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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Olly Feldman, welcome to the WP Minute.
Olly Feldman (00:03)
Yeah, thank you, me.
Matt Medeiros (00:05)
Head of global sales at hosting.com. guess before I continue, hosting.com is one of our pillar sponsors. Thank you hosting.com for supporting the work that we do. ⁓ I think you and I are gonna have a great conversation. I grew up in sales, started with a car dealership. My family owned a bunch of car dealerships and then I went on to start an agency, ran that for a decade, worked at an enterprise hosting company for about three and a half years as an accounting executive, albeit.
sales and you know whatever podcasting here I am at Gravity Forms and doing the WP minute everything is sales to me but what about you Oli what's the day to day like for you are you constantly in your CRM tracking all of your sales folks and understanding where the leads are coming from break it down for us
Olly Feldman (00:49)
Yeah, so my day is very varied. So I have teams globally across the globe. So we're in the UK, US and Australia. So obviously working varied hours, catching up with the team, doing some coaching sessions. But actually I like to spend more of my time speaking to our customers. So going with my team to their meetings with our customers, understanding what's going on in their agencies, going to lot of networking events and following up with great connections I've made at those events and really just understanding.
the agency landscapes that we can keep on top of it as a team and as a business and make sure our products are in the right place as well.
Matt Medeiros (01:24)
I'm sure the agency owner out there, especially like the boutique agency owner, two, three people wondering how to like level up their game, how to get to the bigger customer. Although not always, more money doesn't always mean better. Maybe we'll unpack that in a little while, but there are folks listening to this going, hey, I'd like to have this sort of relationship with a hosting provider ⁓ that can be a partner alongside of me. ⁓
Olly Feldman (01:38)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (01:52)
What's the mindset of an agency that you work with that says, here's how they serve customers. Here's how they think about business, right? They're not just building websites, they're doing what else? What's your thoughts on that?
Olly Feldman (02:06)
Yeah, it's a really interesting question because we see it a lot where people all have the same type of mindset and succeed and the people who are trying to succeed and they're not necessarily thinking about the mindset or way of doing it. They're trying to win that next big customer as you say. Whereas where we've seen agencies really have success and go from freelancer to one or two developers, boutique up into a bigger agency has been two areas really, which is niching down.
So really focusing on what they specialize in and who they want to specialize it for. But actually the main one is when they strip it back and start looking at their processes internally and how profitable every part of that process is, and therefore productize that offering rather than just sell everything. So they actually look at all of the services they provide to clients, who their most profitable clients are.
take the services they're providing to them and productize it in a way that is easily repeatable, almost cookie cutter. So we can resell this service, we can resell this service at a profitable price and it allows them to focus. And then you kind of get away from the, let's have a two week plan to build a proposal for a new client that we want on board that we don't win. And you perhaps do that three or four times until you win one and you've lost a lot of time. Instead, you've got a repeatable process so that pitching becomes quicker.
and then the build becomes quicker because it's all repeatable and scalable and process driven that allows you to do more volume and have more time back to actually then focus and grow.
Matt Medeiros (03:37)
By the time this episode comes out, ⁓ dear listener or viewer, there should be ⁓ another, hopefully everything goes right by the time this episode goes out. There'll be another course ⁓ at the wpminute.com slash courses. The first one that's there now is hosting decoded. It's how to pick the best WordPress hosting provider for your agency. And the next course is obviously going to forget the title because it's still being developed right now, but it's about
Olly Feldman (03:45)
Hahaha
Matt Medeiros (04:06)
scoping WordPress projects and some of the stuff that Ollie just mentioned are in actually in both of these courses where there's a lot of folks in the in the agency game they go I gotta build some like in order to move up I must build something custom it must be so unique and so in-depth to get the bigger dollars like that's the only way to go about it but what I want to unpack is what Ollie mentioned about process
I say this all the time as a recovering agency owner of a decade, like honing down on the things that you do really good. Like I always say the core competency of the agency and putting that into a repeatable package. doesn't, it doesn't push you into retail. If that phrase makes sense, it doesn't push you into, you're just this place that does this thing over and over again. It's not like a warehouse of websites, but it does focus ⁓ the customer's attention.
so they understand where your core competency is. And it focuses your team's attention into like, yeah man, 80 % of the projects, this is how we react. 20 % of the projects, we do a different thing. Your thoughts from Boots on the Ground, Ollie, on getting somebody to get over that, like, oh, I don't wanna create a done for you service, I don't wanna create this retail offering, I wanna be bespoke and custom and hands on. What are your thoughts?
Olly Feldman (05:32)
Yeah, I mean, I like to refer to it as moving from a construction site to a bakery where you have set recipes, set ways of doing things. Yes, you can customize it and tweak it and change it, but you've got your core range of products that you're just making all the time. And that also allows you to predictably scale because you know, ⁓ when we have five more of these products, we need another developer or we need another ops manager or whatever it may be. But the key thing that I see is it allows you to show the value of what you're offering and allow the customer to understand it, which is you're saying there.
And think that's the hardest piece that I've seen agency owners try to figure out is that understanding actually we need to sell on the value, not on the technicality of what we can build and the features that we can add into it. They need to focus on more of the value and what all those features and technicalities are going to give you as a brand that's working with our agency. And how we've seen them get over it is more than not working with someone who's done it before. So working with a mentor, joining an agency peer group where they're going to go to
you know, a no holds barred boardroom session where you speak with other agency owners, talking about your problems, where you want to go and being shown real world experience. I mean, we do that a lot of our customers as well, where I've been working with agencies for 15 years. And so we've seen the ups, we've seen the downs, we've seen what's worked and what's not. So we can start to have that conversation with them and let them see what's possible. And then we'll typically direct them to an agency networking group or a peer support group or mentors who can then, you know, give them that.
hands-on experience to get them up to that next stage.
Matt Medeiros (07:04)
Yeah. There's oftentimes everybody starts at different stages in, let's say, their agency career. Of course, we have AI. We're going to talk about AI in a little while to help level up and get some of this expertise, which I say, if I had AI when I was running an agency, oh, boy, like, same thing, like, when I think if I had AI when I was in college, boy, my GBA would be amazing.
Olly Feldman (07:23)
Ha
Mm-hmm.
Just be flying,
yeah.
Matt Medeiros (07:34)
I know we'll talk about that in a moment, but I think a lot of people forget. to be fair, it's not that they forget, they're just under so much pressure to survive in the early days and the latter days of running an agency. Like they gotta get that project. That's how they feed themselves and maybe they're a small team of people. So I totally get the lack of oversight, but sales and marketing, like the packaging, the presenting, like you can...
Olly Feldman (07:45)
Yes.
Matt Medeiros (08:00)
fulfill this thing and especially with AI today, like a lot of people can be able to fulfill these things. But can you build that rapport and that trust ⁓ in that sales process to get that customer say, yes, this is the agency we're going to sign with because of X, Y and Z. What do you think? Where does trust land for you in that sales process ⁓ as the agency owner and then maybe as the hosting company as well?
Olly Feldman (08:25)
Yeah, I think it's hugely important. And I think that's why so many agencies when they're starting out and actually even when they get pretty big are still founder led sales because that's the person who is the business. And so they come across in the right way to build that rapport and give the trust. But it can be really hard, especially where a lot of boutique or small agencies are set up where someone leaves an agency. could be a developer, it could be a designer.
where they start doing enough freelance work on the side and go, you know what, I'm going to set up my own agency and they start and they don't have those skills. I think that's where they can really struggle in the early days because they're not used to building rapport with people and having to go and have these conversations. And I often will implore them to go and study, go and study some sales, study how to build trust and rapport with people because it makes such a big difference, particularly in the early days. If you haven't been in that client facing role and you've been in the background as a developer, it makes such a difference.
and then investing in your own team as you get bigger. So you want to move away from founder led sales and create a scalable, repeatable processes in the agency. You need to then empower your staff to do the same thing. So it's the right training and the right guidelines really in playbooks that they follow through to build that trust. How we do it here at hosting.com is very similar. I all of our account managers are extremely well-trained. been in this industry for a long time.
They're not sort of fresh out of college or their first job and coming in here. We have got experienced people. We do have those sorts of staff members in different sales teams handling different things. And of course they can move between teams within the business. So we have experienced people who know the industry, know the product and know agencies and have worked with agencies for many years. And then the main focus is we are consultative. So the one thing I do not want my team to be doing is selling. They're not.
car salesmen, they're not out there to try and hammer as many deals as possible. It's about building relationships with agencies so that we are there and trusted when they have a problem. Because when we speak to an agency, nine times out of 10, 10 times out 10, they'll have hosting in place. And they're probably very happy with it and it's probably doing a very good job for them. But at some point, they'll come across a problem, be it scalability, where they're getting bigger, be it support, or be it that they just want to speed up the sites or improve security.
We've then positioned ourselves as a trusted partner already through our conversations and our meetings and networking events that when the time's right, they then reach out to us and we have that conversation to onboard them. Of course, it goes the other way as well, where we reach out to someone and they onboard differently, but it's very much relationship-led and then consultative. So understanding their pain points and surfacing them because we work with thousands of agencies, we understand the pain points so we can help to surface those pain points for them.
and then finding the right solution to solve those pain points.
Matt Medeiros (11:20)
There's a duality here that I want to talk about the freelance the agency owner and then I want to talk about salespeople at hosting comm because I have feedback there as the agency owner this is this is why like we were talking earlier about like process and you know Packaging up a solution and having like a ready done for you turnkeys kind of solution Is this allows you to like really refine the sales pitch? You know pre sales process the sales pitch
Olly Feldman (11:24)
Mmm. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (11:48)
the core competencies, whatever. And it can lead people down a path of, ⁓ you know, understanding of the customer. So for example, running my agency, like, you know, the biggest project, now remember this is in the thick of things running my agency was about 15, 20 years ago, something like that. But the projects back then, all WordPress, you my biggest project back then was probably like 75K. We had recurring... ⁓
Olly Feldman (11:58)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (12:18)
⁓ Retainer fees, you know our biggest clients maybe over their span of their retainership was maybe three hundred to half a million dollars and spend with us for a few years or whatever so like sizable projects, but then when I got to a company called page Lee where I worked for a few years I saw things on the other side of the fence where I was like, wow
There are a lot bigger projects happening ⁓ at this enterprise level. Like I thought I was in the enterprise. no, no, no. Like I realized like, there's this whole other world here. as a new salesperson, promise I'm getting to the question, as a new salesperson, what I realized was, ⁓ I just didn't know anything about like big media or higher ed or government websites. And once I knew that process and once I could understand that as a salesperson at Pagerly,
Olly Feldman (12:38)
Yeah. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (13:07)
and understand how they bought websites, which is the underlining, like how they bought websites and agency projects, the whole thing unlocked. It's so few about like, what plugin are you using versus like, do you know how to speak to this customer and understand their buying process? And that's when things unlocked. This is a long loaded question, but how do you...
How do you get your own agent, your own sales folks to think that way? And how do you think an agency can like go down that?
Olly Feldman (13:40)
Really, really good question. Our answer for us first, the key is staying up to date with what's going on in the agency world. Having so many agency clients that we're speaking to and have great relationships to, and we start to understand any changes that are going on in their business. But the number one way that the team does this is being part of the agency community. So we both sponsor events, put on events, and attend a lot of events. And that doesn't mean we're attending just to try and win new customers and get leads.
There's events that I have my team event purely for learning. So it could be an ops event where they're talking through the struggles in an ops team and how to solve them. And they start to see that picture and they're starting to hear the stories of what these ops leaders are going through. The same from a development point of view, the same from an MD founder point of view, what struggles are they seeing because it's a different struggle that the ops leader to the dev leader to the founder is seeing. And they're hearing the real stories and how they were solved. And then they'll follow up those conversations and it
You do that over many years and you have a really good pulse on what's happening in the agency world. And we're events all the time. I mean, I'm at two more events this week and I've already been to one this week. Leon and my team in the UK has got an event every day next week. And we've got a lot going on in the US and Australia as well. So we're always out in the community to really understand what's going on because it makes such a difference that when you truly understand the client you're selling to or the area you're selling into.
that you can help them surface those pain points. So I loved how you put it earlier in terms of like, do you know how you want to sell this thing or how they buy it? It's, we know what a successful agency looks like and what they're doing. And therefore we can see what's not being done right. And rather than going, you've done this wrong. It's, well, this is, you know, it's a growing pain where you are now. And actually this is, this is how you get up here and you start to surface the reasons behind it to help people understand. Cause we're not trying to start something they don't need. If they're not ready to scale up and move into that enterprise space or
into a completely different setup to what they're on, then it's not right right now and we'll have that open on this conversation as well. And then from an agency's point of view, ⁓ yeah sorry, as I say from an agency's point of view, I think this is where niching down really helps because if you're not niched down, you could be having 20 different conversations in a day with 20 different pain points they're trying to resolve and 20 different outcomes they're trying to fix, whereas if you're super niched down,
Matt Medeiros (15:45)
All right, let's put, go ahead. Nope, nope, continue, continue.
Olly Feldman (16:07)
It's always repeatable. You might have three different options that you're going down, but it's easier to show that value and easier to really understand that marketplace you're in, the vertical you're in, and therefore know the problems and how to solve them and how to lead someone to the solution. I think if you are full service and going everywhere, you then have to kind of go higher level from your verticals. know, is it an e-commerce site and they're trying to convert? Is it a SaaS product that they're trying to get signups? Or is it an informational site and it's trying to be super clear to understand and navigate and
You have to then focus on the different verticals and focus on that higher level. But I do think that's a harder sell than when you niche down and you can truly understand the marketplace and customers.
Matt Medeiros (16:46)
It's also the hardest to manage too, right? Because I think, like we were saying before, is if you're in that, if you're founder led sales, which like 99 % of like the agency starting up, that's what you are. And you're doing these quotes. I my God, I remember just the sleepless nights and going into the weekend and being like, God, I gotta build this quote for this person and I gotta think about all this stuff and I have to put it into a doc and I have to pitch it, present it. And everyone was different. I'm like, okay, what am I doing for this person?
Olly Feldman (16:48)
Yeah. Yeah.
Every agency here.
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (17:14)
If I had refined it, which I eventually did like halfway through my agency tenure and realized. But like up until that point, I was just like, this is just not going to scale. Like I can't be custom quoting everything all the time. I just don't even have the time for it. I want to put each other putting that aside. I want to put each other both sort of like in the sales hot seat. I've often, you know, obviously, ⁓ I forget what the exact motto is, but I think like the best selling is consultative selling or consultative selling, whatever.
⁓ as a somebody who's been in a sales position mostly all of his life, ⁓ myself, sometimes I, sometimes that can be a crutch and I'm curious how you balance that with your own sales team and you know, whatever, I'll call myself a seasoned salesperson or whatever. but it can also be a crutch because sometimes you're like, I had this phone call with this big enterprise, you know, I think they kind of, right, they only need to stick with Drupal, but my
Sales manager, maybe Ollie in this case might say, no, no, Matt, we need to hit quota this month. We need KPI. So I'm glad you were really consultative on that phone call. But like, where do you make that balance of like, I'm a helpful person trying to like solve your technical issue to, ⁓ we got KPI's we got to hit here. We got to hit this budget. What are your thoughts?
Olly Feldman (18:33)
Yeah, it's a really good question and it is a fine line to walk because we do not want to be car salesmen, double glazing salesmen where you're just going hard for the sale and the close. It has to be the right fit. And that's the key piece. It's actually the very first conversation rather than the last conversation. And the first conversation, we can understand timelines, what the success actually looked like, why would you be choosing to move?
and what does success look like after you've moved and understanding their entire sign off process internally contracts everything else. Because if we know that upfront, we know that we can then be harder on a close because we know what success is going to look like. We know the problems it's going to solve and that allows you to focus on the close in that way. If we have that information really loose upfront or there's certain points that stick out as actually, you know, this person's not in a position to move really, we'll have a very different type of conversation.
But the entire process is still very consultative because we're trying to understand the pain points that we can solve. Because if we can't solve them, we're never going to get to that end point of the conversation. So it's very much in that initial discovery call meeting where you need to find out as much information as possible about your influences inside the company you're selling to, who are the actual decision makers, what does the entire sign-off process look like, but most importantly, what are they trying to achieve by going through this process and what does success look like at the end of it?
Because by understanding that, not only are you being more consultative, because you're ensuring that you're meeting their timelines, their needs, and giving them the right solution, but it also allows you to close better at the end as well, so that you can manage that cycle and ensure it's not going on for six months, 12 months, two years, or never closing, and hitting KPI through that.
Matt Medeiros (20:14)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, again, another one of those huge lessons when I started getting into the enterprise. And this is a great lesson for, again, a freelancer of any size. As you start to move up and you start to get to bigger businesses, bigger brands that you're trying to sign, you know, I'll never forget selling into, I don't even remember what kind of business it was, media business or something. And I was out
was talking to the head of marketing and they were like, this is great, this is great. This is exactly what we need. We need to host with you. We need this WordPress site. We're done. Like this is it. I'm like, I got my first sale. And then they go, okay, so let me just introduce you to our procurement department. And I'm like, the procurement department? Like, what is this all about? And then it was like, fill this out, sign this form. We need to do legal. We need to do a InfoSec audits. We need to do all this stuff. And then we're to put you up. And I'm like, wait a minute, the guy just told me he was ready to sign. And they're like, no, no, no, this whole process.
Olly Feldman (20:53)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (21:08)
now has to be executed. And again, another light bulb moment, like understanding the stakeholders or the champions or influencers, as you said in the thing. ⁓ Super important and sort of like these are the muscles you start to ⁓ build up, right? Over time, agency and sales and stuff like that. Where do you see the most opportunity for selling into WordPress? Is the agency out there listening to this going, okay, I got a niche down, I need to like
build out like this turnkey solution. What is it for you and more particularly, what is it for hosting.com? Is it Woo sites? Is it membership sites, media sites? Where do you see the opportunity these days?
Olly Feldman (21:50)
It's really good question and it is evolving constantly. We have seen a really big uptake in media sites and blogger sites particularly, where the blog bit, they then turn into a WooSite. So it'll be a blogger that's coming up on social media. They have a huge media gallery that links back into everything they're doing and then they become a WooSite when they start selling merch. We're seeing that happen a lot. If you're an agency, it depends whether you want to go for cookie cutter at scale.
where you want to do volume of sites or whether you want to have less clients paying more. And that's then really where the WooSites come in because the additional benefit to a WooSite over a standard site is the maintenance plans, your recurring revenue you can get off the back of that. You you can have that client on a retainer because that website is making money. They need to ensure it stays online. They need to ensure it's updated. They'll probably be bringing in new products all the time. And that's when you can then sell those additional products through to those clients where you can build recurring revenue.
And I think as a small agency, that retainer piece, that recurring revenue is more important than winning a huge flashy project when you're trying to grow because it covers the bills. You know, I'm sure every agency founder for the first two years of their agency is struggling to sleep worrying about cashflow, worrying about the wage check coming and having to pay the staff, having to pay the rent if they've got an office. And as soon as you can get some clients and the retainers that cover all of those bills, then you can go and win the flashy project work. But I think that's...
Matt Medeiros (23:04)
Hmm.
Olly Feldman (23:18)
That's where Woo really comes in because it allows you to build out those maintenance plans at a higher level to cover your costs quicker than if you just look at media sites or anything else.
Matt Medeiros (23:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's also one of those things where, I mean, those folks, hopefully, the WooCommerce sites that you're building or consulting on, those are the folks making money. Right? So it's like, it's very easy to sort of like make that, I don't want to say trade off, but to convince them to say like, okay, you need us to build this stuff out and manage this stuff for you and so on and so forth. Partnership and leads, always a big thing, I think, in agency and hosting. Is there like a...
Olly Feldman (23:41)
Exactly.
Matt Medeiros (24:00)
workflow or way that hosting.com approaches, ⁓ what I'll say, sharing leads, you might have a different phrase for it. know, agencies have been working with you, and they're hey, we want to be a partner, but that also means, like, how can you get customers in front of us? You can't do that for every agency that you service. So, like, what's the tiers? Like, what's the step, stair step approach from, like, I'm a boutique agency to I'm a hundred person shop. Like, we're just hosting.com sort of fill those gaps.
Olly Feldman (24:28)
Yeah, really good question. So our agency partnership program is only in its first phase currently. And we have a much bigger, more in-depth plan launching in the coming months, which I'm really excited about. can't wait for that to come out. And that will be, don't want go into too much detail because it could change, but it's really exciting what's being built there. At the moment, how that will work is we do get leads very often on a daily basis, where we'll be working either with an end client of an agency and they no longer work with the agency, but the hosting is still with us.
and then they need a new agency. Or we'll oftentimes have someone who's just been hosting their own site that they've built and now they've grown big enough and they want an agency. And they'll come to us for advice of who to be introduced to. In that scenario, how we currently work is we have a list of preferred partners. So it's people who we know and have seen have done a good job, who we have a really close working relationship with. So we understand how their business works.
And from that, we know that that'd be a good fit for the lead that comes in. We will always give a minimum of three options to the person. So we never just say, hey, this is this one agency. And we do keep track of who we're passing things through to as well to keep it as varied as possible and not just have one preferred partner that everything's getting passed through to. But that's how it works at the moment. And that is a very manual process within my account management team. And they will be passing them to customers as against leads, obviously.
But the new program that's being built allows people to source the agency themselves within the platform. It's really exciting what's coming. it's... Yeah, I won't go into too much detail because it could change. we've got some exciting things coming in that space because it's such an important part of the relationship now where the agencies want as many leads as possible from the hosting provider and the leads are there. They do exist. So we want to make sure that we're giving them out in a fair way and also managing that handover really smoothly.
because we don't want it to just be, every time sometimes we write a mental email to introduce two people together, we want to make it a really smooth, nice handover process as well. Because obviously we want that hosting at the end of it for ourselves as well. So there's benefits both sides from doing so.
Matt Medeiros (26:35)
Yeah,
yeah. So a lot of the stuff that we've talked about up until this point is a lot of trust, a lot of human capital, a lot of relationship building. But as we close out, let's just talk about AI. The complete opposite. No, not the complete opposite. I mean, kind of the complete opposite. I'm curious your thoughts on maybe how you're leveraging AI on the sales side of things and then we can just dissect from there. So AI in the sales process, do you leverage it? Is it helping, not helping finding some
Olly Feldman (26:48)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (27:04)
positives or negatives, what's your take?
Olly Feldman (27:08)
Yes. So we utilize AI a lot. We've tried AI in many ways and we're going to be using AI in different ways. So I can happily run through it. So we have AI in our CRM system and we have AI on our email system. So we're a Microsoft house, we use Office 365. So we have Copilot and we have the sales version of Copilot. And what the biggest benefit to that is, is twofold. You can ask it a question.
and it has access to all of your emails, all of your company documents, your knowledge bases, and it can surface the question. It could be as simple from this particular version of Joomla, is it supported on this server that we sell? So it can be a really basic question if it's not saying we're selling that often, and it will surface the answer for them. But where we see the biggest benefit is if someone emails us, it's already brought up all the context, all of the documents we may have worked on together, the quotes we've worked on together.
And it's already suggesting how to reply to that email. If we have a meeting booked and it could be the pitch meeting, it will bring up the pitch documents we've created. It'll bring up all of the previous conversations, condense it, tell us what our previous talking points are and what our key talking points and metrics are this time. We have some custom GPTs in there, so it knows our sales processes that we go through and it'll tell the staff if they've surfaced the right information in the calls. If they haven't, it'll prompt them to surface the information on the next call or in follow-up email.
It automatically writes the follow ups for us and the action points. that's, think a lot of people are using AI in this way, particularly meeting assistants and that side of things. And that makes a big difference. And I haven't had it run as smoothly as having Copilot integrated to everything because it has access to emails and teams and documents and everything. It makes it very smooth. I use AI in team reporting. So AI builds all the reports for us every month. And obviously you can just, by using a text prompt, change the report, change the data you want to view and surface.
which as a sales leader saves hours, if not days, a month in reporting and makes a really big difference. And then an area we've tested AI and seen it not work very well was a AI outreach tool. So we have tested having like an AI SDR that is connecting and messaging people on LinkedIn. And it did great volume, but it was super low conversion rate because the messaging it was building was
clearly AI and not human fed. And that comes back to that relationship piece where it's missing the nuance of if one of my team would reach out to someone on LinkedIn, they may have picked something up off their personal LinkedIn, like, ⁓ you live in Vegas. When I was in Vegas, I went to this really cool little pub. Is it still there? A little bit of context that AI just can't match that will start a relationship and start a conversation. But we are looking at creating a new N8N process.
using Dripify and Claude and OpenAI where we create all the campaigns and we create the messaging. There's about 180 different campaign routes that someone could go down and it truly personalizes it to them and writes it as us. And actually this will be sending it as us directly as well. And it won't be sending 5,000 a day. It will be two or three messages a day done in a truly personalized way and we will approve the messages before they send as well. And that's going to make a big difference to us.
And from an agency standpoint, one of the coolest ways I've seen AI used in an agency is a Manchester-based in the UK agency, although they are actually a global agency called Butterfly Effect. And they've done a talk on this, so I'm sure they'd be happy me talking about it. But they created their own GPT that listens when they are going to a discovery meeting. So if they have a new brand that they want to pitch to, they basically have a laptop as a fifth person in the room.
and it's just listening to everything that's going on. The key part to this is that GPT has been onboarded to their company. It's gone through the full onboarding process that a new member of staff would go through. It's gone through that pitch process. It's gone through that pitch decks. It's gone through how they work, how they price things. And what this enables them to do is at the end of that discovery meeting, it's already built the pitch deck, it's priced the job, and it's all ready to go.
So instead of them having to go back to the agency using, you know, six, sometimes 12 hours of staff's time that's no longer billable because it's for a pitch, it's done and they can pitch it there and then. And they're seeing a huge uptake in how many clients they're winning because in that very first meeting, they're pitching back the proposal, they've priced it and everything is ready to go. So they're not, you you touched on earlier how long it would take to go away and build out these custom decks every time.
And yes, you get more efficient in your layouts and how you're doing it, but it still takes time. Whereas they've used AI to do all of that for them. So it completely removes that.
Matt Medeiros (32:06)
I can't help but think of like this dystopian future of like the Terminator following you into the room with it. it wait who's yeah, who's that? that's the guy who's gonna give you the sales pitch at the end Our closing rates went up three thousand percent. No kidding because the thing looks like it's gonna kill us in the room Yeah sign here. ⁓ god, it's a no, that's but that's great and those things yeah, it's
Olly Feldman (32:12)
Just standing quietly.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, sign, just hands it out.
Matt Medeiros (32:35)
I know, everyone's, this is an overused phrase, know, times are wild, things are changing so fast. And it is crazy how like the negotiation process, like those key points of like negotiation, like what are we getting? What's the value at what cost? And like, I don't know, like the inference of like those discussions happening in real time, like you walk in with somebody and the customer is telling you what you need. You know, it's going to be a wild time where
Olly Feldman (32:57)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (33:05)
I'm hoping that human trust factor wins in all of this. Because if you imagine, and I've said this before, if you imagine Facebook's glasses, Metta's glasses, ⁓ with ⁓ LLM in the future, not that far away, where if you go back to the roots of being a car salesman, if somebody's wearing those glasses and I'm saying, this Cadillac Escalade is...
Olly Feldman (33:08)
Yes.
Matt Medeiros (33:31)
now $100,000, like the best price I can give you is $98,500. They go, and they're just looking at you and the glasses are calculating the negotiation and telling them like what to say next, right? Like that's, we're not that far off from like that real time negotiation for good and bad, Like good for humanity for like somebody puts a contract in front of you that says, yeah, your cell phone bill is 50 bucks a month.
Olly Feldman (33:41)
Yeah
Mmm.
Matt Medeiros (33:58)
And then if you ever cancel it's, you know, $10,000 cancellation fee. Somebody can literally see that contract and decipher that in real time. And there's a, there's a benefit on the flip side of people not getting screwed over on bad deals, right? And these things are going to help, but it's also going to be like, there's not going to be much room for negotiation in the future. So like your pitch has to be great. ⁓
Olly Feldman (34:22)
Yeah,
and I think that's where it's the human element of... AI can probably do this in the future as well, but it's that element of truly showing the value, showing you've understood the problem and can solve it in the right way. Because at that point, the price shouldn't matter. Price shouldn't be the negotiation. The negotiation should be how much of the value are you getting, rather than how much does it cost to me? And know, in a WooSight as an example, it's what your conversion rate is going to be.
Matt Medeiros (34:43)
What's the outcome? Yep.
Olly Feldman (34:52)
how much traffic is the site going to get and what's your revenue going to be, is what can we deliver at the tail end of the value we're going to give you over the, it's going to cost you 50k upfront for this site.
Matt Medeiros (35:02)
Yeah, he's all he felt and you can find him at hosting.com. Anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks or to sign up for any kind of partnership, maybe get in line for something anywhere else you want them to go.
Olly Feldman (35:14)
Yeah, so hosting.com is the best place, but always reach out to us on LinkedIn. So you just type Olly Feldman I'm the only person on LinkedIn with that name and feel free to drop me a message. I would love to have a chat.
Matt Medeiros (35:23)
Awesome, thanks a lot.