How to build an AI automation agency for beginners in 2024

hello everyone in this video I'm going to talk about how anyone can build their own AI automation agency in just 30 days or less I'll be drawing on the experience I've gained from being part of a team that works with 60,000 plus agencies and condense it down into a bit of a blueprint and week-by-week action plan that you can easily follow to get your new adventure underway within a month or less at minimal cost there's no degree required no brick or mortar Investments and you can do all of this from the comfort of your own home which is one of the biggest perks about starting an agency and thanks to no code automation tools you don't need to worry about any of the development work so through this video we're going to cover Three core topics what AI Solutions and services should you sell who should you sell them to and how much to charge but before we dive into the how let's establish a bit about the why you're probably aware that chat GPT has taken the World by storm and it's made AI a Hot Topic in every industry in fact there was one stat that suggested businesses this year are going to invest $300 billion in AI tools however while big corporations Embrace AI many small and medium businesses feel left out according to a QuickBook study 70% of smbs believe AI could enhance their competitiveness against the big end of town and that's where the opportunity lies by starting an AI automation agency you can bridge that Gap and become part of a burgeoning industry so stay tuned I'm going to dive straight in into the first week of this action plan okay so what are we going to do in the first week Imagine your first week as a detective on a mission your task is to dive deep into the local business scene through market research you want to get to know business owners in your community and understand their digital and AI needs now to save you time time I want to help you understand six of the big categories you can expect people to reveal in their conversations when you're going through this market research phase so no particular order the first big bucket for any business is content most businesses they just can't afford writers designers editors those kinds of skills but they need content to drive website traffic social engagement and of course search rankings now with the rise of AI and proliferation of tools like chat GPT and Bing AI image generator and Google's Gemini there's tons of value that you can provide to local businesses uh here's an idea how about adding a chat gbt extension within Google Docs or Microsoft Word and then showing a business owner how to use Smart prompts to create multiple social media posts in one document you then Implement a zapier integration to take content from that document and automatically schedule them as posts across their social media accounts boom you've suddenly helped businesses create regular content on social media whereas perhaps they weren't doing that and you suddenly look like a hero next on the list is listings from Google business profile to Trip Advisor local businesses have an endless number of online business directories which they need to put their listings on in a way that's accurate but to do that it takes a lot of time now here's an idea you can provide businesses with tools that allow them to claim all their relevant listings instantly that way they maintain accurate business information across all online directories and have consistent details for things like operating hours phone numbers website links business images and so on all right moving on to number three is managing reviews most people 98% in fact are reading reviews so keeping those star ratings High proactively managing customer feedback that is no longer optional for businesses now at the same time managing all that stuff is super tiring and that's where automations can play a huge hand so here's an idea as an AI automation agency you could help local business Implement tools which Leverage The Power of AI to provide instant and polite SEO optimized responses at scale and add value through things like sentiment tracking and ratings comparisons versus local competitors next on the list is social media which is of course how so many of us are discovering Brands and products now I already talked about the content piece but there's many other facets when it comes to social media and how AI Solutions can help with those for example there are products that can notify a business whenever pictures of their products are being posted and shared on social media boost digital advertising performance by making recommendations based on past performance and current trends and of course make reporting a breeze by instantly giving business businesses a holistic view of their performance across all their accounts so they don't need to Deep dive into each one and try and make sense of all of that number five websites there are so many AI Le improvements that you as an AI automations agency can make to websites to help improve their performance for example how about AI powered website chat Bots those things are booming and they work because prospects are always browsing a website and trying to find information about a local business out side operating hours and let's face it a lot of prospects just don't want to call so chat Bots add a whole new level of interaction with visitors and they're so smart these days that they actually know how to work up a conversation and get your contact info which in a business context means more tangible leads another example is to integrate AI extensions and automations into e-commerce websites to help reduce abandoned cart rates so for example you could help a local business to send out automated reminders or special discounts to help customers complete that purchase that's been sitting in their cart in an e-commerce store last but not least workflows this is kind of the nitty-gritty stuff which can make a world of difference and it's really up to you to Deep dive into a business owner's operations and find opportunities for savings and productivity benefits here's an example let's say you're doing work for a boutique insurance company and they've got a booth at a conference and they want to capture leads now a lot of the way these industries and old school companies work is they still use paper forms which is not the best user experience now you could help modernize that you could set up automations where customer information is captured via a QR code a new record of that Prospect is immediately created in their CRM and assigned out to a salesperson for follow-up as well as added to the insurance company's nurture campaign boom that is a a lot of time saved for that client thanks to Ai and automations now those are the six buckets and that's just a high level overview and I know I didn't mention many specific products and that's because there are so many it would take forever so part of your challenge will be listening to business owners and finding out about the AI products that could work for them and that you could resell so don't be afraid to take demos and free trials now in terms of well how do I find this stuff out so in these seven days it's really important that you get out there and have real conversations with local business owners maybe make a list of who you're going to contact dayto day and also try online channels like Facebook and Discord ask for a moment of the business owner's time and try to find out things like what AI tools are you using right now which parts of your business do you wish you could automate and where in your business do you wish you could actually spend more time in the more time you can free up for them the more they're going to be inclined to work with you so as you progress in week one you'll be identifying the needs of businesses in your community and try and figure out how to solve them by researching those different solutions okay we made it through week one we're now in week two and the focus is on prospecting so the goal in the prospecting week is to find out number one where do I find potential customers and number two how do I convince them to talk to me with a view to sell to them this is a really interesting part so don't go anywhere because we'll be developing your sales Playbook right now and I'll share some secrets to help you boost your lead generation now before you say a word to anyone your approach here matters when we talked about product I mentioned your detective in the prospecting stage you're actually a doctor your job will be to listen to business owners as if they're patients this is called the outside in approach and it involves aligning your AI automation agency to their needs and this strategy is the brainchild of Mark rer the former Chief Revenue officer at HubSpot and one of the smartest guys in Tech sales and he actually spoke about this at one of our virtual events now in the description I've posted a link to an article I wrote from his presentation called Mark roberge's fstep sales process to win more deals please read it because it will help position your Agency for Success quicker and help you avoid many of those unnecessary mistakes that you don't need to be making now you need tools and I'll quickly touch on essential tools for prospecting the first is a CRM now since you're going to be interacting with a lot of business owners you need to keep track of those conversations and remember the names of who you're dealing with and where you're at in terms of of the selling stage so you need a CRM and please get one with email marketing capabilities the second is a website a website with your logo a bit of information about your agency and you really critical please include any proof or case studies that you can on how you've helped other businesses and it is essential that you have a lead capture form the third essential thing is you need sales intelligence tools you want sales intelligence tools that provide instant reporting on a local business's digital weak points otherwise you are going to be looking at every business and spending hours of your time it's going to chew your head you're going to be doing so much research if you can get an automated sales intelligence tool it'll save you a lot of time and a lot of them offer reporting functionality that you can actually share with clients and it makes it much easier to have a conversation with them now let's talk about where to find our leads the easiest way to start is is by contacting the business owners you know so if you already have good relationships with the owner of the local Salon the hardware store Etc that's a good little pool of early leads to tap and many of these business owners have relationships with other local businesses so try to leverage that but really cold calling and cold visiting is going to be your biggest driver of leads initially and I know that sounds painful going out there Into the Wilderness and trying to sell your services but as you build up your reputation leads and referrals are also going to come to you naturally now when you talk to or meet business owners you need to develop what I call a talk track and that should cover a couple of things why you're reaching out to them and how you can help them questions that show genuine interest in understanding their challenges and areas where they could use help and save money based on your research uh you should prepare to show tangible results you've achieved for previous clients if that's possible and you need to be prepared to invite them to take action or think about the next steps they may ask you for a follow-up demo uh call me back later uh send me a proposal or just sell it to me and in terms of who to Target just start with a simple Google search of local businesses near you and perhaps start with a niche that you're comfortable with now I'm going to share some secret Source Avenues so let's open up that Source bottle because there are three Avenues to help turbocharge your lead generation that some of our best agency partners have suggested so the first is you want to be attending local Chamber of Commerce events these are networking events hosted by your local Chamber of Commerce and they offer super valuable opportunities to connect with potential clients but it's really important you focus on building genuine relationships rather than pushing sales pitches you don't want to be the person at these uh events just trying to sell engage in meaning meaningful conversations share about your expertise and and express interest in future collaborations the second is you want to be monitoring job ads now bear with me in the thesis on this one so often what local businesses do is they're posting jobs uh for casual positions full-time positions they might want to be hiring a Content writer for 10 hours a week or they might want to be hiring a customer service rep now if you see those job ads and you have products and services that can help solve for that reach out to them more than likely they're going to want to save money on labor and that's your cue to help them the third is you want to be utilizing LinkedIn LinkedIn is the world's biggest professional business Network and our agency partner swear by it so set up an account optimize your profile join relevant groups and connect with other business owners in your Niche and try and share valuable content and utilize features like inmail and sales Navigator and please actively engage in conversations to establish credibility and attract potential clients there's a ton of resources out there on how to use LinkedIn well so I'd encourage you to just do a Google Search and check some of those out so to summarize in these seven days your list of activities are get a website up quickly even if it's just simple with a bit of information and a contact form find a good CRM that works for your AI automation agency consider getting sales intelligence tools so that you can really collapse that time you spend on doing research create and optimize your LinkedIn account and try and join three to four groups that you're interested in prepare your talk track register for one networking event set up some job alerts code call or visit 15 to 20 businesses and try to book one or two meetings phew I know that sounds like a lot but this is after all meant to be a 30-day crash course and if you're taking many of these boxes you are doing great okay let's move on to week three and the next 7 days and the spotlight here is on pitching this is when you'll be meeting with your prospect specs either in person or virtually with the goal of securing that sale or closing that deal in the product phase you played the role of a detective during prospecting you acted as a doctor and now guess what you're a Storyteller now keep watching because I'll be sharing a powerful framework to boost your storytelling skills now why are stories important it's because stories have been proven to be 22 times more engaging than presenting facts and figures alone and much more affecting much more effective excuse me than just straight up selling so we want to lead our pitches with stories and that's where I'm going to introduce you to What's called the why change framework and this is a structured approach designed to convince prospects why they need your services why they need to change and here's how it works in your story you want to introduce the prospect to an unconsidered need related to Ai and automations and why they're essential for business business you want to throw in a bit of loss aversion by highlighting the missed opportunities they face by not adopting AI such as losing business to competitors who have ai you want to create a win loss contrast by sharing case studies of businesses thriving with AI tools versus those struggling with manual processes and you want to present the tools you're bringing to the table as the solution if you're interested please drop a message in the comments below and I'd be super happy to put together a professional looking slide deck that any AI automation agency can use to share a compelling story that leverages that framework I can make it white labeled so you can download it add your own logo and change it as you see fit just let us know in the comments below and please subscribe to our Channel and I can post an update video of when it's ready and I'll take you through it so in week three we're going to focus on the pitch and this is what you're really going to hone in on um during these seven days you're exercising your Storyteller charm you're working on shifting away your mindset from I'm going to go into that meeting and sell sell sell to I'm going to tell a story about why AI is the future create some fomo and solve a business owner's problems with these awesome Solutions so prepare and rehearse your pitch put together presentation slides and again please drop a comment if you'd like us to prepare that for you and again be ready for unexpected things the prospect may want a demo they may want to buy right then and there they may want to NE neate pricing uh on on the spot and that's the topic that we're now going to come to the nerve-wracking moment of money how should I price my services so in this final week and before sending off your first proposal you'll be thinking about what to charge so when it comes to an AI automation agency there are several elements and different strategies to consider around pricing so this video is for beginners I'm not going to go into sophisticated hybrid strategies we'll talk through three of the most popular ones now the first and foremost is your reseller fee this is the core Revenue driver for your agency and I want you to put most of your focus here because this is passive income at its finest the reseller fee is the cost of what you pay to buy AI tools and solutions and the amount you're selling it to the local business for now our suggested golden number is a 40 to 60% margin now suppose you're buying a review management tool for $100 per month per unit and you want to resell that to local businesses now to make this worth your time you need to be selling this for no less than $140 preferably $160 and much higher if you can that applies to each product you sell some will be at lower margins some higher but try to keep that average margin at no less than 40% now eventually you want to be selling packages of three 5 7 10 products to hundreds of local businesses that's what our most successful Partners do some of whom are raking in millions per month with this bundling strategy that they eventually upsell more products into now the second is your consulting fee or retainer fee your time of course has value and you've taken the time to diagnose the prospect tailor solutions to their needs create their create their AI automation strategy and there will be time required on your end for onboarding and implementation and all those other activities now some agencies straight up just charge for their time as much as $500 per hour on top of the reseller fee some also include a monthly retainer where they get paid monthly because the agency has to spend hours of Labor to support that client every month so that's one to consider adding to your agency's business model for sure and the third one is the value added or Project based fee this fee is where you charge for your services based on the value generated for a client or based on the complexity of the project an example could go like this you implement Ai and automations for a local business which saves them from hiring an admin assistant for $50,000 a year you spend $10,000 in labor developing these workflows and setting them up with the tools they need you could charge them a 50% value added service fee being $225,000 that lets you recoup the $110,000 you spent on labor plus 150% margin on the time invested seems fair to me but each project and local business's propensity to pay will be different so be prepared to negotiate so to conclude on pricing those are your three different general pricing strategies it's really important here to test the waters and do your research on what other competitors and agencies might be charging as well and don't be afraid to provide your services on say a 30-day free trial or start some of your initial clients at a break even cost and go up from there for many of our partners getting their first client was often the hardest but it got much easier over time please also think about your business expenses and how you'll accept payments what will be the cost of doing business in the first 12 months and how many leads conversions and sales would you need in order to exceed that we'll use QuickBooks or stripe and hopefully of course you've done things like your business regist ation and set up your business tax account Etc and we won't touch on it in detail in this video but it's really important you think about three things after the fact in terms of when you close a deal how will you measure success so setting up key performance indicators with your clients how will you deliver proof of performance and hopefully the products you pick support you with that and how often will you do check-ins think of those client relationships as plants they need to be watered often okay final thoughts we've covered a lot of ground in this video If you stuck around to watch me talk for this long congratulations and thank you with that we've completed our crash course in building an AI automation Agency for beginners in 20124 in 30 days in week one you built up your AI automation agency product line and did some Market Research in week two you started developing your online community presence and started pitching to business owners in week three you hopefully told some amazing stories to convince the local business that they need you and in the final week you sent off a proposal with a wellth thought out pricing strategy and hopefully achieved that 40 to 60% margin and you did some forward business planning as well and set up regular check-ins with them I hope you enjoyed this video You're our community and we would love to hear from you so if you want me to go into more detail in certain areas or have suggestions for future content and materials please drop a note in the comment section and our team will be super happy to look at it good luck with your journey in starting an AI automation [Music] agency

Channel: Vendasta

Views: 7,984

Keywords: ai automation, ai automation agency, ai agency, how to make money with ai, automation agency, how to start an ai business, how to start an ai automation agency, digital marketing, ai automation business, ai tools, ai tools for business, ai tools for business automation, ai tools for digital marketing, ai tools for marketing, ai tools for graphic design, ai tools for content creation, ai agency automation, ai agency ideas, ai agency services, ai agency business

Id: 80BwZzZuvYk

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024