s about.

And I, yeah, I’m curious in– Just to throw back the question a little bit at you, as I think about this through the lens of a course creator, I wonder how that manifests more do you cover how much do you want to expose? ‘Cause like my thought is, if I’m marketing a course now, I actually want to get most of the like curriculum and method, and I would publish a lot of like my own thinking to the point where a lot of the like ideas in the course are out there.

But again, it comes down to the information is readily available, so that’s not why people take the course. And the like level of packaging that you do in the actual end course that somebody would buy is obviously gonna be different than having hundreds of like sporadic articles that you publish over the years covering your method in detail.

Chris Badgett: From a modern times perspective, I think the biggest mistake that education entrepreneurs specifically make is they get really protective of what’s inside the course or the membership, and they think of it as intellectual property, which it is, but they get stingy on sharing information.

Like some of the best coaches online as, as an example in the business niche, like I mentioned Dan Martell, a guy I worked with for two years, all his stuff you can find on his YouTube channel, like most of it, like all of the best ideas and his strategies, tips, tactics and so on. But that’s not– I bought the membership and this was an expensive five figure a year kind of mentor coaching program.

So I’m not just buying access to the content. I wanted the coaching and the personalization and all the other stuff inside the community in addition to the content. I think- So 

Alex Panagis: that– Sorry, just to cut you off there. Yeah. I think exactly like that, that kind of is like in a way Dan Martell’s strategy now on YouTube, which we’re paying a lot of attention to because we love that type of content, is an offshoot of like what Gary Vaynerchuk did, which is like you put out so much free stuff, which is a, not only a form of generating inbound, it’s also a form of building trust because you’re not trying to say this is obviously an extreme example, come– Like this is my secret method and you’re gonna only get it for the people that buy the course and you don’t really talk about it. I think that’s a much harder sell in a world where everybody has AI at their disposal because yeah you’re not you’re, the, you’re gonna struggle to develop a human connection and I think that’s ultimately people make buying decisions emotionally, like at the end of the day.

Even if it’s like business products and not and software, regardless, the same is very much true for courses.

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And the the big mistake too, or the, the fire I wanna light under people is like the race is on. You’re not, like you said, you’re just making content. You’re not just making content for humans, you’re making it for AI.

So from an SEO perspective in the old world, and SEO’s not dead by the way it’s a compounding game. So you have to get it out there. The search engine has to index it, and then it’s looking for signals of how much people like it, share it, and s- there’s tons of ranking factors. But for AI and large language models, their AI is basically stealing everything it can find on the internet, so you need to get free stuff out there for it to steal, and that’s how you show up in AI conversations with people.

And the best time to start is 10 years ago, but the next best time is today. So it’s time to get on it, share your content, because AI, like the language models like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all these things, can’t see what’s inside your course ’cause it’s protected. That’s part of what a learning management system does is it protects you know, for us- enrolled users only or members access to what they’re getting, and the AI and the search engine can’t see that.

So you need to have some public-facing content besides just your homepage, your about page, and your contact page. 

Alex Panagis: I also, yeah, just like in the week before traveling to come to the US to meet up with you and Jason from Paid Memberships Pro is like the… I had three or four meetings with different companies which were building something where they wanted AI to essentially– I guess a kind of a parallel is like the LifterLMS MCP, but their tool is in-installable in a code base, and they, their whole strategy for an entire year, which is just leaning into why you need to use AI in, even if you’re a little bit resistant to it, because you need to be attacking at things on all fronts, which is they lean very much heavily into social and video and trying to go viral and do just lots of like short clips on LinkedIn and posts and yeah.

A year later of pursuing that strategy, which in hindsight, like obviously you can always say hindsight is 20/20, like in the time when that decision was made, a lot of people were skeptical over what, like the value of producing original, well-researched content where a human is in the loop because it was unclear whether, you’d really get much traffic from Google anymore.

Now, fast-forward to where we are today, that same product and company, when they want their users to install the tool with AI, they’ll plug it into Claude Code and with a prompt that is provided, and Claude will say, “Oh, it looks like you wanted to install this tool, but actually this tool is only doing this other thing.”

Like it has no idea of the new product that they’ve launched or the new feature that the company has because they haven’t spent that whole year leading up to the release of the feature basically becoming a leader in that, new industry that they’re trying to get into by tapping into long-form evergreen content with well-researched guides.

So I think, yeah, we basically need to feed the AI models as much as we can. 

Chris Badgett: The next form of marketing in my framework is outbound marketing, also known as prospecting. And this is something that you think of in enterprise sales, where these, these sales team people, men and women, get on planes, and they go out into the world and try to close customers or send emails or make cold calls.

Outbound has a really bad name, particularly because it’s mostly done poorly, and I would say of all the forms of marketing, this is the one that is most underused. It’s also done poorly, but the people that do it well literally print money because instead of relying on content, which obviously I’m a big fan of, you’re literally going out into the world, and it’s why I call it hunting and not farming.

You set your target on… This is why your customer avatar research is so important, but you know who it is you wanna help, and then you can– This personal development comes in here. You have to get over your imposter syndrome. You have to get over all the bad experiences you’ve had with cold callers calling your house while you’re eating dinner and all that stuff, and do it the right way.

Which the right way is when you reach out to somebody, don’t be pushy. Add value before you ask. You’re also kinda stepping into relationship building too. But… And try to… The, the main thing that gets people to get into outbound and do it well is to just add value first and don’t ask for the sale immediately.

And w- if you really believe in your product- The first sale you make is to yourself. So if you’re scared about doing outbound, first do some personal work and make sure you really believe in your product. ‘Cause if you believe in your product, you’re gonna have almost a moral obligation to go help people.

And if you reframe your mindset to that, then you’re not annoying or interrupting people, you’re actually just trying to help people and letting the right people know that you have the solution for them. 

Alex Panagis: Just a, a thought on that. It’s funny that for me it was really when people started debating the value of SEO and would content that you produce first that you wanna rank on Google or you just wanna publish your own will that still be as important in generating inbound?

It was very quick that the natural decision was outbound is the next form of technical marketing ’cause you can engineer it. You have, let’s say, oh, we get 1,000 prospects in and we have a conversion rate of this to get a reply, and then from the people that book a … how many of those people that reply do we eventually book a meeting with?

So people like the fact that it can be engineered and measured, which is also one of the things I like about it. But I think because it’s looked at as one of those forms of marketing that you can engineer, it is also one of the ones that people try to dehumanize and do at scale, and I would argue … there’s a great essay, like very old now, but from Paul Graham about doing things that don’t scale.

I think that’s applies more than a- anything to doing outbound if you don’t wanna destroy your reputation and your brand is instead of just thinking of … And I see it a lot in the companies that I’ve worked with and advised over the years. The typical mindset with some CEOs, they’ll see outbound as a strategy and they’ll start doing it and instantly, as in within a matter of one week of running it, they’ll be like, “Okay, so this is going okay.

We have a 1% reply rate. We haven’t booked a single meeting.” Obviously they won’t point that out, but they’ll then say, “How do we reach out to 100 times the amount of people we’re reaching out to now?” Whereas the point … that’s entirely defeating the point. You should focus on figuring out who you’re targeting, nailing the messaging really well, and also ultimately approaching people in the way that you would want to be approached.

Again- I talked about it like pattern matching with the media stuff of what you like to watch and what you believe your target audience will enjoys. What type of, what– Like I, I bookmark every time I, or put it in a folder in my email client every time I get a cold email. I’m like, “I know they used AI for that, but the targeting and the offer was really good.”

And most of the time that i- if the copy and the positioning and the way they get my attention, they go through all this effort, the only ti- reason it would then not be something that you’d go for is ’cause the offer or the pricing itself is just not good timing or too expensive and you wouldn’t go for it.

But yeah, my, my whole not to preach, but I would just say try not to get onto the completely u- use AI to automate the hell out of the entire process, basically. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s a bunch of buzzwords in there that are really important, which is do things that don’t scale first, sell how you like to be sold, and garbage in, garbage out.

Alex Panagis: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But, so long before AI, even though outbound was not my natural strength, I committed it, to it. Entrepreneurship is a consistency and commitment game, so I set a pattern more than a decade ago where every week, no matter what, I would do at least one cold outreach to somebody I thought I could help.

I might be listening to a podcast and hear somebody, and I’m like, “Oh, they would be a great fit for Lifter.” They might, whatever. And I would just s-send an unsolicited email, and it’s not like, “Hey, buy my stuff.” It’s, “Hey, I love…” First context, “Hey, I love that episode you did with or this, “I really got value from this one idea.”

“Have you heard of LifterLMS? That’s my tool. I’m the founder. D- it has this thing you were looking for in the episode. And by the way we have this free resource that like to help you explore, help whatever. “Hey, this is our comparison guide for the different tools out there,” or, “This is an article about, why WordPress versus closed SAS software for a learning management system.”

And I won’t even ask for a sale. I won’t put my Book a Meeting link in there. And then I’ll be polite. I’ll be like, “Hey, thanks again. I really enjoyed that content. Let me know if I can be of help,” or something like that. So I would workshop that and make it tighter, but that’s the general idea, and I would do that manually every week.

I’ve always done that just as a habit. But then when you bring AI in, like you said, you don’t wanna scale what’s not ready to scale. But first, when we’re doing prospecting, the thing that can be really time-consuming is list building, building your outbound list. Who are the people… imagine you have a s- giant sales team and you need to create a list of 1,000 people to reach out to that are qualified and a perfect fit that you could add value for.

That kind of research is now very fast with AI if you’re clear on who it is you help, and there’s a lot of people that it’s so easy to find how to contact them. For example, if you’re… Let’s say you’re teaching something about selling houses to real estate agents. Real estate agents, it’s very easy to find their phone number and email address.

S- every YouTuber, if you go to their About tab, there’s a button where they… You have to click it to make sure you’re not a robot, and you can get out their contact email, ’cause they wanna be contacted. And some people are hard to find, but you can you can build a prospect list easy- easier than ever before, and you use…

sometimes, people sell lists. “Oh, here’s a list of all the dentists in your state. It’s $300,” or whatever. I don’t recommend buying lists, but you can do stuff like that and it could be helpful. But then it’s also about the, the communication, like what you’re sending. This is an example of where I would use AI to create a skill for a pattern of communication I would use where introduce…

in the skill, I would have AI interview me until it was 95% sure the skill was fully formed, but interview me until you have a template of an outbound communication that could work. By the way, here’s 10 years of emails that I’ve done manually. Look for the patterns there. Add value. Don’t be pushy.

Don’t do what everybody else does and drop a Book a Meeting link or push hard for the sale. And I would just develop my system to, draft that communication so it’s fill in the blank, which then a human or the AI could, literally fill it in. And there’s systems… I know you use this system.

It’s called- 

Alex Panagis: Lemlist. Yeah. Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: Lemlist to do this And I will say every time I do something like that, move from something I do manually to automated with AI or human in the loop automated, I do sometimes feel like, I am– it is not gonna be 100% the same as if I sent that one email. But if I s- am able to send 100 a day, I may…

i’m consciously making a trade-off. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. The pyramid of AI, the cost and efficiency argument. Otherwise it just wouldn’t happen, so yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But if you don’t do the work on the front end to really nail the… That’s why I have that filter to get all that stuff out, ’cause everybody’s doing it poorly, and I have a- a way in my skill to find the good ones. I don’t– It doesn’t move all the ones out, it just moves all the bad ones out. So that’s the the prospecting system, and then it’s just other tools you can integrate with AI For example, like if once you… Prospecting is not just like one-shotting, it’s like a conversation usually.

So eventually, if they do raise their hand and say, “I’m interested,” you can have your AI connected to your Calendly, you can have it monitoring your inbox. There’s a concept for, of like hot, cold, and warm leads. So like a hot lead in prospecting is somebody, “Hey, you’ve b- we’ve been back and forth many times.

This person keeps asking questions. They really wanna connect.” So you would surface like your hot leads. There’s a concept called lead scoring that you can use to figure out what is hot, what is warm what’s cold, or, what should you just turn off, and things like that. But meeting scheduling, your email integrating with other tools that may have a AI-native capability.

For example, like we, we do research at Lifter through a tool called BuiltWith, which is public information that has certain softwares that people use. So if you– if I wanna reach out to people who have are using like a competitor tool or using another tool that people always use inside alongside LifterLMS, I can, start doing that.

But some of those s- tools, those like lists, public list tools, and this is where I would buy… Like they’ll give you some contacts for free, but then you have to buy. If they have a MCP where you can plug your agent into it and you’re basically paying for access that way, instead of buying a spreadsheet or a CSV file, your AI is just plugged in and can just generate that and bring it in even easier.

So those are some AI tips around prospecting. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I don’t know how, in how much detail we can do more content on like outbound in future, because I think it’s a big topic. But like another Thing which relates to both the prospecting and also the copywriting of the email itself is using signals. So as one of the signals that you mentioned is like using built with data.

Another one that like more so in services and coaching works really well is monitor like job alerts. Oh, people are hiring for like a particular role, or funding rounds is like the most common I think that people will target like, oh, this company just, ran a funding round for this amount of money.

That puts them into the, like our customer profile and matches our ideal customer profile, therefore let’s reach out to them and, maybe at this point they’re gonna be hiring a huge number of team members if, Yeah, so I think that works. And then basically the, from the signal or based on what other information you have about a particular prospect, I like to, like whether it’s at the beginning or not really depends on how you’re trying to frame the email entirely and what you’re pitching.

But I love using the concept of a relational anchor, which is when I reach out to somebody, it’s not just anyway, the email is about helping them, but it’s why right now did you send this email so that the person has the context of, okay, they’ve, recently seen something.

And the most basic version of this, which is again, how AI would do it, is, “Oh, I recently read your, blog article,” or, “Oh, I recently saw your tweet,” which is obviously like the, the version of it that you want to stay away from because it’s very obvious to people that get lots of, cold email inbound that the person has clearly not pr- actually seen that or put the effort into it, or they’ve not actually listened to the podcast.

They’ve really just saying that they listened to it. So if we, yeah, if Jason Cohen is a good example, if we were to reach out to him because of something on his podcast, like you can’t just be like, “Oh, I recently enjoyed your episode of the-” Yeah … “this podcast.” Like that, that’s again, like a, a thing which requires, that’s the part which AI can get right de- depending on how you prompt it.

But I do think like it requires a human to be in the loop because it’s, at the end of the day, especially if you’re sending it as you from your own email, then it comes across as just low effort and potentially lazy. I think you have a note here about a specific like copywriting skill, the Cialdini skill.

Chris Badgett: The Cialdini skill- Yeah … is something I like to use, which is Robert Cialdini wrote a book called “Influence,” and he’s a social scientist, and he actually studied cults for decades, and I think he even embedded himself in cults as a sociologist. And he would interview people e- that exited a cult, and he he basically studied how cults recruit and retain members, and then figured out how to apply it to business.

Whenever I mention Robert Cialdini, it always comes with a disclaimer because what you will learn here could make you a cult leader, master manipulator, but that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to become an influencer or a good marketer. But some of Cialdini’s the principles of influence are things like reciprocity.

So when I say something like, “Add value before you ask for the sale,” that’s actually the principle of reciprocity. We have a free version of LifterLMS. That’s our biggest reciprocity play there is. We actually have a very functioning, successful business where most of our cust- our users are actually using the free thing, and they’re fine with that, and I’m fine with that.

But a percentage of those need our paid stuff, so that’s give before you get. Another one is authority. So that’s where you might mention in your outbound prospecting email, I’ve been running LifterLMS for 12 years. I have a YouTube channel with 1,500 videos, and a podcast that’s been going for 12 years, which I started at the same time as Tim Ferriss.

I’m just a lot less famous, which… So I’m joking. And by the way, you know what that joke does? That’s another principle of influence from Cialdini, which is likability. So another hang-up for education entrepreneurs is they think they have to put on an act to make a content or be a leader in their company or be on stage or whatever.

A funny one with me as an example is I’ve never owned a suit At some point in my career did I feel like I should probably get a tie or should I wear a suit jacket to a conference? I just don’t do it. It’s not me. And that’s likable. I wear the same fishing shirts from the same brand.

I’ve s- if you see me at a conference, if you see me at my house, if you see me out fishing or whatever, it’s the same shirt, and that’s just likable. That’s actually Likability is a big factor in generating trust, which is a big part of sales, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

The other… there’s more Cialdini influences, so I would encourage you to study that, but that’s an example of a skill you could create. So if I was creating a landing page for a new course or membership, and I’m working with it manually myself as a human and with AI, then I would run it through my Cialdini skill to see if I’ve gracefully, in a non-manipulative way, incorporated all those seven factors.

So proceed at your own risk. Use use ethically and everything like that, and don’t start a cult. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. Just to go back and take it, I know this is not really the section that we’re on, but it’s funny ’cause that Rob- Robert Cialdini is a good example of it. We’re not saying join a cult to produce content-

but it’s a pretty good example of really going the distance to do research to, to come out with something really good original. It’s h- how many people do you know that have done something, not necessarily joining a cult, but something that’s that level of like sacrifice to like research how to be persuasive and how to do persuasive writing?

There’s very few writers that have done that, and there’s also a reason why we’re citing this specific author as opposed to the hundreds of other people that have written books on copywriting. 

Chris Badgett: Move, moving on from outbound, I actually c-consider social media marketing a form of outbound, particularly paid ads, ’cause you’re literally trying to show up cold in front of somebody.

But social, even with the name social in it, it blurs the line between outbound and relationship marketing. But I’m just putting that out there, like I see social media marketing as a form of outbound. But the… particularly with paid ads. But the biggest mistake people make with paid ads is just like scaling an outbound prospecting outreach program with AI before it’s ready.

With social– with paid ads, whether those are Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok ads, whatever particularly if you’re doing content, I’m a big fan of scaling what’s already working instead of thinking paid advertising is a ATM that just prints money in, where you put $100 in and you get $200 out. You wanna scale what’s already working.

But moving on to relationships this is the most fuzzy and also the most dangerous place to use AI, but I’ll teach this concept of relationship marketing from using a particular relationship strategy that also blurs the line with outbound. I’d give credit if I knew who originally came up with the idea, but there’s this concept called the Dream 100.

So if you think about your education company and you think about i- if I could get… Who would the top 100 people be that if I had a relationship with would really help my business? It could be another influencer with a related but non-competitive product. It could be a celebrity customer who you know is a, a course creator who, if I, “Oh, that person, if they were using Lifter instead of competitor X, that would be really good for the brand.

And by the way, I think they would be honestly happier over here because of XYZ.” So that’s the concept of the Dream 100, and it blurs into outbound because you would take that list and over time slowly do some outbound, try to build relationships. “Oh, this person’s speaking at a conference. Oh, they wrote a book.”

Like Jason Cohen is an example. A simple thing you could do is buy the book and then go the extra mile, which only takes two minutes, and leave a p- positive review for the book ’cause you read it and loved it, and that you’re just slowly building relationships. But relationships aren’t science.

It’s kinda messy. But at the same time, some people feel bad about doing things like, “Okay, I built my Dream 100, and now I’m putting these people in a spreadsheet or in a CRM, and I’m, like, kinda tracking what I’m doing.” Some people feel like that feels like it’s kinda weird or whatever.

But no, you’re just trying to stay organized ’cause you’re literally trying to develop business relationships with 100 people, which is really hard. There’s a concept called Dunbar’s number, which is that a human being can actually only maintain, with the way our brain works, 140 relationships, which in the old world was, like, kind of the maximum size of a tribe or a group of people.

But then as things evolve, like civilizations and societies and the internet, we live in a world now where if you think about social media, like I, I probably have 3,000 Facebook friends and, o- over the course of LifterLMS, 145,000 people have opted into our email list. I can’t the human brain can’t manage all that.

So it’s– all I’m saying is it’s cool to use tools to keep up with accelerating times. But in terms of using AI for relationship marketing, if we use the Dream 100 example, AI could help you come up with that Dream 100 list. Like you might come up with 12 or 25 or 50, but then now that it can see the types of people you’re finding, it can be li- it could propose 200 more, and then you could filter down to the 100 that you think you wanna do.

Another thing with relationship marketing is events So for example everybody– I, I’m more of an introvert, right? So I don’t… conferences drain me, as an example, and I actually prefer the smaller, like 50 to 200-person conference. But there’s– I met you at a conference. My business- 

Alex Panagis: After knowing each other for a while through the internet, but 

Chris Badgett: yeah.

Yeah. Yes, which is the loose internet- Yeah … like all these- Yeah … connections. And then our lead developer, Brian Hogg, I met at a conference in Mexico m- many years ago. Current business partners, Jason and Kim Coleman, I met at a conference. Getting outside of your office and from behind the computer and going out to the world, again, with a recipro- reciprocity and open mind mindset.

Just add value, build connections, break bread together, introduce yourself even try to put on a an event yourself. And maybe you’re trying to develop relationships, but you’re also helping hold the space for other people to connect to each other. And, when it comes to, like in the online community world, which we’ll get into in another session, I just wanna put out a word of caution.

You don’t want to over-AI your relationships. So a, a simple example of that would be if you have a Facebook group or you have an online community on your website, don’t just turn it over to AI to be your social media manager. ‘Cause it could help. It could surface things and like kinda, “Hey, you should probably respond to this one,” or, “Hey I need some ideas to get my community engaged.”

But don’t just like hand relationships to AI. It’s almost the most important area for human in the loop. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think, like even the– not to push back on what you’re saying, ’cause you’re saying like when you’re doing the Dream 100, to use AI to help if you get to a point where you can’t find any more.

But in a way, that’s like the type of exercise where Ideally, depending on, how new you are in the industry you’re in, you should be able to think of like at least 50 companies where they’re like an ideal, like fit for what you’re doing and who you’d like to go after without having to rely on other tools, ’cause you have some understanding and follow people in the industry and know of the companies in the industry.

So I think like there are, again, like with the relationship aspect, there’s like certain like strategic things where it’s ultimately you having to make a decision like is this a good fit client or not, or potential customer? And then, yeah, like the next thing that you wanna focus on here from my understanding is the sales and how you can use there’s so much, like from a software and tool standpoint, I think it was Gong, which did the sales intelligence like product with reviewing sales call transcripts to find out like common questions that customers would ask and things that people would like salespeople would say that get people to convert.

I think it’s like a– funny now looking back, because this is now something that basically all of us do using our meeting recorders and feeding it to our AI company brain so that it actually all lives in one place and it understands how often something has come up. So yeah.

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Yeah. So the first thing I’ll say is, to the uninitiated, people sometimes think that sales and marketing are the same thing, and they’re not.

They’re completely different. They do blur and overlap near the conversion point, if you will. And some of, like outbound marketing it might be a collaboration between marketing and sales, but sales is a, a very different thing. And the way I like to teach sales to somebody, and this is for education entrepreneurs in particular, they tend to be stronger in the expert hat and the the teaching hat, but sometimes weaker on the entrepreneurship and technology hat.

Though, but though it depends, like if somebody’s selling sales training, they’re already good at sales, they may need help with the technology or something else. But the way sales really clicked for me is when I understood a concept called conversion tools. So conversion just means, closing a sale, and there’s different types of conversions.

But in terms of a sales conversion, that’s when money comes out, goes through the internet or by hand or by check or wire or whatever, and the sale is closed. And sales has a bad rap there’s words like high ticket closer or, in the car industry as an example, which always has a bad rap.

It’s just broken in the sense in general. I know there’s good car sales folks out there, but many people have had a bad experience getting closed at the dealership. But conversion tools is the mechanism of which the sale is generated. And depending upon the price point of what you’re charging, different conversion tools make sense for you and your business.

And I’ll give some rough numbers here. If you have a lower priced course or membership, what we would call low ticket, you need a low touch, no touch sales conversion tool, and I’ll give examples of that. But just to get through the price points, if you’re getting up in, let’s say, the five hundred dollars to two thousand dollars, you can do a group sales conversion tool.

And then once you get into high ticket, which is like in general two thousand dollars or higher That’s high-ticket sales. That’s where an actual sales team or sales, one-on-one sales conversation is more required. Typically, people don’t pull out $30,000 on their credit card to join a high-end coaching program, so you actually need a sales team.

So first, know your lane. Don’t try to do hi- hire a sales team when your product costs 200 bucks. And if you’re s- you’re in the mid-market, y- you don’t wanna do no touch when it does sometimes take some conversation to close a $2,000 sale. And if you’re high-ticket, don’t think a single sales page is gonna work for you.

So to give some examples in low… What low touch, no touch means is Synchronous or at the same time communication isn’t necessary, or it’s very minimal with something like a email Q&A, we call that pre-sales email, is that’s all you need, and that’s what works at your price point. And in the mid-market, that’s things like, let’s say, $2,000 price point.

We need more touch in there, which means the you might need a sales presentation, but you’re not charging enough that you have a salesperson get on a plane and fly and give a custom presentation in a boardroom. You leverage tools like webinars and, online events. People register, you add value, not just sell.

And there’s a whole, way to do webinars that are totally non-pushy, value-adding, and also convert really well. And then the high-end sales is a completely different beast. That’s what people mean when they say things like enterprise sales or you’re on a website and it says, “Call for price.”

Book a meeting. That’s … Y- you’re getting into high-ticket land. But j- just to weave AI into that, I’ll get into that in a second, but go ahead with what you were thinking. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I was just gonna say, another advantage of doing that is if you do, let’s say you have a cheaper course, let’s say 599, which is not cheap by any means depending where you are in the world.

But if you then get on a call with people in order to sell that, and you do one-on-one calls, you set a, I think, a poor expectation because… And I’ve been sold to on coaching programs like this, which were relatively expensive, where they did loads of pre-sales work that was high touch, but for a program that was ultimately not high touch at all.

So then that sets a, in my opinion a huge expectation gap. So i- in a way, while it might be tempting, if you can and you have the time early on to do the one-on-one sales call and personalized demos for people, it, in a way, doesn’t make sense to do that because you’re then gonna set the expectation when the person becomes a customer that obviously now they’ve paid you, so why wouldn’t you get on a call with them again, and why wouldn’t you provide that one-on-one help?

So I think it’s useful from that point of view as well. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And one pro tip I just wanna put out there, if you’re new and just starting Break all the rules. I recommend acting like enterprise salesperson, even if you have a low-ticket offer, ’cause you need to feedback loop. If you just put up a, a landing page and a Buy Now button and and you’re, nothing’s happening you need to open up the feedback loop.

And what I mean by break the rules is in the early days- Yeah … one-on-one is key, but use these kind of levels to know where you need to end up. And feel free to break the rules at times. But like Alex said you have to manage expectations. If you sell so hard and it’s so great and you have a $10 course, and they’re like…

And they have your phone number they’re gonna expect a lot for $10. So it’s not really their fault. It’s your fault as the entrepreneur for not setting the expectations correctly and overselling in a way. But in terms of weaving AI into this, sales is really a, a conversation, and AI can help you flesh it out.

So even with a landing page A sales page, as it’s called, what you’re doing is you’re actually having a conversation in the mind of your prospect. They come with questions, they read, and they’re kind– Your, your words on the screen are basically having that conversation, and AI can help you figure that out.

So we could probably do a, a jam session on here on what makes a good sales page, particularly for somebody who doesn’t have a background in marketing or copywriting and, Robert Cialdini and things like that. So a good sales page, and this is where, you could take what you’re listening to here and create an AI skill in your AI to help you.

You could call it the sales page generator skill AI, ChatGPT or whoever, interview me until you’re 95% sure you have everything you need to make a great sales page and and then go from that and use the sales page generator skill, which is gonna… The re- This is j- I’m just trying to teach people about skills here.

By giving the AI some bumpers and some things to look for, it’s not gonna just in general create a sales page. It’s gonna create a great sales page. So let’s give people some things. This is– Like, studying sales page creation, even if you’re mid-market or plan on doing one-on-one high-ticket sales, the act of learning how to write a great sales page, in my opinion, is one of the most fundamental principles or skills of sales.

So a great s- And so I’ll give you my pro tips. Before AI, I would open up a text editor with no formatting, like a note-taking app, ’cause you can get distracted. You’re like, “Oh, we should put a video here. This, this headline should be bigger.” I’m like, “No, just go straight to the words first.” That’s why I strip out all the formatting and everything.

But what I’m trying to get are the components of a good sales page, so which starts with a headline. And this isn’t an exact science. There’s different frameworks, but there’s a headline which has what’s known as a, a hook in it a subheadline which kind of expands on the promise. So a, a great sales page, basically the– what you’re looking at, every component mo- compels the person to go to the next component and basically be sold to.

And if you’ve done your customer avatar work, it should feel like a great experience. So just spitballing here, we got our headline, our subheadline. I personally like to do a video sales letter next, wh-which brings in the likability, the human connection. Oh, there’s a real human here. It’s not just words on the page.

So that’s a In general, 45-second to two-minute video perhaps, talking head, so you’re humanizing it. So this is like the scale thing. Yeah, you could get on a plane and have that conversation in person, but you’re doing what you can do at a lower price point with a video version of yourself, which by the way, is infinitely scalable.

A thousand people could be watching the video at the same time. But then below the video, you have some things like social proof, which is another Cialdini concept. So it could be a testimonial or a collection of testimonials. Within Cialdini, there’s also another thing that’s different from social proof, which is just called proof, which is a whenever you saw those old TV commercials about where a doctor in a white coat makes a claim about something, that’s like proof.

The white coat is like authority. There’s a lot of detail into it. I could nerd out forever. But so we’ve got some testimonials. We’ve got trusted by these brands, works with these other fra- famous brands or whatever. Like these are all like proof components. And then we get into benefits. So there’s different frameworks in copywriting.

One of my favorites is feature advantage benefit. It’s called FAB. So like a feature advantage benefit of like a, a coaching program could be something like the feature is a weekly live training on Zoom. That’s the feature. The advantage is so you get the most up-to-date training in this part of what we do, and the benefit is so that, you can lose 20 pounds, find the love of your life, or make a six-figure income, something like that.

I’m talking in generalities, but that’s how you frame the benefits. Then the next section is what I call what’s in the box. So this is where you put in like what’s included in inside here. ‘Cause we s- we throw these words around like, “Oh, it’s a membership. It’s a coaching program. It’s a course.”

But what’s included? Do I get templates? Do I get live calls? Do I get, how many courses are in here? Is there one? Is there 57? Is there a community aspect? So it’s like, what’s in the box? Social proof is something you like sprinkle everywhere. So then like below that, I’d probably put some more social proof then I would put the call to action, which is like a buy now button.

In LifterLMS, we call that an access plan. And then below that, we do something called a risk reversal, also known as a guarantee. So that’s something like 30 days, 100% money back guarantee. It’s called a risk reversal because r- removing risk helps close sales. So if you really believe in your product, I’m a huge fan of the 100% time boxed, no questions asked, money back guarantee.

I don’t want your money if this isn’t a fit for you, and I believe in it so much, I’m willing to sell it to you, but you can get 100% refund if it– you find out it’s not for you in the first 30 days. So that’s the anatomy of a sales page. AI can help you with some of that stuff. Like for example, if you’re already in business and you have AI connected to your emails and you haven’t been like really capturing testimonials, you could just send AI out like, “Hey, read five years of emails and see if you find any testimonial, like relevant compliments or content that you can then repurpose.”

Pro tip there, it is good to ask for permission when you publish somebody’s private communication particularly if you’re gonna put like their face or headshot beside it and stuff like that but AI can help with all those pieces, but what would you add to the anatomy of a sales page as a conversion tool?

Alex Panagis: I think, the main thing I would add is doing all of those things well is an art form, and it’s har- it’s a mix of art and science, but the main thing I would say is the positioning and also experimentation of d- don’t get hung up on doing the perfect sales page, especially initially.

Experiment with different angles of positioning. I find myself doing that a lot. I’ll create different versions of a landing page, and without saying that this is what I’m doing to people, I’ll sh- share the different versions with different people to get feedback spec- from specific people I want feedback on.

And then often what I’ll do is I’ll share the other versions o- once they’ve given feedback on the first version to see if it, the idea just clicks more. So that would be my main thing is there is a certain number of assumptions that… aI will make a lot of assumptions, then you as a human, as the expert, can make other and probably more assumptions more accurately than AI will be able to make.

But then at the end of the day, the customer’s gonna see it completely differently. We get tunnel visioned when we work in an industry for a really long time, that we think that things that are import- like, non-obvious to the end user, that we j- we are just like yeah, obviously.” The main example that comes to mind now on the spot is the 30-day money-back guarantee.

A lot of companies offer that, but they just don’t put it front and center on the sales page. And they’re like yeah, obviously.” You have a 14-day or a 30-day wi- right of withdrawal, and in some countries that’s even required to offer. So why not use it in the marketing? If you’re, if in Europe you’re required to have I believe it’s 14 days right of withdrawal why not just use that as something, even if it is a requirement, use that as something that you put front and center to remind people like, yes, but look, you’re taking up your…

taking a bet is a perhaps a bold way of saying it, but you’re basically going out on a limb to that this is the right purchase decision, and if it’s an extremely high-ticket offer es- especially, at that point, you want to reassure them, like, that you’re gonna be there you’re gonna be able to refund them if they’re not 100% happy.

And I think the other thing I’ll just s- say on the money-back guarantee, I think some companies fight the feedback r- or the money-back guarantee requests, and I think that’s a ver- very much a negative thing that will leave people with a bad taste in their mouth. If somebody went through the decision to buy something, and then very quickly or before they see the value ask for money back, the…

I al- in almost all cases, if it… obviously, if it’s within the period, I would just offer it. I wouldn’t push back. And then in the time once you’ve offered it, ask them why or whether there was something that would change it, or again, maybe do some price research at that point. But don’t use it as an opportunity before offering the refund.

I’ve gone through that with a couple of companies. They’ll be like, “Before we issue the refund what was it about the experience?” And it’s I’m happy to give that, but just issue the refund, and then I’ll even get on a call and do feedback with why I just wasn’t happy with where the product is.

Just to be mindful of time, u- unless you have something else that you wanted to add to that I was gonna suggest we move on to the AI and operations side of things. 

Chris Badgett: One more just counterintuitive tip that almost nobody does that I think is the highest leverage thing for sales pages is to actually do that before you create your program, because it forces you to figure out You’re- you’ve done your avatar research.

You know what their three primary pain points and the benefits you wanna create. The what’s in the box is very important ’cause people just gloss over the details. It also forces you to figure out your price point, because if you’re putting all this stuff you’ve dreamed up in your head of what you want in the box, and you haven’t really studied pricing or anything you’ll teach yourself the lesson of “Hey, there’s no way I could deliver all that for $200, so maybe this is a $2,000 thing.

Or if I wanna do a cheaper thing, I n- I need to remove some of these things.” So it’s like a forcing function to force you to come up with your offer basically. Yeah. 

Alex Panagis: I just, and I know you said we’re gonna move on for the sake of time, but yeah, like that, that brings up I won’t go into specifics for the sake of time, but yeah, one thing I find myself doing more and more, and that’s partially because AI can lead you in the wrong direction like very quickly, is to do customer research before you actually do the thing, and sometimes don’t even make it obvious that you’ve not started doing the thing.

I’ve already made a start on it, but like just yesterday you saw me sitting down with your business partner, Jason, and we were talking about some AI thing and direction that I’ve like already started working on. But then I’ve reached the point where I’m like, “Wait, let me like take a step back instead of just continuing like full steam ahead and building that like new feature for a product that we are working on.

Let me actually ask somebody which is potentially a good customer or user, or also the type of person that would build that product themself. Does the positioning resonate with them? Does the– Like is the product the something that they would use, or this feature something that they would use?” To understand before I’ve actually built the thing.

And I think like the, the same thing applies to services, coaching and courses definitely. So yeah, I think now that’s for the sake of-

Chris Badgett: I just- Okay … wanna add one more, which is the concept of pre-selling. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So y- this is why you should do the sales page first. You should literally sell the product before it exists, which sounds weird.

But even in the very beginning of LifterLMS in 2014 we sold it before it was ready. We already knew we were gonna like work on it, and those people are like, they got a great price. They got the ability to influence the product early and have an open ear to feature requests and things like that.

So y- if you do the sales page first and you actually pre-sell it, you’re vali- validating that this is a good idea. And it, if you do that and nobody buys, that’s a good signal you should like totally pivot the offer, and you just save yourself tons of time, money, and life energy. So I’m a big fan of pre-selling.

Alex Panagis: Awesome. So moving on to AI and operations, I think you have a big idea that you wanna start with. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, so as an entrepreneur, we do a lot of things, but, the main things are marketing, sales, and then actually running the business or operations. And like I said, the, our course or coaching program or certification or continuing education business, whatever it is, that’s the product.

But you’re also building a business product. So inside of operations are things like building a team, if you’re moving and have the finances and ability to do that. You have to manage the team, you have to lead the team. Then there’s project management, like staying organized, ’cause the more advanced your business gets, it’s gonna kinda expand out.

You have to do bookkeeping, accounting, finance. You have customer support. You’re not just selling, you also have to do delivery and deliver the promise that you, you promised in your marketing. You have to build the product itself, which may require a wide variety of skill sets which AI can help you with.

But you might need to hire team members or a subcontractor, and then you need to manage those relationships, and who’s gonna do, this part or that part. So that’s operations. That’s the business product, and if You know, there’s a great book called Good to Great or Built to Sell.

I’m forgetting which one it is, but if you wanna ever be able to sell your business, it needs to have a strong not just product, but operating system behind that. And it– every day isn’t just everybody winging it at the company. There’s systems. And AI, by the way, is great at systems. So the operations load particularly, that’s the catch 22.

All right, I built a sales page. I pre-sold it. People bought. I got super busy, and I actually built some courses and memberships or certification programs inside. I got all this stuff together, and now I got all these people, and I’m like, customers who need stuff, and I’m really overwhelmed. And that puts a lot of pressure, particularly on the founder if you’re a one-person show.

It’s like becoming a parent where you, where for the first time you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I have another full-time job.” Operations is like that. My tip here with AI is to connect AI to as much as you can so that it can reduce the operational load and the overwhelm. So calendar integration, analytics, your help desk, like I mentioned in another episode, where the AI is like the first line of customer support, and it drafts responses before the humans even show up.

And one of… one of the interesting things at LifterLMS is we have a concept called a escalation, which is where, let’s say a support team member is doing tech support, and they have a question that they need to rope in a senior developer to look at. It used to be in our internal communication tool, the support rep would ask the lead developer like, “Hey, does– how does LifterLMS work in this way?”

Or whatever. But I’ve watched it happen. It started slow, and then it went like a tsunami where the support team member just asks Maurice, our agent, gets a better, faster answer. And what I mean by better is if you ask a developer or the founder or whatever, they’re so busy that they might have even forgot.

“Oh, I don’t even remember what we did there or exactly how that works.” But the AI knows ’cause it’s plugged into everything. It can see every line of code. So you get AI integrated in your learning management system. So one of the coolest things we did recently, when we look at operations in the business product- our business kinda has its own documentation.

You mentioned SOPs earlier, which stands for standard operating procedures. I call them business playbooks as well. So I- we have a whole site at our company called just team.lifterlms.com. It’s not available to the public. We actually have a feature in Lifter if you wanna create this kind of site to put the your business operating system inside Lifter and make it not publicly available.

So that’s like a… It’s called internal training. So like you– let’s say you hire a new team member, and they’re like “Hey, how’s it going? What do I do?” So in the old world, you would take a new team member and you would say, “All right, you’re gonna shadow Bob for five months and just figure out what Bob does.”

But when you actually document what you do and you structure it systematically inside your learning management system, it’s like a LMS for your company, and that’s super helpful. And one thing you can do with AI, the problem with creating standard operating procedures or business playbooks is it– if you’re a busy founder, as an example, or course creator, you’re like, “I really don’t have time for that,” and then it just doesn’t get prioritized.

But you can use an AI tool to b- to “Hey, watch me do this,” or, “This is how I did this.” Create a s- standard operating procedure so a new team member… Or I could pull somebody off the street, put them in this chair in front of this computer or whatever, and they would be able to review the process and execute on that.

So a lot of businesses do not document anything. It’s It’s like the sales page thing where people often do it at the end, but it’s so much better if you do it at the beginning. If you’re– Usually it takes a founder being like I can’t. I’ve gotten this question a million times,” and then I get on a call with a team member and they’re…

“i’m just repeating myself. I really need to systematize it.” And then they build the process. But if you can do it either at the beginning or early, like the second time you get the same question or you’re innovating and creating, say as a coach. Like what happens to successful coaches is they will bring in other coaches to help support, and that’s one of the ways they scale, particularly if it’s in the mid-market or higher-end price points.

They can’t do it all alone, so you have to train coaches on how to coach, and that’s like a whole other job. But if you systematize it and use AI to help systematize what you do. The problem is, if like you said, sales page design is a art and a science, and it’s hard to systematize it.

But what we’re doing in our conversation when we’re talking about sales pages is we’re actually sharing the system or the science part of it that somebody could take and then use. Developing those internal playbooks and using AI to get unstuck is so key 

Alex Panagis: I’m just gonna… I think for the companies that don’t document or the individual entrepreneurs that don’t document very much yet, I’ll just add that there’s an entire startup which is, I believe their ultimate objective is to get into robotics, but their current business is solely focused on having humans wear cameras to watch how they do things.

So they have Basically, they pay electricians, plumbers and people all over the world, cleaners all over the world, with the objective of having AI shadow what they do, and having basically data on how they do things so that they can use that to eventually train robots. And, think of that what you will.

Some people will think that’s a bit of a doomsday scenario. But it applied to, in a more more normal sense to a tech business or to a course business where you’re doing something on the laptop anyway, and you can have a, very easily do things and have use AI to therefore document what you do so that you can, get that documentation ready.

I think a big This may or be jumping ahead slightly, so stop me if you want. But one of my things that I think about a lot is that there are good employees that resist using AI, and they do so for very rational reasons. One of the m- the main reasons there is fear of replacement or unclear incentives.

A company trying to automate away a process, like we’ve spoken about in the earlier episodes in this serie- series where when we find extra time. So for example, me saying I don’t convert the LifterLMS weekly newsletter from a Google Doc to the active campaign markup. For you as a business owner and for me my thought is like, “Okay, great.”

Because I’m not doing that, I have more time to do stuff that is important and requires my manual l- effort and labor still. So as long as the… I think as long as you’re operating with that mindset you can put the fear of replacement and unclear incentives issues to rest And then the other thing is no t- little time to learn.

Like as as entrepreneurs, we’re usually in the business, you’re likely the person that’s at the forefront of how to use the AI tools because you’re the one building them, you’re the one experimenting with them the most, and if the AI tool makes mistakes but you’re, you as the entrepreneur are the one using them, it’s not as much of an issue.

Whereas if you’d have an employee that used AI and screwed something up, it becomes more of an issue because then it’s oh, they weren’t having the level of oversight required. So I think working on adoption is like a with AI is a really important part if you don’t want– Like essentially, if you want to take your team with you and make sure that they are leveling up at the same rate that you are by becoming faster, more efficient, and better with AI.

And there’s varying different opinions. I’m actually curious what your thought is. Like some– Like I, I think it’s Elon Musk famously doesn’t believe in the concept of change management at all. For anyone to have a controversial opinion, of course it would be him. But basically his mindset is like the whole theory of like having people worry or like HR think about oh yes, now this whole or like this whole process is changing in bigger organizations or supporting people to deal with the change shouldn’t be required because the people that should be with you are just good enough and will be able to deal with the change, and otherwise you need to hire new people.

I have a much, I think, a much more mellow like sense and approach, and I don’t think as, brutal of an approach is required in the, the businesses that we work with. Which is that you can like, to an extent, I think there are like certain employees which can be far more resistant, and it’s just difficult because they wanna bury their head in their sand, in the sand as opposed to adapt.

And the main last thing I’ll add as well, which I think about a lot, is in each company, it’s really good to have a c– depending on the size, obviously, but it’s good to have some people that are very skeptical and dislike using AI because it will then challenge… You’ll have it can be– Some leaders hate that, but I think I, I enjoy it because you’ll get on a call, and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I just did this like landing page,” and you’ll share stuff for review.

And those are usually the people that will be able to pick it apart with the most objective approach. Now, it’s somewhat frustrating because those tend to also be the people in the team that then don’t want to become more efficient with AI. But I think there’s an, there, there is like a lesson in there of how to structure an organization in an age where you have AI.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, just to land the plane, it’s interesting ’cause sales is in this conversation, but we’re talking about operations. When it comes to AI adoption inside of a company, you have to sell it, which it means if somebody’s AI resistant, which I appreciate, us, or at least at my age and having kids and being a parent, I see a younger generation that is really AI resistant, like in my kids’ age, and I’m really interested in that issue, and I’m sure they have valid points.

And there’s, there are risks and things to worry about that are legitimate. But like in an organization you kinda have to sell it. And if we go back to everything we’ve talked about sales, you have to build a relationship with the team member. You need to create content to help them learn how to use it, so it’s not as scary, particularly like if they’re not non-technical.

And you have to g- do outbound and go talk to them and do some training. You have to kinda create a sales page style of benefits. “Hey, if you do this, this will make the part about your job that’s repetitive, that you don’t like, automated, which then frees you up to be in your genius zone and do that.”

So you have to sell it. The last thing I’ll add is that the crazy thing, and this is kinda like the expert hat, if you will, is that we’re all walking around with a black box. A- And as an education entrepreneur, we’re so close to our strengths as entrepreneurs that we don’t realize, in general, we have above average systems thinking, pattern matching, risk-taking, and to expect like everybody on the team to have that same like kinda entrepreneur personality, you have to give people grace.

And by the way, they have other strengths you don’t have, like follow-through. They’re not as ADD or whatever the issue is. They may be more technical, may be more creative, artistic, whatever. But that’s why in a perfect world, if everybody is excelling or rating with AI and figuring out the systems and the patterns in their black boxes, and that makes it into the business product- when it gets documented or whatever, it’s, that’s how you create an incredible asset.

But any final thoughts from you on AI for operations? 

Alex Panagis: No, I think the main thing I’ll think of is you really want AI to be a multiplier. And a- again, not to cite the same thing over and over, but it comes back to the Hidden Multiplier book. I think that the main hook of that book is how to get more out of your existing team or with your existing team and product.

It’s like you don’t… U- unless you’re at a point where you really need to rethink everything and you want to change up the team. But generally speaking, if you have a business that’s already working, your idea and your whole the way you’re going to roll out AI and adopt it should be centered around how do I get more out of the people.

And I think your point is right. At the end of the day, you just need to work with the people. And we also need to be more as business owners and entrepreneurs, generally, you struggle with the element of being impatient and wanting to micromanage and seeing that thing over and over of people saying I could have just done it myself.

In the time I’ve had to explain it, I might as well have just used AI.” But that, in a way, isn’t the problem ’cause you still– Isn’t the point, ’cause you still want people to own and have ownership of a certain responsibility in the company, and you want the people to have the– Again, like you say, we are very prone to getting carried away by doing the new thing, and we need to keep our time freed up.

So I like to now that we have AI as a tool, it’s really nice to be able to get an initiative off the ground, like an outbound campaign, for example, and then the ongoing work related to the outbound campaign so that I can start the new initiative and get the new initiative off the ground. I can now explain how to continue doing that to a team member, which we’re, is something that we’re doing at LifterLMS, is a great very relevant example at the moment.

But that applies to everything. You really– A- and also goes back to the whole thing, like 10, 90, t- sorry, 10/80/10, where you spend time in the beginning, and it’s applying through through the lens of operations as well, in my opinion. 

Chris Badgett: And the last thing I just wanted to say, it’s like the Navy SEALs.

They have a saying, “Slow is smooth is fast.” But if you actually look at how an elite military operator operating in a team works, that whole system is full of standard operating procedures, training. They use technology to do incredible things. So you, what you’re doing with AI as a technology is you’re creating…

You wanna try to create a Navy SEAL style organization, but in order to do that, you have to slow down- 

… 

Chris Badgett: And learn new tools, experiment, deliberate practice, human connection and all that. So you have to s- actually slow down to speed up. Absolutely.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.