Practical AI Processes - Marie Piercy

Phil: AI is everywhere right now. Everyone's talking about it, but how many small businesses are actually using it to replace real processes and save real time? Marie, welcome to the pod. what was your initial interest in AI or what drove you down the AI route both for your own business and for clients' business? Because I know that people are thinking, I'm aware of AI, but surely it's somebody else's job.

Marie Piercy: Yeah, I think, do you know what? Probably three years ago now, I was looking for... more efficient, more effective ways to run and scale a business. And I've had a business that has failed in the past. And when I look at why it failed, it was down to lack of structure, you know, being the founder and trying to do all the things myself. And so I've learned from that. And so I started just getting really interested in actually, you know, how do you leverage systems process and AI is a huge part of that. I just started watching YouTube clips. started researching online, I started watching webinars and trying to get an interest around actually what does it mean? Because most business owners will come to me now and go, it's everywhere, it's buzzword, what does it mean? So I started just researching and then started mapping out our own process and going, well actually, what in there does need the human? Because I'm a massive believer, as much as I talk about AI, we cannot lose the human in what we do, of your sales process when you map it out and there's 10 steps. There's probably only three that need me as a human. The rest is manual, repetitive, so AI could do it. So I started looking at each part of that process and started with that initial lead generation research data gathering task and then went and looked for tools that I could use that would make that easier. Same. I for many years, probably two years, did a lot on ChatGBT. where we start with AI, right? So I did a lot with chat and ChatGBT is good. You know, if you're not used to AI, if you've never used any tool, then start with chat. But then I started looking at whatever tools were out there, know, Gemini, Claude, I did my research around what do I actually want it to do and then started playing around with these systems. And for me, is the most effective to be able to manage an entire process, to effectively have different job roles in there and to train it in your business. So it's exactly the same. What I would say about AI, and this is so important for anyone who's thinking about how to use it in the business, it's only as good as the information you give it. So it's a bit like an employee. If they have a good induction, they're going to know what they need to know. It's the same with AI. And where people are hesitant right now with AI is, don't want to sound the same as everyone else. I don't want to lose my tone. My business is all about me. It can still be all of those things if it's trained correctly. So for me, Claude is by far the best tool out there that businesses can use to be able to create projects and have different tasks completed for them.

Phil: I love it. So you researched AI, you've got into Claude, you've started to, I presume, find processes within your own business that you can map out. What did you what was the kind of biggest pain point that you thought, do you know what? My customers are having to do this repetitive job, and we could really systemize this and we could maximize AI here.

Marie Piercy: The pain point is the pressure on the business owner time. Like they're spending all of their time doing things in their business, which aren't making money. And we do it because we have to, we are control freaks, right? We run businesses and we think, we do think we have to do everything. And that's fine when you set up, but when you want to grow and scale, you can't do everything. You become the bottleneck. So when I go into businesses and one of the first things we do is look at the strategy. you now, where do you want to be? Then we look at their process, right? Let's map out your sales process and who is doing each part of that process. And you go, all right, okay. So that's you as well. And that's you as well. And that's you as well. And the reality is when you look at what we're doing, you think, my God, in the world we live in now, you don't need to be doing them things. So I map it out and then go, right, okay. So we, we can get AI to do that. And one thing I would say to anyone thinking about AI, it's about chasing which tool to use it's about What's one task that is taking you too long in your business? One task, so like that research task, what is the best software to use to help me do that? So it's not about going, well, I'm going to do everything in Claude, I'm going to do everything in ChatGPT. What's the problem you've got and what's the best solution for it? But in general terms, Claude is good as an all round support to any business. So that's kind of, that's my... way I work with clients. Let's pick one task and let's get AI working on that task and then we move on to the next task.

Phil: So you've discovered Claude, you love it, you started to influence systems in your own business. You've seen that people, and I'm sure we all are, spend too much time looking for leads, looking for those ideal client profiles, rather than actually reaching out and contacting them, which I'd say is the important part of the work or the you know, the the win at the end of the day. How did you go about then getting Claude to go through that process? What was the I'm gonna say your first step was talking with the business owner. mapping out what their existing system was. What was step two?

Marie Piercy: Once you've done that, step two is then building Clawed out. And I think this is what puts a lot of people off because you can't just implement AI and start using it. This is where you see, think people using chat and just putting in prompts that say, create me a post that does X, Y, and Z. And that's where everything sounds the same. The key here, once we've identified where's the bottleneck, where's the tasks that actually need to be done by something else or someone else. The minute I started looking at Clodger, you have to invest in building it out. And this becomes a sticking point for a lot of business owners because realistically probably took me half a day, half a day to build it out properly. But Again, I did a lot of research behind that. The reality is my clients, typical business owners don't want to go and research. They don't want to spend half a day building it out. So we do support them with it because not everyone... Most business owners are good at their thing. Whatever they do, they build websites, know, the great IT, you know, whatever their trade is, they know it, they love it. No one teaches you running a business and certainly no one teaches you how to run your business with AI. And a lot of these business owners just don't have the appetite to go and learn it. They don't want to go and learn it, but... If you're going to grow and scale, you have to embrace and leverage AI. Because if you don't, competitors will and you won't have a business. Like it is that brutal. But with Claude, the minute you've picked what tool you wanna use, you have to find time to sit down in a dark room and train it in your business. And with Claude, it's really easy. It is easy. It's just timely because we've got to get everything out of here and into Claude. And to a lot of business owners, that's quite overwhelming, right? But you have to train Claude. So that would be the next step.

Phil: So to summarize then, so step one, we we write down the process, we've got the process written down.

Marie Piercy: Yeah.

Phil: Step two, sounds like a scary

Marie Piercy: Yeah.

Phil: jump. Step two, because we're a busy business owner, we're under pressure, but step two is we've got to step away from the business for a day or for half

Marie Piercy: Yeah.

Phil: a day or whatever it is, or go on an AI training course or whatever it is, to then build that process into Claude. Is that is what's the approach that you're seeing people take at the moment? Is that what they're doing or is it is that where

Marie Piercy: None.

Phil: we probably need to work with a partner to to really fast track that?

Marie Piercy: What you typically get where business owners start is they will just start using ChatGBT or Claude. And what they start doing is just giving it prompts. know, write me a social media post about XYZ. And that's not wrong. You know, we all start somewhere and we'll start, you know, getting familiar with the systems. But what I'm talking about with Claude and something we're working on now, these Claude, the projects you set up in Claude could be actual employees. It's an employee. because the project you build in Claude could be a lead generator, for example. Previously, we'd have paid somebody £1,500 to come in and do that role in your business. So this is the difference between a business owner starting up, playing around with the tools, which is fine. But if we're going to talk about businesses wanting to scale, then you have to put a bit of legwork into this to get the end result and to get the right outcome. So, and it depends how tech savvy you are. know, some business owners embrace it and go, I want to learn it, I want to know. And don't get me wrong, you can have this work done in a few hours. huge but if it's not your thing and you don't know where to start and you actually got no interest then absolutely partner with someone who can just get it set up for you because it is a simple task but it needs training it's like if you were going to induct a new employee would you would you hire somebody and then go I haven't got a few hours to tell them about my business no you wouldn't so yes you can do it yourself use someone to do it but just do it just train it because the more you train it the better it becomes. It is a member of staff. Okay. We now have Claude set up and anyone who knows Claude, you set it up with individual projects. So, and once you've told it once what you want that project to do, you don't have to tell it again. So we have different employees set up within Claude. So lead generation is a big one. our entire sales process, what I would say is 50 % of it at least is being built out inside Claude. So we've got the research in elements. So every week my Claude will pull a list of my ideal clients, it will source their contact details, it will create a crib sheet on why they're our ideal client and give us some insight into why we could or how we could outreach to that client. It then adds them to our CRM and creates me a task. So on a Monday morning I come in and log into my CRM and there's my 20 client calls for that day. Then from there, what it does is it then does the continuation in terms of the nurture. So we've got a project set up that nurtures our cold leaves. Then it schedules appointments and the appointment setter project will confirm them appointments. So it sends my link to book in my diary. It will send confirmation, reminders, follow ups, et cetera. Then follow up the meeting needs me. This is where it's really important to not forget we are humans and you know, and we have to still remember that people buy people. So the meeting is absolutely me. What I would say though is I record and transcribe every single meeting. So I record every meeting through Otter. That's the tool I use to record my meetings. Following the meeting, Otter then speaks out to Claude and from the transcript Claude then takes my proposal and creates a full proposal for my client in minutes with my recommendations. It would then send that via the CRM to the client and then it does the follow-ups after. So actually all of the stuff in the sales process that's quite manual, repetitive, takes time. is now done by Claude. The human element is me when I have an initial conversation with a client in the meeting and if I need to follow up with them after the meeting. Everything else is done by Claude.

Phil: Okay. So your first step again is is to write down what you're doing, I presume, to find your leads at the moment. And then did you have a conversation with Claude saying, This is what I do, can you do it? Or did you look for YouTube videos or what did you find to take that first step to turn that process into reality?

Marie Piercy: I went online and looked at training documents for Claude. So I knew when I mapped out our sales process, I knew I needed it to do this element. so I went in and lots of forums online, know, Facebook has lots of forums around Claude and everything else. But, and then I researched online and went away and watched a few tutorials and, and, and for me it was right. You know, I need, this can do it. You know, Claude can do this for me. I know it can. I'm quite lucky we've got a tech team in the background because we implement process into businesses, CRMs, et cetera. So we've got a tech team who are very tech savvy and they get me all the time going, can it do that? Yeah, it can do that. Right. Fine. So we knew Claude could do what we wanted it to do. But there's so much information out there. The challenge you have as a business owner is it can be overwhelming. The one thing I would say right now in every conversation I have right now with a business owner, none of them have appetite to go and learn what to do with AI. They don't. So we need to make it easier. We need to educate people on actually, this is really easy, but the way we're doing it now and positioning it very much is around, this is your team. This is your sales and marketing team. So rather than go and spend two, three grand on every hire, use AI. Use AI at a fraction of the cost. But what I do find is business owners absolutely need hand holding through it because you know, I don't think it's complex and it doesn't need to be complex but most business owners genuinely right now have no idea how or where to start.

Hayley Baxter: So if we just take it back to just one task, because you've got like a whole ecosystem

Marie Piercy: Yeah.

Hayley Baxter: there of sales process, but if we just take one task, so if we just take the research bit of how

Marie Piercy: Yep.

Hayley Baxter: you're using Claude to go and research those clients and come up with the 20 that you need to call this week.

Marie Piercy: Yeah.

Hayley Baxter: If I wanted to go and do this today after this call, because I'm so inspired by it,

Marie Piercy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. So what I would do in its most basic form is get a Claude account. You can get a free account. It may restrict you in what you can do with it. It will let you do certain prompts and then it will go, you've done enough for today. But it's a good starting point. Start with the free account and then if you need to upgrade and see value in it. Create the Claude account, go in and set up. the basics of your business. So just tell it a bit about your business. So in 10 minutes, you know, give it an overview of your business. If you've got any documents, you can feed it. So business plans, marketing material, the link to your website, you know, any comms, anything you've got. that you can just feed it. You're teaching it about your business just by feeding it. So just give it all context. Once you've done that, create a project and call that project Lead Generator. And then you go into the project and talk to Claude and tell it what you want it to do. each week Claude, I'm going to come in here and I want you to go and find 10 ideal clients for me. Here's what my ideal client looks like with one of ours. We call it a lucky like, because what I do is every week I feed it one of our existing customers or one of our prospects that we want to work with. I go, each week I want you to go and find 20 lookalike businesses. And what I'm looking for is X, Y Z. And then what you can do if you, start with, is each week you just come in on Friday and you go, please run me this week's searches looking at that company. And then straight away, what Claude will do is it will go and do the deep research. It will find 20 lookalikes for you and it will provide you with a spreadsheet that goes, here's your companies, here's the contacts, here's why they're a good fit for your business. And here's my suggestion on how you outreach to them and what you say. Download it, you sit on a Monday morning and you go through it. That's it. And that takes Claude probably five minutes, you know, but you can, you could set that up in half an hour. You've got to start somewhere, right? Love it. Love it. Yeah. Yeah.

Phil: Absolutely love your look-alike vibes. I think one of the things that we as businesses need to know is not just who's our ideal client, but why the ideal client. And I think the real power you've captured there, Marie is you say, This is an ideal client that we work with. They chose us because of this, this, this, this, this, and we wanted them because of these factors. Now go and find me more. I think that's really powerful. That's that's a brilliant tip. So once they've done that, and I think this is a great kind of toe in the water, they've unleashed this power, they see the power of AI, they've started to get some processes in there, and they think, okay, maybe, maybe I've reached my tipping point now. I can see, I can see that it's worth investing into. At that point, I'm presuming they're looking to contact a company. Who is your ideal client profile, Marie?

Marie Piercy: Who's mine? My ideal client is business owners who have been established for three years plus, a business that is turning over typically one million plus and has a small team in place. But they also have a founder who is keen to scale. and is open to change because that is crucial. Of course, we've built our businesses on everything we know, but we have to accept if we want different end results, then things have to be different. So that is the key thing for me. We are industry agnostic, it doesn't matter. To grow a business and sell more of your thing, the process is the same in terms of how you do that.

Phil: And if they've listened to this and thought, My God, this could save me a fortune and I could become a billionaire, potentially the next Elon Musk, how would they get in touch with you, Maureen?

Marie Piercy: LinkedIn, you will find me all over LinkedIn consistently. yeah, come and connect with me over in LinkedIn or drop me an email.

Phil: Fantastic.

Hayley Baxter: Thank you so much, Marie.

Marie Piercy: You are welcome.

Phil: Wow, Marie is so much further in the journey. I think we often kid ourselves that small businesses aren't able to implement AI properly. However, having spoke to Marie, she's clearly so much further down the process and she's sounds like she has absolutely nailed processes that I'm still working on. Things like seeking out those ideal client profiles, it looks like she's she's miles ahead of me. So I really enjoyed the huge, huge kind of gotcha for me was where she said to put in your existing clients to then let AI copycat. What about yourself, Haley?

Hayley Baxter: Yeah, that was a great that was a great insight, that the copycat thing, rather than just putting in so I've done it before where you put your ideal client profile in that you've all that you've written for your perfect perfect client. I know we said something else there. for your perfect client. but actually putting in the profile of clients that you already have, that's just like that's just under the level, isn't it? So I thought that was really interesting. I think that I think what Marie's done, having a whole sales ecosystem running through AI, but keeping that human touch at the right points, is incredible. when you when we then stripped it back and just were like, right, well how do we do just this bit? Let's just start start small one thing. Actually I was like, well you know what, I could go away and have a go at that because it that then didn't feel so incredible. but I suppose that's why AI experts are being developed all over all over the all over the world now. That's that's the new job, isn't it, becoming an AI expert.

Phil: I always think everything's the same, so If you enjoy something and you find that you start to get results, whether it's jogging, whether it's walking, whether it's learning a new skill, the more you gain, the more successful you are, the more you want to do it. And I think for both of us, if we got into the copycat profile, I'll almost guarantee that we'd spend and I think this is a business owner thing, we'd spend four or five hours a night perfecting it, we'd be absolutely hyper focused in enjoying it. And then we'd probably come up somewhere short of where Marie was, but we'd probably find four or five other uses that we've got for it. And I think it's that dipping the toe in the water that that copycat profile really provided.

Hayley Baxter: Yeah, and I think it is just having time to play, like making time in in your diary just to have a play with it. I think that's how that's how I learned best anyway. Is there anything other than actually going trying to put that process into your own business, is there anything else you were inspired to think I might I might change in my business or try to do something similar?

Phil: Well, we've just started getting the blog post out and I think from that some of the ideal client profile and getting the copycat. I think that was really important. So I think it'd be worthwhile now running through those blog posts and saying, Here are our customers, what would be the lead, or could we twist the blog post a little bit to to put it towards that profile? rather than it just be a maybe not a generic, but a pro a blog post that's based around the ideal client profile that I've written down as opposed to an actual in real life profile. So that's something that certainly had me thinking. How about yourself, Hayley?

Hayley Baxter: There was well, there's loads of things, isn't there, when you sit back and think about it. But I think the thing I am gonna do, because we were literally talking about this yesterday, doing some research for clients to connect with or start to bring us get into their world or bring into our world. So I am actually gonna task Carla. I'm gonna send her this transcript and say, have a go at this. I'm gonna see what happens. A true art delegation. So on that note, I think it's a great point to end. So thank you so much.

Phil: Before we end, I'm going to say we will all know how successful Carla is because I would like you, if she is successful, to put a 40 second blurb into this podcast to tell us what she did. So if that is missing everybody, we know that Carla has not been successful. If you found this podcast useful, if you thought it was great, if you enjoyed listening to it, then please do us a favor and recommend us to your friends, colleagues and family.