What’s the best strategy to get voice‑AI clients – cold email with a free trial or a kickoff‑call offer – and which niche should I target, local contractors or something else?
I don’t have any voice‑AI campaigns running right now, but I’d start by targeting call‑intensive niches. Look for services where a quick phone call is essential – for example, local cleaners. Search Google for “cleaner [city]”, open the top five results, and call each one in order until you get a response. Focus on time‑sensitive, local services because they’re more likely to adopt a voice‑AI solution. Once you have a list, run a cold‑email campaign offering either a free trial or a kickoff call, depending on what resonates with the prospect. The key is to demonstrate how the voice agent can handle after‑hours calls or urgent bookings, saving the business time and increasing conversion rates.
First, revisit your cold‑email fundamentals. Make sure your emails actually land in the inbox, get opened, and are compelling enough to earn a reply. Test deliverability, subject lines, and copy. A good cold‑email sequence should: 1) land in the primary inbox, 2) achieve a decent open rate, 3) get clicks, and 4) provoke a reply. If you’re not seeing any replies, you likely have a problem at one of those earlier steps. Start by creating a simple campaign that feels personal—e.g., “Hey [Name], how’s it going? I’m working on …”—and iterate until you see engagement. Once you have a working email framework, you can begin gathering case studies by offering free or low‑cost pilots, which will later strengthen your outreach.
Cold calling is extremely time‑inefficient: spending an hour on the phone typically yields only 10–15 minutes of actual conversation unless you use a power dialer, and most people don’t use even basic tools like Clearbit. This means you operate at about 25% efficiency—the opposite of leverage. Instead of cold calling, devote that time to sending high‑quality cold emails and direct messages. The outcome is similar: prospects get a high‑quality interaction, you can appear on video, and you gain the ability to automate follow‑ups, cut through gatekeepers, and eliminate dial and connect times. Essentially, a well‑crafted cold email functions as a high‑quality voicemail that scales far better than phone calls.
cold callingcold emaillead generationbusiness development
I was thinking local businesses, but in a previous video I said I would stay away from local businesses. There's nuance: I would definitely stay away from local businesses in general because they're less scalable and you don't get straightforward access to local leads, unlike fully digital leads. However, if you're selling voice agents, local businesses can be your best bet because they're high volume and have big consequences if they miss a call or inquiry, which creates strong search intent and need‑based demand. They also tend to have relatively low average order values, which matters because if a business you reach has a high average order value, the opportunity cost of losing even a small percentage of conversion rate by switching to an AI voice agent (instead of a human) can outweigh the savings. You might save $2,000 a month, but the opportunity cost could lose you $20,000 a month, which isn’t a trade I’d make.
I don't think this would be nearly as valuable as you think. Think about it — someone fills out a form and immediately gets an AI voice call? Unless you're literally demoing your voice offer's quality, a fresh inbound lead is about as close to real money as you'll get, and I don't know why you'd want to farm that out to a model that will probably perform worse than a real salesperson. Just hire good commission appointment setters, pay them well, and have them call those leads directly — you can layer in AI for after-hours coverage if you can't staff a 24-hour rotation or you have too much volume to handle otherwise. Human beings are still better at closing, at least for now, and people don't like being treated like a number — they respond better to an actual person calling them. Even if AI voice quality matched a human exactly, the fact that one is human is probably worth at least 5% in conversion — same reason people buy handmade goods at a flea market instead of mass-manufactured ones, we feel connected to humans. That may change as models improve, but for now, don't let AI touch a lead that fresh — a human needs to make that first contact, even if it's just an initial text made to look human-sent rather than obviously automated.