Mastering AI Agents for Business Growth With Alane Boyd

Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast, where we have top leaders and founders of agencies sharing wisdom on how they built their company. Hi there, I'm Kevin Horrigan. I'm the host of the show where I feature inspiring business leaders from various backgrounds and industries willing to share their stories and insights. Today's podcast is brought to you by Spinutech.

So Elaine, at Spinutech, we help middle market and larger clients grow by giving them more leads. Hey, Elaine, who doesn't want more leads? At Spinutech, we take an end-to-end digital approach, starting with your website and making sure it has the right aesthetic appeal and convincing content to convert visitors into action. And then we look through all your digital marketing tactics, such as SEO, paid search, organic and paid social, email marketing, and more.

With all of those optimized and fine-tuned, we help our clients grow. To learn more, go to www.spinutech.com.

Well, today's guest is Elaine Boyd, founder of The Biggest Goal. Elaine is a serial entrepreneur. She grew her social media marketing agency to 600 active clients before selling it in 2018. Her newest company, The Biggest Goal, helps companies implement the AI solutions to help effectively navigate the AI journey they should all embrace.

Elaine, welcome back. Thanks for having me back. Lots of new things have happened since we chatted. Well, let's get started there.

What has happened since we last chatted? I know you've been evolving quite a bit. Tell us more. I mean, companies have to evolve to stay alive.

And so just really diving into AI, but more than just prompting, it's really how do we have automated work with AI and building AI agents. So we've been focusing on providing a service that builds those, but also teaching people how to build them. So tell me more about that. So, again, everyone's curious about AI.

I was at a conference last week. You know, it's the dominant conversation. But everyone's curious, but I don't think anybody's got a defined path that they know exactly like I'm in a good spot with AI. Tell me more about what you're doing.

Yeah. So the difference is a lot of people maybe don't know the difference between just, you know, oh, I use Chat to BT versus what an agent is. And so if you think about your day to day, you're chatting with AI, like going to a Chat to BT or similar, then that is still manual work. It's you going to the AI, chatting with it, getting an output that you want, and then taking that out and going and doing something with it.

Sure. Very manual and very siloed because it's dependent on you. Well, an agent already has all those instructions as a part of it, and it can do a job very clearly and has access to your CRM and maybe your project management system or something like that. and when it's triggered, when something comes in, it goes, oh, I know what to do.

And the agent already has all the AI prompts. It has AI hooked up to it and can take on that task and take care of the problem for you without any manual input necessarily. So Elaine, I'm sure you've built out a few of these so far. You have some use cases and some client successes maybe you want to share.

Yeah so I share how I have my team structured I have 12 humans and 40 AI agents And they are such a part of our team that because they doing real work they doing real things that people normally would do They are part of our org chart. We give them names. So we've got Polly and Perry and Kronos and Rhea. So all 40 of them are named.

They're part of our org chart. And humans get one color in the org chart, AI agents get another. And so some examples would be, you know, thinking about the sales process, knowing if that lead is part of your ideal customer profile. Does this person fit your ICP or not?

Or can go and data mine and find your ICP. Get them in front of the tools or your website or whatever it is to get that person from a cold ICP to a warm lead for you. Yeah, sounds great. So you have some that are doing the prospecting.

You have some agents that are doing the prospecting. You have some agents that are doing the internal lead review and then maybe assigning or even some automated responses when leads come in. Yep, all of the above. Now, you know, I think it's really important to say that there is still a human part of this, right?

That we don't want to just have AI creating this, sending things out. There still needs to be a human element, having them review the outreach that's going out. The agent can draft emails for you and things like that, but there should still be some human pieces to this. And having, we're the experts, we're the knowledge, and the agents can go and execute for us instead of us having to do every single tedious piece of it.

Yeah, completely makes sense. I know you talked about your org chart. I think you said you have 12 full-time team members as part of your org chart, but you had 40 or 41 agents. how do you know the difference between you know what is needed a full-time team member who's on w2 who's in the green code and then maybe who you know what what can be an agent and how's that impacting the workforce of the future i mean it's definitely i mean so i want to say this we have been impacted by technology for our for our existence you and i but things that we're not getting on this call and having a phone operator connect us.

That job was eliminated by technology. Sure. This has always been happening for the last 100 years that things are evolving and humans are more strategic and creative versus having to do the tedious work. So, you know, we think about this and we're like, oh my gosh, it's taking people's jobs.

Man, that's been happening for a long, long time. And where my team and we had to really build this culture around is what are we doing? What could be automated? The people that have skills are going to stay.

The people that are just doing data entry and that don't want to evolve with the company. Well, yeah, an agent can replace them. And that's the idea. It's like, I want my team to be thinking about this and utilizing it.

They become the manager of those agents, just like they would people. So they need to keep them updated. They need to keep their instructions. Your processes change.

The agent may need to change. Yeah, no, that's well said. And I love your analogy about, you know, we were able to get on this phone call without anybody manually connecting. I had the view of the old switchboard and the plug and play when you were sharing that.

But I think that a great example of just how technology continues to replace things over and over again but finds new places where people have to reinvest their time And obviously you know continuing to train the agents and so on is where the evolution of where those careers are going Can you tell me about any use cases of like, you know, you shared, I think a little bit about maybe what some of you're doing there. Anything else, a deeper dive, maybe of a client win or somebody saying, hey, I'm glad that we hired your services.

Any good wins out there? Any good stories? Oh, gosh. The two popular use cases that we implement often because it's time consuming is new client onboarding and proposal generation.

Yeah. So, you know, part of that sales process, but creating a proposal can take a minimum of two hours and some clients put 80 hours into their proposal. So any time that can be decreased in the proposal period when you're not making any money off of that client yet is a huge win. And so those are one of our favorites to implement with clients because, man, if we can get that to five minutes, they are, you know, ecstatic.

Yes. Yeah. No, that makes it great. So I think maybe one of the last questions here, Elaine, is just so a lot of us are still trying to figure out our AI journey.

It sounds like you've built a company that's helping people navigate that probably with better predictability and a better feeling about going into it. What would an engagement look like or how does somebody engage you and what was their need and what's the outcome they get? So usually with our customer journey, we start off by doing an AI workshop with their leadership team. What is AI past just prompting so that they understand what the capabilities are, what agents are?

And then we do cohorts and you don't have to necessarily go through one of our AI workshops. It's just a great lead into the what an AI agent is. But we do AI agent training workshops where it's a four week course with one of my business partners that he teaches how to build agents and going into N8N and creating a database and all of these things. And what we're seeing is.

People coming to that, they're not just sending one person. It is, we have multiple companies sending four to 10 people through these because you need the founders and leaderships to understand what this is, even if they're not building them. They want to understand what does it take to build one. And then they've got the builders on their team.

Who are the champions that could go in and create some of these for them? So that would be the next phase. And man, some of them are just off to the races after that. We've got an AI mastermind and AI builders group for continued support after that.

And we also have some implementation services. But we're really seeing that this perfect unity is teaching your internal teams and then also having the support afterwards where our team can be an adjunct to the creation of agents without needing to be on a full service package with us. Yeah, no, that completely makes sense. Two more questions for you.

one, where are you getting your source of AI inspiration today? Oh my gosh. Well, my team is so much fun. I mean, we, this weekend, I really, so I'd already downloaded Claude Desktop and was using Claude Co-Work, but one of my team members was like, check out check this out I created a 14 page website using pencil and Claude Co Now we still need experts Like again like this some of this is my skillset is only so good And to articulate what I thinking in my head and getting it out to somebody is really difficult.

So I've found that this is a great way to prototype to get my vision over to somebody. And so seeing that, like my team, they trained me on it because I hadn't done it before. And they're like, Elaine, we are at a roadblock with you. How about you do this?

It's been amazing. Yeah, no, it sounds amazing. And I think every day I was, I think I just said I was at a conference last week, of course, AA has dominated the conversation. But one of the presenters said this, and I thought it was just a really good statement of where I think a lot of us are today.

I should say it was like, when AA came out, I embraced it, you know, super big chat GPT user, but so many new tools have come out and so many different uses of different tools and licensing arrangements and all kinds of, it's changed so much. She's like, I've gone back to AI dating again. She's like, I don't take any commitment right now because the landscapes change that quickly. And I feel like kind of where I think many of us are in our journey.

We've tried a couple of things, but there's more and more coming and don't want to overcommit to something until you understand what else is out there in market. So I really thought it was funny how she made a joke out of she's back to AI dating again, just because she doesn't want to get too deep into a tool that maybe has had another later game player bring something different to the table from a functional perspective, from a licensing perspective. But I know it's just evolving like crazy.

And I think we're all just trying to figure it out. And companies like yours are the biggest goal to be able to help others navigate it with a more high level of confidence, I think is great. Yeah, Kevin, I'm going to have to have you come to sit in on one of our AI masterminds, because that is exactly what we're doing every other week. And we're curating AI.

So where, like as a leader in your company, how do you keep up with what's going on and what AI tools to use and really just being agile? Like you got to be agile right now. Yeah, I think AI dating is one way to say it, but AI agile is probably a much more important way to say it. So I really appreciate that.

Elaine, you shared a lot of great stuff with what you're doing with The Biggest Goal. If anyone wants to connect with you, what's the best way they could reach out to you? Biggestgoal.ai is my website and you can always reach out there, but I'm really active on LinkedIn.

And I mean, Kevin, I think you and I even chat, you know, on there sometimes. So Elaine Boyd on LinkedIn, shoot me a note and, you know, I'd love to chat. And we have so many free resources available too on just being able to stay up to date. Yeah, Elaine, thank you so much.

We appreciate you being a guest on that Growth Fire podcast. Super appreciate your time. Super appreciate all the contributions that you've made from an AI perspective. And we wish you and your team the biggest goal, ongoing success.

Thank you, Kevin. Yep, you have a nice day. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast powered by Spinutech. And you can learn more at spinutech.

com. That's S-P-I-N-U-T-E-C-H dot com.