Happy Guru Pernima. Nick, just wanted to say massive thank you for creating some of the best automation content out there. Your teaching style and generosity and sharing knowledge makes a difference. For anyone wondering, Guru Purima is a data honor and appreciate teachers and mentors who guide us. The word guru comes from Sanskrit where guru means darkness and ruins remover. That's really cool. I didn't know that. So guru is someone who removes darkness. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate this. Happy guru panima to you as well. Daryl says, Hey, Nick, thank you for the daily updates. Been listening to them daily on my morning commute. Hopefully you're listening to this on your daily commute right now, man. I know you're against chat bots, but I need to know your honest opinion on automatic lead nurturing systems. Basically, we're using GHL as a CRM. Chatbots will handle Q&A qualification and nurturing on multiple channels. When leads are qualified/ show buying intent, client staff will be notified to take over. There will also be follow-up sequences to follow up with prospects who ghost. I might be wrong, might be an idiot. That's why I'd really appreciate to know your honest thoughts and criticism.
Using AI in the sales process isn't inherently bad, but you should only use it if your AI-driven solution outperforms an equivalent human solution. Often, the money saved by AI is less than the implementation cost. For example, with a $10,000 average deal size, a 1% drop in conversion due to AI costs you $100 per opportunity. If AI isn't saving you at least that much, stick with people. Consider that AI works 24/7 while people don't, and AI can be onboarded instantly with minimal legal hassle. However, ensure the money you save by switching to AI isn't outweighed by lost opportunity costs.
What a great question. This is more a consulting and strategy perspective than a building one. Naturally, if you're trying to make more money and thinking, 'Ooh, what's a way to make more money? I know AI is all the rage—maybe we'll add an AI chatbot to our website,' but if the chatbot doesn't talk to anybody, it won't make you more money. You've stumbled on a universal problem for many service businesses: they just don't have any leads. The real point of value, the bottleneck you could fix, is usually lead generation. I don't know how many people visit their site daily, monthly, or yearly, so it's hard to suggest exactly what to do next, but you're on the right track. The usual thinking is: get leads first, then worry about optimizing how you deal with them, nurture them, and improve conversion rates later. In your opinion, what's the best automation to sell? Could you make a video on it? The best automation to sell is something that increases or encourages lead generation, which we discussed. One of the main systems I sell is a cold outreach system where I build distribution for someone from scratch for about $200–$300 a month ongoing. They start with zero leads in their pipeline—usually an agency—and after the system is set up, they get roughly 30 leads per month that want to book calls. This is a game-changer and easy to justify as an investment for companies whose bottleneck is lead generation, like most businesses under $50k–$100k per month in revenue. Think of it this way: I'm solving their most dire problem—no leads entering the business. I charge them $3,000–$4,000 a month, which is fine because without me they wouldn't even have a business making more than $3k–$4k a month. In my experience, the best automations to sell for small to mid-sized businesses are those that help the top of the funnel. If they already have an outbound system but aren't getting many leads, I'd recommend a speed-to-lead system. Anything close to the top of the funnel—whether outbound or inbound—helps a lot, and that's what I'd recommend.
Yes, selling chat bots will remain viable and actually increase in value as they become more intelligent and easier to implement. CRM and structured data will also stay in demand. For services, focus on systems tied to revenue because they’re easier to justify and have higher perceived impact than backend optimizations. To overcome running out of retainer ideas and delivering less value, list what the client currently does to generate revenue, list what others use to generate revenue, find the overlap, and build systems that help them do the effective activities. Avoid low‑return activities like excessive LinkedIn posting; instead, double‑down on high‑return channels such as trade shows. This approach lets you quickly justify your retainer value.
I just use Chat GPT for everything—not because it’s the best, but because all frontier models are roughly at the same level; any edge one gains is only a few percentage points and quickly matched by another. For business use, those tiny differences don’t matter, so sticking with one model helps me avoid shiny‑object syndrome and lets me get fast with its API. Regarding selling automation: think of your offering as having a core service (the AI automation you build) and packaging around it. The client never sees the underlying automation; they only see the packaging. Good packaging lets you add perceived value—you could even wrap a simple automation in a fancy dashboard and charge premium prices. But the real work is still the automation inside the box. To make the package sexy, you can create custom dashboards, or simply make the notification emails or alerts look polished and professional. For practicing sales: the best practice is to actually sell. You learn by doing, earning while you learn, which is far better than just rehearsing. So go out and sell your automation packages; the experience itself is the practice.
Thank you for the question. I see this as a bad idea for a car dealership. Chatbots save very little money on lead intake because the labor cost for handling DMs is low—around $5–$10 per hour in the Philippines, maybe $40–$50 per day. Automating that would save only about $1,200 per month. More importantly, chatbots convert poorly compared to humans. Assuming a 20% conversion rate with a person, a chatbot might drop to ~15%, a 5% loss. On a dealership selling cars at $500 profit each, that 5% drop translates to losing about $12,500 per month while saving only $1,200—a net loss. Chatbots lack contextual awareness, nuance, and the ability to read tone or political vibe; they take things at face value and can misfire, reducing lead quality downstream. Chatbots make sense only for high‑volume, low‑complexity scenarios like enterprise customer support where the cost of human agents is huge and the interaction is simple. For a small‑ to mid‑size dealership, the value is minimal. Instead, I’d recommend scaling up the human team to handle the volume, because labor remains cheap relative to the company size, and humans outperform bots in lead conversion.