Overcome The Mental Hurdles (Lead Harvest Part 1) – Websites.ca Talk Ep. 54

Hello websites.ca audience, this is Sean Corbett with websites.ca Marketing coming to you. For this month’s episode, I’m going to do the first of a three-part series. We’re basically going to be talking about some of the most pressing questions that business owners have brought to me and my business partners in the last five years. And typically those pressing questions come down to — it doesn’t really matter specifically what the request is, they could say, “can I do Facebook?”, “Can I get more traffic?”, “Can I do ads?”, “Can I blah, blah, blah” — but the end result of what they want is that they want more leads, more traffic, more eyeballs, whatever should respond in more leads. And why do people want more leads? Well, it’s because they want more sales. So this three-part series is going to be covering basically the nucleus or the genesis of a course that myself and my business partner Ross Mann are going to be releasing of how to generate cold leads for certain types of businesses, maybe not all businesses, but most.
And then how to take all of the people that don’t become leads and essentially keep them warm, keep working them until you can sell a whole bunch more, or pardon me, the people of the leads who don’t become sales to take all the non-sales and keep the leads warm and work them into eventually a whole bunch more becoming sales. Because if you spend money on advertising, obviously you can’t just take the people who say yes right away to make it worth your while. You have to sell people over time. So I won’t bury the lede. The two concepts that we’re going to be talking about, the two tools or whatever platforms, if you want to call it that, and these won’t work for everybody, but they’ll work for the majority of people as we’ve proven out with various clients in both the US and Canada actually, and across the world, is we’re going to be talking about cold texting.
And then you take those leads and you either sell them or you follow up with them and the follow up stuff, the funnel, if you will, is all done through email marketing. So how cold texting and email marketing can essentially be one of your main methods for maintaining your business, growing your revenue, getting more leads, getting more sales, that kind of thing. Now, on this particular episode, I’m not going to get into any specifics about cold texting, and I’m not going to get into any specifics about email marketing. And the reason why I’m not going to do that is because every time I take on a client, every time Ross takes on a client, every time websites.ca builds a website for somebody new. And we’ve all been doing this now for 15 plus years. And again, I should point out this isn’t just for Canadian businesses.
We work with people all around the world. So I would say this is fairly universally applicable, is that owners or managers bring with them certain secular beliefs. In other words, they say, oh, well X won’t work for my business, or My customers are different, or We have to do things a certain way, blah, blah, blah. Oh, that’s too cheesy. Oh, that’s too salesy. Oh, that’s too marketing. And nothing I’m saying here was innovated by me, right? I’ve learned from the people who came before me, just like everybody learns from the people who came before them. A lot of what I’m saying on this episode today can be gleaned from a fellow named Dan Kennedy. And I highly recommend that you look into Dan Kennedy’s work. He’s one of the sort of preeminent thinkers in the marketing world, but also it’s psychological. It taps into human nature and all that kind of stuff.
And again, before I get started, this is going to be the top 15 secular beliefs that business owners have to overcome before they can succeed with cold texting and email marketing, or really any great marketing campaigns. But before I get into this, this is not anti-business owner. I myself am a business owner. The owners of websites.ca or business owners, obviously if you’re listening to this and you have a business and you have any employees, they have secular beliefs that a lot of which if they were examined, they would be destroyed. A lot of your customers come in with sort of preset beliefs that are entirely wrong. So I’ve very fond of saying the customer is never right. I come from the art world or the entertainment world. So we were filmmakers and writers and so on. And the first thing that you learn when you have any type of audience is that the audience will know what it likes when it gets it, but the audience doesn’t know how to get it.
And so you never listen to the audience when they tell you what to do. It doesn’t result in them and them actually liking it. This whole concept of the customer being always right, I understand where it was coming from. It was coming from giving attentive, proactive customer service. It was for delivering on what you say it was for being friendly, welcoming, establishing a relationship. So the place that it was coming from and the results that it was aiming for, the slogan I suppose, was good, but it twisted people into believing that just listening to your customer, I shouldn’t say listening to your customer, but doing what your customer asks you to do in the exact manner they ask you to do it is the secret to success. And I would actually argue that it’s the complete opposite. Listening to your customer when they tell you how they want something, when they want it in the manner that they want it to is a perfect way to go out of business.
So obviously you have to deliver things that the customer needs and that they’re willing to pay for and blah, blah, blah. So that just, that’s something to think about as we go through this episode. So with all that preamble out of the way, again, this is the top 15 secular beliefs about getting cold leads and working cold leads that I’ve found in 15 plus years of doing this that most business owners have to overcome. I’m going to jump in each topic one at a time, but to give you a sort of overview of what to expect, we’re going to talk about things like, oh, that’s not a good tool. People will think that’s bad, or I’m being mean, or I’m being too salesy. There’s a lot of things around that. There’s a lot of things around the audience is too dumb or won’t pay attention, or I have to do special secret, flashy, showy things.
I have to copy other people in the business. I have to be really showy, all these kind of things. And then finally, there’s a lot of secular, silly beliefs around tools that if there’s a digital tool out there or an AI tool or Google search or whatever, it’s seen as, well, I have to do that or I won’t be successful. Well, the thing is just a tool, like just doing it in air quotes, just trying it doesn’t guarantee success. And also chasing a lot of these things means that you don’t focus on the stuff that really moves the needle. So with all of that out of the way, number one, these are not in any particular order. So I want to number them, but they’re not in any particular order of importance. So the first one I want to talk about is this secular belief.
People will say to me, I don’t want to spam people. I don’t want to spam my customers. I don’t want to email too much spammy. Oh, I don’t want to text them. People won’t respond to texts. That’s spammy. Well, if it’s spam, it’s spammy. If you’re trying to defraud them, if you’re trying to lie to them, if you’re saying you’re a Nigerian prince, if you’re telling them that they need to do the needful and send you their social insurance number, if you’re doing all the things that we get hit with on our cell phones, on our voicemails, on our emails, on a daily basis, obviously those things are spam, which is another way of saying scams. They’re scams, simply emailing people. You could email your customers every day, not spam. You could text your customers every day. You could call them every day, not spam, not a scam.
Now, that might look a little needy or whatever, if you’re constantly reaching out to people, I get it. You have to make a judgment on everything that I’m saying, and you have to adjust it for your own audience. So there’s no easy answers here, but I am telling you, you could probably email and text and call way more than you’re doing right now, way more. And the trick there is that when you email or text or call, forgive my language, don’t be a dickhead. Don’t be a times stealer. Be entertaining. Be informative, be helpful, be friendly. So that’s actually the difference. You could touch people and contact people and do all these things way more often than you’re doing, but it actually takes some effort. You can’t just be asking them to do something for you all the time. I mean, that’s just normal human nature.
That makes sense when you think about it like that, okay? If somebody’s — think about the people that you meet with most and talk to most if you’re not forced to meet with them or talk to them or whatever. But there’s somebody that you engage with every day. For a lot of people, it might be their kids, it might be their spouse. It might be an author that they read a lot or a podcast or a guru or whatever, that they check in with their content online. You do that and you’re happy to do it. You’re happy the more FaceTime you get with these people, but that’s because they’re bringing something to your life. So it’s a little bit cliched to say, bring value or whatever, but that’s another way of saying be entertaining, be informative, be whatever. When you’re being those things, you’re not spammy and you’re not scammy.
So email works, texting works. I can tell you this. I didn’t necessarily believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. It totally works when you do it in an engaging way. So the next one on my list is a lot of customers and clients say to me, well, people don’t read. No one reads anymore. We can’t send anyone an email over two sentences. We can’t do an ad over one sentence. I need an elevator pitch, right? Hollywood told me that I have to say what I mean two sentences or less. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The truth of the matter is, if it’s something that you’re not interested in or you’re extremely distracted, you’re not going to pay attention to it. If you’re interested in it and it captures your attention for this moment, then you’re going to follow it into the preceding moments.
If you’re very, very interested, you might stick around for hours. Hours. The proof is right now, maybe not right now, but in the last five to 10 years, one of the most popular ways of people consuming entertainment is to go onto Netflix, and they call it binge watching. So somebody watches an entire TV series in a weekend, right? 16, 20, 40, whatever hours of television, they watch it in a row. One of some of the most popular books in the modern era has been the Harry Potter series, the Game of Thrones series. These are giant thousand page books people are reading. Trust me, people read if they’re interested in it, if they care about the topic, people listen. Joe Rogan podcast, most popular podcast, one of the most popular podcasts, hours and hours of just inane rambling between people. But if it’s interesting to you, if the topic is interesting to you, you stick around for three plus hours.
So this is not me saying, Hey, every message should be three plus hours. It’s just saying put out of your mind the secular belief that, oh, people hate reading. No one’s going to read. No one’s going to take the time. That’s totally untrue. It’s the exact opposite. Actually. Another secular belief is that there are special secret hacks and tricks, and once you know these hacks and tricks, all you have to do is the hack and trick, and then you’ll be a millionaire. Well, obviously when I say it like this millionaire, the millionaire is like a 10 thousandaire now, right? A billionaire. I guess when I say it like this, it seems crazy. It seems stupid, but so many people come to me, if you’ve heard any of these episodes, I always say they come to me and they say, I want do Facebook. I want to do Twitter.
I want to talk like a certain politician or guru in my emails. So there was a time after oh eight or whatever where people would say, oh, our emails and our headline should sound like Obama. He was popular at the time. And then some people come and again, you’ve got to put aside your political beliefs. I don’t care if you love him or hate him or whatever. And then people would come in and now they’re like, oh, we should be like Trump. We should say we’re the best at everything. Our stuff’s the best. We’re the winners with everything. We’re going to win and win, and we’re going to be the best. Well, these guys have cultivated brands and positioning over years with billions of dollars with the best in the business behind them, and then you’re just going to jump in and copy that. It doesn’t make any sense.
There are no special secret hacks and tricks. Oh, actually, you know what there is. There is one special secret consistency. That’s the special secret. If you show up every day, all the time, day in and day out, rain or shine with a consistent message over time, basically by attrition, you will make sales. Now, I’m not saying that the effort and the energy and the money that you put into it is going to equal what you get out of it, but that’s the only special secret hack and trick there is, at least for a small business, local owner in the SEO game or traffic game or whatever, there’s always a three month period where somebody can game the system, but that’s like the day trader mentality. Unless you’re going to approach your business like that all the time, which is very high stress, very high anxiety, you could lose it all tomorrow. Of course, you could make big gains in the short term, but then you could lose it all. Most business owners are just not of that mindset, and it’s not helpful to approach your business that way.
This next secular belief is one very near and dear to my heart, because anytime I’ve ever found out anything that had any power, any staying power, any educative power that allowed me to get to the next level, when I would explain it to people, the mindset hurdle they had was, well, that sounds impossible, and it all sounds like dark wizard magic. So they were basically saying they don’t believe what I’m saying, but also what I’m saying is the magic red pill that works, and I wish I had a better way of explaining this to people, but oh man, okay. I’m trying to think of an example for you. In the sales world, there’s a lot of things, if anybody’s ever heard of NLP neurolinguistic programming. Now, again, I’m just putting this out there as a concept. I’m not saying it’s real or it’s scientific or it works, but a lot of people have attested that just thinking about it and trying to enact it has helped them in their sales process.
So often when you go to people and you say, okay, well, words are a kind of hypnosis words have an effect on people. Here’s how you might be able to use that aiding your sales process. They’ll say, well, that sounds very inauthentic. That sounds very manipulative. That sounds very bad. In other words, that sounds like dark wizard magic. Oh, I don’t want to use that dark wizard magic. That’s black magic. That’s not good. And then they also say, but that wouldn’t work for me. That wouldn’t work on my customers. It wouldn’t work on me. I don’t want to do it, blah, blah, blah. So these are actually conflicting beliefs. It doesn’t work, but I don’t want to do it. It works so well that it’s evil. So if there’s anything in your life that you’re currently saying that about, I don’t even care if it’s not about business.
It might be about personal relationships or I dunno, hobbies, your religious thoughts, economic thoughts, political thoughts, whatever it is. That’s just an interesting thing to think about. Are you dismissing something because simultaneously you think it would never work and that it’s also evil, magic, something to think about. Another secular belief that we see a lot in the marketing world is, I should be able to do this thing and then profit. In other words, I’m looking for a one and done solution. And like I said earlier on in this recording, I believe the true secret trick hack, which again, is not really a secret trick hack. I’m being sort of trying to be humorous and irreverent or whatever, but the one thing is consistency and showing up every day. So it’s the complete opposite of one and done. You don’t just do something once. Now, again, you could spend a lot of time and a lot of market research and so on, and bring all your expertise and have a great team and do a really good marketing campaign that you can kind of squeeze the juice out of for years and years, and that is a thing that happens.
And sometimes the flip side, secular belief of that is like, oh, we have to change this thing that works. I don’t even think I wrote that down on my list, but a lot of business owners actually want to change the thing that works for them. Most often, it’s like one and done, or we have to change all the time. That would be a better way of saying this. It’s neither. It’s like you’re going to be constantly innovating and constantly progressing and constantly tweaking your message, but then also sometimes you have to run with a message that works until it starts to stop working.
It’s my other way of saying it’s it ain’t over until you’re dead. Or if you want to get philosophical, it’s a Sisyphean thing. You’re going to be doing this task every day for your business life, so you might as well get used to it, right? Okay. Another secular belief, you can’t sell all the time. We have to have warmup sequences. We have to let people get to know us, blah, blah, blah. This is just a misunderstanding of how marketing works, especially in the online world or the direct marketing world. So people are sort of equating that to showing up at a conference or going to do a business call or going to a party or whatever, and just being like, Hey, want to do the thing that I want to do, right? It’s like if you go on a date in the first five minutes, you don’t say, let’s jump in bed immediately.
If you go to a business networking thing, you don’t introduce yourself by saying, Hey, my name’s and you should buy from me. So that’s rather obvious. We know that you’re not going to sell an inappropriate times, but a lot of people have this secular belief that I can’t do an ad. I can’t do a social media post. I can’t do a letter to my customers. I can’t do an email without selling at the end. This ties back into the whole ads or spam emails or spam texts or spam thing. If you’re doing it in an engaging way that people are interested and excited to talk to you, of course, at the very end, you can ask them for a sale. So it’s all this consideration here. It’s not just like what you do. Obviously there’s a lot of intention and thought behind it, but yet you absolutely can sell in all of your marketing assets all the time, provided obviously you’re being entertaining and engaging and whatever. Now, what is entertaining and engaging and whatever mean that leads us to the next secular belief one has to overcome. They say, oh, Sean, I have to be clever. It has to be interesting and has to be unique. Well, in the sense that you want to stand out, obviously it has to be unique, but this idea that cleverness, I’ve noticed that folks are, we have to have a slogan or a jingle or whatever.
Obviously there’s some power to that, and standing out and being creative helps, but it’s towards an end. Another thing that you can see on our past episodes is I’ve often talked about how if you’re in a market where the main desire is just for a certain feature, and I always like to give the example of how it’s very hard to buy a cotton T-shirt right now in the country that I live a hundred percent cotton. Well, a hundred percent cotton is not a benefit. It’s just a feature, right? It’s very much a meat and potatoes marketing message, straightforward stating what you do, or we sell a hundred percent cotton. However, when you have an audience, when you have a marketplace that doesn’t cater to that, why be clever? Why? Oh, I have to think of a rhyme or a jingle, or it’s got to be cutesy, or we’re going to have colors.
And actually, no, that’s distracting people. The people who want to buy the a hundred percent cotton, we don’t like all that shit. We’ve been reading labels for years and years and years to try to get past that. We’ve got to get past the brand name. We’ve got to get past the advertising because all the branding and advertising and labels are hiding the fact that nobody uses natural fabrics anymore. You have to have an awareness of your market. Like with all of these secular beliefs, it’s easy to accept them because you don’t want to do the work of just having an awareness of your market and where you sit within your market. The most powerful marketing messages are very often not clever. They’re just repeating the words that your ideal customers are saying. Now, another secular belief is if someone doesn’t buy, now, if someone doesn’t buy off the ad, then they’ve heard my best message and they’ll never buy.
All I consider that is, yeah, you got to read Dan Kennedy’s stuff. Sometimes you got to hit people. Well, if you ever read any old marketing or sales books, they say, you got to tell somebody seven times. Ask somebody seven times to buy. I don’t know how accurate that is. But the point has proven, if you’re going to go and spend money on advertising, which is the whole point of this series, and then you’re going to work those leads and you’re only going to ask ’em to buy once, you’re dead in the water, man, save your money. It’s not going to work for you now. So the next secular belief is that we have to be on this platform or that platform. We have to go external, and what does that mean by our own ecosystem? Get people into our own ecosystem. So a lot of times when I talk to clients that will have a good success on LinkedIn, we’ll have a good success.
Maybe Ross helps people. My business partner Ross always helps people go to conferences and harvest a lot leads at conferences and so on. Those are all great. You have to learn how to use external platforms. Obviously, the age that we live in external platforms, it almost has never been easier and cheaper to use external platforms. But the flip side of that is the external platform controls everything. They make certain rules that might not work at all with communicating with your best clients. They might punish you or kick you off the platform at any time. They will not allow you to access your contacts, whatever. So I always advocate to clients that you have to think about all these external platforms you go on. Always think about getting people into your own ecosystem, and what does your own ecosystem mean? Well, for the sake of this series, the example I give is that you would send people marketing emails.
So you want to get their email address. You also want to get their telephone number, and as a stretch goal, by telephone number, I usually mean mobile phone now, right? I don’t know if a home phone is as important a thing anymore. Mobile phone would be good. You can also text them, and then the stretch goal would be their address. If you really want to get fancy in the future and do mail outs or plot out where your customers are across the country, if you’re someone who sells outside of local, I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast, they mostly sell local. So this series and our upcoming courses, we don’t really cover mail outs, but I do think it’s an important thing. I think it’s still a powerful thing that works really well. So onto the next secular belief, all of my clients at one point or another, and these are not unintelligent people, these are not unsuccessful people.
They always, so this is not a burn on them. I’m just saying I’ve noticed it over and over again as they come to me and they say, we have to copy. I have this competitor, and I know they’re successful. We have to copy this thing and that thing they do. And there’s a really great example. Again, I’m coming back to Dan Kennedy. There’s a great example that Dan Kennedy gives about who’s going to take over the Johnny Carson time slot or the show, and eventually it goes to Jay Leno, and the belief was, oh, we have to do comedy the way Jay Leno does comedy. But in fact, it turns out that it was the way that Jay Leno networked with network executives that really won him the slot. There were plenty of capable comedians, and so you don’t have to know anything about that story, but just I’m putting that out there for people who might be old enough to remember that.
The point is, you don’t know what makes successful people successful. You really don’t know. So when a client comes to me and says, this successful person has a yellow color in the headline of their email, or This successful person always uses this type of picture or whatever, it’s like you are, you’re chasing a dragon there. You don’t even know. That might be the worst thing they do. That might be the thing they do that’s holding them back from making sales. I really urge you do not copy what other people are doing. Now, again, if you take a step back and you’re just like, I’m not doing any email marketing, I’m not doing any Facebook ads, and my competitors are doing ads, giving out coupons, doing specials, trying to do appearances, holding events, I’m not saying, oh, don’t look into what could possibly help you by looking at examples of what other successful businesses are doing.
Copying means fixating on specific things. Oh, we have to make this type of claim in our advertising. Oh, we have to have exclamation points. I’ve literally, you might laugh at that, but I’ve literally had people come to me and say, oh, my top competitor uses this many exclamation points. We have to use those. And it’s like, those don’t matter. You don’t know if they matter. Anyway, so another secular belief, one that comes up a lot is that you as a business owner, you as a marketer can’t say or do X, we can never say this. We can never do that. Or we have say this, we have to do that. We have to say, the customer’s always right? We can’t send an email that doesn’t have a sale. Throw all that stuff away. You have to start thinking three dimensionally about your business and your audience.
You can’t just make statements like, we can’t do this ever again. Obviously, there are certain things, I don’t know why I’m trying to take off the top of my head. If you do remodeling, kitchen renovations or something, most clients want to see past work, okay? So you can’t fight against that. You can’t kick against that. But here’s something to take away from this, the very best people in their fields, and you might not be at that level. You might not be at the level where you’re turning people away. If you’re not at the level where you’re turning people away, then this particular lesson doesn’t help you. But I’m just saying it to give you this full view of everything. Once you’re at that level, of course, it might be a marketing angle to say to people, yeah, you can’t see the bathroom before it’s finished.
You pay me a million dollars. I’ll come in and renovate your bathroom so you can see them at the end. Now, you can imagine to certain people with a certain prestige, that would be incredibly powerful. Oh, what a surprise. It’s so amazing. But again, this comes back to my previous points. If you’re, you don’t have that positioning in the market, you could never copy that. So even these rules, even these secular beliefs that I say that you have to overcome or that they’re wrong, there’s going to be a point where you reexamine them and you go, oh, actually, that belief would be really helpful to me. And that’s the trippy thing about this mental exercise that we have to do. Before I tell you how to get called leads through texting, and before I had to tell you how to harness sales through emailing, we have to get over these mindset hurdles. So another big thing, another secular belief is we’re very scared of hearing no. That means the customer’s mad at us. We’re very scared of getting unsubscribed from our emails or spam complaints to our texts or to our emails or whatever.
Obviously, if 50% of what you’re sending is getting spam complaints and you’re being threatened by lawyers all the time and stuff you probably forget, breaking rules, breaking laws, you’re probably doing something really ineffective. So stop doing that. But the point is, is when you send out emails, you’re going to get people to tell you, again, part of my language, my best emails, the emails that sell the most, they also get the most replies that say, fuck off. I want you to think about that for a second. My emails, my texts, my sales letters that sell the most sales scripts on the phone that sell the most. I’ve never done face-to-face on a retail situation, but I would imagine that it tracks the stuff that you can consistently get yourself or your staff to do is the stuff that stirs emotional response in people. And sometimes that emotional response is going to be very negative, very defensive or against very defensive for them and very aggressive towards you.
So unsubscribes are fine. If you’re sending out emails and you’re getting a healthy amount of unsubscribes, that’s fine. If you’re getting a healthy amount of nos, that’s fine. It’s when they ignore you. It’s a big, big problem. If you’re not hearing back from your list, if you’re not getting those nos, you’re not getting those unsubscribes, but you’re also not getting sales, that’s a really good indication that you are not pushing your messaging nearly hard enough. Now, I know I’ve left this deliberately vague, and I hate to be this kind of guy, but I have to do it. I would have to know your particular situation to give any more specific advice than that, and I’m not giving that service away for free over a podcast. Unfortunately, that’s an expensive personal consultation, but just go away from this understanding, hearing no and losing subscribers and stuff that is part and parcel of being successful at this game.
So we’re rounding this up. We only have three left. Another secular belief here that we need to overcome is that you have to be doing everything everywhere. Got to be on every platform. Oh, I heard about a new platform. I heard about a new social media. I heard about a new tactic I got to try. I got to be there, dah, dah, dah. And when people do that, they ended up being nowhere or the effect as they ended up being nowhere because spread so thin, their messaging isn’t tailored to any of these platforms, and it just sucks. It’s not a bad thing. A lot of successful people online do cover more platforms than the average small business, but the average small business has to deploy their resources as effectively as they can and look at this type of thing and say, let me do one or two things I’m really good at, and let me get, establish consistency there, and then maybe we’ll look into other platforms.
So the biggest problem that I’ve seen with clients is not at the start, right? A lot of this mindset stuff has to do with before you start, but this particular mindset hurdle is really important for people who are in the middle of some types of marketing campaigns, and they’re seeing a little bit of success, and they’re being sort of seduced or entranced to now try a couple new things and spread themselves thin, and I would really caution against that. Second last thing on my list of secular beliefs you need to overcome is that digital marketing is cheaper. Digital marketing is free. Digital marketing is, everybody can do digital marketing. Again, on its surface. Kind of true. Yeah, everybody can start a free Facebook account. Everybody can start posting there. What’s not true is that anyone will care or that anyone will see the posts. So there is a point in the digital marketing world, unlike the physical marketing world, testing is a lot cheaper, but there’s a point where if you want to be effective, the cost ramps up exponentially.
It ramps up fast, and it ramps up to a point that makes most people sick to their stomachs. When you talk to serious people who are doing digital marketing, it’s a very high amount for the average business owner, and it’s sustained amount for months after months after months without necessarily seeing results right away. And so that’s something I would just prepare you for. Again, I’m not giving you tricks or hacks or shortcuts. I’m trying to tell you what works for me and my clients, and ultimately, and eventually you’re spending money and you have to have a serious budget that you set aside month to month, and there’s going to be months where you’re down. You don’t get as much results, but at least for the people that I work with, it could be very different for the industry you’re in, but there’s a lead time for our sales.
So if we have a month that seems low for leads that might catch up on sales two or three months later, you have to have a few months later. It took that for a really long time horizon and a very serious budget to dip into. Now, final secular belief, I almost didn’t include this in the episode, but it is very topical right now. I wanted to make this really applicable to any time and place. But anyway, okay, I can’t release this as it is right now, as of this recording, without mentioning it, the biggest, most annoying secular belief that we see as marketers right now in the small business space is that artificial intelligence AI can or should do some or everything and can or should be extremely perfect and effective at it. I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what people think AI is. My personal belief, which I’ve said in other episodes, is it’s basically just an advanced search engine at this point. It is not a sentient being. It doesn’t do your work for you. It doesn’t think for you.
AI can or should not do anything for your business. Stop thinking about shortcuts. Stop thinking how you, oh, I’m getting left behind unless I use this technology. No, you’re getting left behind unless you’re getting left behind when you’re not paying attention to your customers or audience, and you’re not paying attention to your customer service and your bottom line and so on. Those are far more important things. You could be a little bit out of the current year with your technology, and you could still be doing very, very well. So again, that’s not to say there’s not uses for what we currently call AI in the market, but if you think, oh, AI will write my ad, AI will figure out what my audience wants. AI will come up with a fancy hack that will get me in front of more people. It is not going to happen, buddy.
It’s not going to happen. I’m saying this to you guys now almost as an exorcism for myself, because I can’t even speak that harshly with certain clients who talk about what’s to use AI for this and that. You have to be respectful and say, okay, well examine how we could use the AI tools, and we’ll see. We’ll see where in the process we could use them. Obviously, we’re always looking for tools to help us, but the truth of the matter is, when us marketers get together on our own, we say one of two things. What do these people think AI does? They’re so stupid. They have no clue. AI doesn’t do any of the things they’re asking for, and you could take this away as a very dark thing. A lot of marketers I talked to have said, if these guys keep asking for some AI solution that doesn’t exist, I’m just going to start telling them, yeah, that’s what I’m selling you.
And so there you go. There’s that magic words concept. Some people might actually believe in the magic words of just telling them that we’re using ai. Now, again, that sounds very cynical, but the point is, if you do that to people after a couple months, they’re going to realize that ai, or not magic or not, it’s actually not producing the results they want. So the whole point of this particular episode is to take a very sober minded view of what we’re going to talk about in the coming two episodes that conclude the series. So I’ve been rambling for a long time. I would really encourage you to, if you’re worked up about anything that I said in this episode, I could be wrong. Your audience better than me, your industry better than me. So the chances are, if I said something that doesn’t apply to you, you’re probably right.
It’s a good exception. It doesn’t apply to you. All I would ask you to do is for any of these things that you disagree with me on that you heard, just give me two minutes of thought on them, sleep on it, walk on it, okay, and just come back and sit there for two minutes and think about it. Is there any angle that I’m not seeing here? Because I think that’s where I have noticed a lot of help with clients when they let go of these secular beliefs. Then all the other stuff that we’re going to talk about later on in the series becomes a lot more effective.