The Revenue-Focused Marketer

Links and Resources

• The AI Power Shift: Can China’s DeepSeek Disrupt OpenAI and Google?
• The OpenAI Shake-Up: Navigating Success with DiGGrowth’s Hybrid Approach
• The Role of AI and ML in Marketing Analytics

Transcript

0:11:
So welcome back to the revenue focused marketer where we discuss anything and everything related to marketing as well as data.

0:19:
I’m your host, Hershey, and today we’re diving into a topic that’s kind of shaping the future of revenue and operations, which is AI automations.

0:28:
We all know how much time and energy businesses waste on mundane and repetitive tasks, but what if we could kind of automate the boring stuff and let talent thrive?

0:39:
That’s exactly what today’s guest specializes in.

0:42:
Up next, we have a very exciting guest who’s an expert in automating the boring, yet essential task that businesses face today.

0:50:
Benjamin is the CEO of Automate Boring, a custom AI automation, an RPA company that helps organizations streamline their processes and boost.

1:00:
Productivity with a background in law and criminology from Australia, Ben has spent several years helping Fortune 1000 companies integrate gamification principles into sales and communication strategies.

1:15:
Today he’s using his expertise to revolutionize how businesses operate, scale, and enhance customer experiences through AI.

1:23:
So let’s jump right in.

1:26:
Welcome to the revenue focused marketer, Ben.

1:28:
We’re super excited to have you here today.

1:31:
Thanks, I’m excited to be here.

1:34:
Yeah, let’s start with the big picture today.

1:37:
What kind of inspired you to launch Automate boring and how did you really transition from like, you know, your background in law to kind of AI automation?

1:47:
It was part of a necessary evil as part of some of the businesses I was managing for myself, , and it was all to do with employee efficiency.

1:55:
I was running a cybersecurity company and having people work 24 hours a day, we’re having burnout, we were having issues, we were just having like.

2:03:
You go to lunch and you come back and you got 1000 email alerts that you’ve gotta process, right, that that’s fatigue, and like you missed the wrong alert and that has a problem.

2:12:
So that started this quest many years ago on like how do I automate what these people are doing so I can make them more efficient.

2:19:
Right, and then that quest has just evolved and it’s constantly growing, like right now I’m literally showing clients firsthand how I’m scaling a brand new e-commerce company and scaling it to get to 1000 a month, then 5000 a month and then using automations as part of the design infrastructure, and I even share the battles we have when we’re talking to fulfillment houses and production houses on like the difficulties of integrating.

2:48:
Automation, because it, it could be a process change that’s different to what they’re used to because of just how our workflows need to work, because we’re automating things, right?

2:57:
So, , it’s just been this continual quest to how do I improve profitability, how do I have a team of 3 appear as a team of 50?

3:07:
, and like I do that right now with our content team that I’ve built, my AI content team, and we published 5000 blog posts a month, and we published a few 1000 social media posts because of it.

3:18:
And that’s like, we created 20 different AI personas to write content from different backstories and personas.

3:26:
And this is a business that’s literally a team of 3 people.

3:29:
Are doing this, so you can really compound the effects and the profitability of your employees or your independent contractors or however it is, not everyone has employee employees these days, some people have independent contractors.

3:41:
So it’s kind of like, how do we improve the efficiency and empower them to win, not replace them because that’s a dangerous word, if that makes sense.

3:51:
Yeah, no, definitely.

3:53:
I think that’s really fascinating and automation is such a hot topic, but I think many companies are still really hesitant to adopt AI.

4:02:
So what’s the biggest misconception about automation that you’ve encountered in maybe your conversations?

4:09:
I think you kind of mentioned.

4:10:
Like something about, you know, automation and AI replacing jobs, but like, what else do you kind of see out there?

4:18:
Massive resistance to employees implementing, like they all like the idea of automation and they’d love to have things automated, but when you start automating things around their role, they instantly pucker because they’re like, my God, they’re gonna replace me.

4:36:
So then you have the employee sabotaging the automation, you have the employees not wanting to participate in the automation anymore.

4:45:
You, you have, like I sat down with our fulfillment house yesterday and I was talking about how they have a team of 10 people who fill the bottles of our products, right?

4:54:
And I said, well, what I’m doing is I’m gonna be getting a machine that I can put in here that can fill 60 bottles a minute, and we can actually like custom label every bottle.

5:04:
And they were like.

5:05:
What happens to our team?

5:07:
I’m like, whoa, I’m gonna get that team doing other things, but what they’re doing right now isn’t the most efficient thing they could be doing.

5:15:
There’s way more things they could be doing which is more profitable to the business.

5:19:
So I think one of the biggest problems bosses have is having that real conversation with the employee to go, look, your job description was this.

5:29:
Your job description needs to become this.

5:32:
And there’s a difference there because like there’s technology that can empower them.

5:36:
Does that make sense?

5:38:
Definitely.

5:40:
No, and I think kind of speaking of profitability and impact, I know you have personally helped a lot of businesses scale dramatically with automation.

5:48:
So could you share maybe a real world example of how AI has helped a company grow revenue?

5:56:
Yeah, so we had one company where we helped them scale their, , tax business from about $250,000 to $150 million in processing in 8 months or less.

6:06:
, we helped them scale that because, , we took 2 hours of accounting work and consolidated it down into 60 seconds cause that’s how long it took the computer to complete it.

6:16:
We’ve had architecture firms where we’ve helped them manage their million.

6:23:
, product list inventory on reconciling price and availability and quantity from all their vendors, so like their product catalog.

6:30:
So instead of going, hey, I wanna find out is this couch in stock?

6:34:
Like the AI is literally emailing every week, every month, requesting the price catalog, requesting inventory.

6:40:
We’ve helped companies reconcile invoices.

6:43:
, we’ve helped a company find $900,000 in overbilling from their supply.

6:50:
So because we’re able to reconcile transaction logs for 3 months.

6:55:
So like there’s a lot of mundane, boring, repetitive tasks we all know we should do, like, I should go reconcile those vendor statements to make sure my suppliers haven’t overcharged me.

7:06:
I should go and check FedEx to make sure all the parcels were delivered on the on-time guarantee, and if they didn’t file that claim because, Then I can get a compensation for it and things like that, right?

7:19:
Or there’s lost parcels or misplaced parcels.

7:21:
Like there’s, there’s a whole life cycle of things, let alone just auditing sales processes.

7:26:
We’ve helped clients analyze their sales conversations to understand missed opportunities and phone calls cause we analyze the sales, the call transcript and go, well, The customer asked this question, but then you didn’t even answer it.

7:40:
You shut them down, you didn’t do this.

7:42:
The customer asked a buying response here, and you missed it, right?

7:45:
You went into a script and you’re reading your script and you, they were ready to move on and you sat in a space which may have caused you to lose the sale and you don’t realize that.

7:53:
Like, so there’s a whole lot of feedback loops.

7:56:
We’ve helped create for companies to help them understand their data, and some of these companies are small companies, some of these companies are large companies, they’ve all got a very similar problem, and they’ve all got the same problem of how do I even prepare to train an AI on my data so I can have something that works for me, if that makes sense.

8:17:
Definitely.

8:19:
Yeah, I think, , like, you know, marketing also you kind of mentioned about sales, but marketing also has like, you know, a lot of repetitive tasks and for like specifically marketers out there, what do you think?

8:34:
How can they really leverage AI and like, you know, kind of dive deeper into this world of automation?

8:41:
Yeah, so I’d highly recommend that they start thinking about, like, if you haven’t brought on an assistant, it’s hard to bring on an AI because you need to be able to delegate the task to others, right?

8:51:
So one of the things you want to be doing is going, working out what are you automating.

8:54:
And so a lot of people struggle when they don’t have a specific process.

8:59:
That they do.

9:00:
They know they do a task, but if you do that task differently every single day, what are you automating?

9:06:
I’ll give you an example.

9:06:
We had a client where they said, hey, we want you to automate this thing we do with our invoices.

9:11:
There was 10 people in this team, we reviewed what they were doing and what we were worked out was they were doing the same task 8 different ways.

9:22:
So our question to them was, well, do you want to build us to build it out for you in all eight different ways, or do you want one way to become standard?

9:30:
And then that created a conflict for that company because everyone was like, well, my way is better.

9:34:
No, it should be done this way.

9:35:
Like, but yet the company thought it was one method.

9:40:
So this becomes also then problematic, like when you’re just training people.

9:42:
Like if they’re all doing it different ways.

9:45:
Yeah, they’re getting to the same result, like, what’s that company standard?

9:48:
cos then it’s hard to track, enforce, understand where the issues are or bottlenecks are, so a lot of companies don’t know how to delegate or even have a consistent task.

9:59:
And you need to be understanding that automation is a process of iteration.

10:05:
Because a lot of people try to automate a task, thinking that it’s gonna be done perfectly.

10:11:
But you know with any task that you do right now, it’s not perfect.

10:16:
Like, there’s errors, there’s mistakes, it could be better, you’ve done it when you want it to do better, but you’ve just got it, it’s good enough.

10:23:
But yet when we an AI is doing it or when an automation is doing it, chat GPT, whatever we wanna do.

10:29:
We think it’s gonna be perfect, rather than going, what can I have working today and then improve it tomorrow?

10:35:
Like the first time we published our blog post system, our content repurposing engine, it wasn’t perfect.

10:41:
But like, we were creating more content that was beneficial, and over the course of two months, we’ve made it fantastic.

10:48:
Are we still happy with it?

10:50:
No.

10:51:
Do we want to take it to whole new levels?

10:53:
Yes.

10:53:
And there’s some big lessons people could learn from, if that makes sense.

10:57:
Definitely.

10:58:
I think when we kind of talk about content, right, a piece that comes with it is like, you know, , is there any sort of personalization that’s been done, cause a lot of people say when you’re utilizing AI tools and you know, you’re relying on them, you kind of miss out on that sort of human touch.

11:15:
So what advice would you have for Like no marketers that are trying to leverage AI and automation for their content writing piece.

11:24:
The human touch thing I think is a a crock of crap, to be honest, because the human touch is, you’re not using human touch consistently and effectively now.

11:32:
What you can do is layer human touch around AI automation, if that makes sense.

11:37:
So.

11:38:
But yeah, still have a phone call, still have a real text message, still send a a real email because yeah, you’ve automated emails for 90 days, 180 days, right?

11:47:
But throw in a few real ones, throw in a few a real text message.

11:51:
And people think they’re doing it, and one of the biggest misnomers with any communication you’re doing, anything like that, the.

11:59:
You think you’re actually doing more than you really are, and until you actually analyze your data of which clients are you communicating with, because if you’ve got 100 clients, I can pretty much guarantee you’re not having a conversation with all of them every single month.

12:12:
Have you wished them happy birthday?

12:13:
Have you wished them their anniversary, did you know that they had a job promotion, like, Human touch is this type of stuff, and AI can alert you to the fact that XYZ just had an anniversary, get a gift, send it like, it can help you be a more effective human.

12:28:
So.

12:29:
I think human people say this as a way because they haven’t trained a chat GPT to be more effective than them, and let’s face it, chat GPT models now with the reasoning models that are now out there, they’re way smarter than you and I.

12:42:
It’s just that we need to train them on our world, and this is where people really fail.

12:47:
They’re like, oh, Chat GPT doesn’t know.

12:50:
My stuff.

12:50:
I’m like, yeah, but it got trained on the world.

12:53:
It didn’t get trained on your world, so it’s your job to train it on your slice of what you do.

12:58:
Does that make sense?

12:59:
Yeah, and conversational AI is such, right?

13:02:
Like you have to have those conversations and give it more.

13:06:
So typically, like what I’ve really heard and seen in my work also is like, you know, when I’m not getting the results that I really want, it’s the prop that needs more work and I need to be the one providing more to it.

13:19:
, 100%.

13:20:
1 of my tips for people, well, I’ll ask my tip for people is, don’t treat chat GPT or any of these language model.

13:26:
It doesn’t really matter what you use nowadays, as a prompt thing.

13:30:
Talk to it as a human and assistant that you build a conversation with over time.

13:34:
Give it your product catalog, show it your competitors, give it your price list.

13:38:
Like, you can even upload your financials and have it analyze your financials and things like that.

13:43:
Like, it’s.

13:44:
Very, very powerful.

13:45:
And when you, and then when you ask it to generate something for you, you go, well, is there anything you’d improve based on this to help the voice of my customer, voice of customer or VOC?

13:57:
You’ll be amazed at how it improves its output.

14:00:
So a lot of people treat it as a machine rather than this thing that can learn and now reason, and the reasoning is fantastic.

14:09:
Yeah, , we kind of touched upon Chad GBT, but there’s also like, you know, a lot of news about Deep CKI and certain other sort of, you know, AI tools that that are coming out there.

14:22:
What are your kind of thoughts about, like, you know, what’s out there and what’s really working out for you and are you kind of delving into different forms of them?

14:31:
Oh yeah, 100%.

14:32:
So we use perplexity all the time.

14:33:
I use Gemini, , the Gemini model has been, , very, very powerful.

14:37:
Perplexity is really great for when you want to research and do reasoning and things like that, so you can have it go on research keywords or topics or press releases and data and it pulls the sources and then you feed that in.

14:50:
To a Gemini, an anthropic, a Claude, whatever you want, right, to then do the content writing piece.

14:56:
So you set up a research bot, then you set up a writing piece, then you set up an editing bot, which could be a different model.

15:03:
So you could be using different language models to then create this ability to have the workflow you want.

15:11:
Definitely.

15:12:
I think this has been such a fascinating conversation.

15:16:
As we come up to close our discussion today, I just wanted your thoughts on, you know, where do you kind of see the future of automation and the future of AI?

15:24:
Is it like still going to be generated?

15:26:
AI is it agentic AI?

15:28:
I urge what people should really be focused on?

15:31:
Just wondering your thoughts on, you know, what’s it’s gonna be AI because agentic AI is completing tasks, right?

15:38:
So this is the next evolution of what’s coming out, and it’s literally, it’s all about how do we do the workflow because writing the blog post is one thing.

15:46:
But that’s pointless if the post is never put on the website, never put on Medium, never put on LinkedIn, never put on the socials, never turned into a report that’s sent out to the clients like, so we, we’ve been in the generative stage of doing things.

16:01:
Now we’re getting to the point of agentic, which is just doing it, it’s a simple word for doing a workflow.

16:07:
How do I take the blog, the social media posts, the Facebook ad and have it go live?

16:14:
Like how do I have it analyze the stats from the Facebook ads and go, here’s how you could optimize your ads to improve it.

16:20:
Like, I just took my Facebook ads and reduced the costs per acquisition from $50 to $32 in, in less than a week by.

16:29:
Leveraging these type of models and automations and these workflows to work around me, not like, do it all for me.

16:36:
I’m kind of still pulling the strings, but I’m way more efficient now.

16:39:
Wonderful.

16:40:
And honestly, this has been such an eye-opening conversation.

16:44:
And for those that kind of want to learn more about you and automate boating, where can they really find you?

16:50:
Yeah, so automate boring.net.

16:52:
If you’ve got questions, you can reach out to help at automate boring.net.

16:56:
B R I N G.net.

16:57:
I offer people a complimentary chat session where we’ll brainstorm automation ideas just to see what you could automate, how you could automate, and I usually suggest free tools for people to even get started with if they want to do that themselves.

17:10:
Awesome.

17:11:
Thank you again, Ben, so much for joining us today.

17:14:
I know I learned a lot and I’m sure our listeners will walk away with a lot of valuable takeaways.

17:20:
So that’s a wrap for today’s episode of the revenue-focused marketer.

17:24:
If you found this.

17:25:
So valuable, just leave us a review and tell us how you really felt about it, share your insights with us and stay tuned for more insights because AI is evolving and we’re here to kind of guide your path.

17:38:
So see you next time and thank you so much.

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