27 | How Lanny Heiz Uses AI for Sales, Prospecting & GTM

What if you could generate a full sales pipeline without hiring SDRs? Lanny Heiz, founder of Enablement, has done just that—scaling to $150K/month in revenue using AI-driven automation. In this episode, he shares how he transitioned from manual outreach to an allbound approach powered by AI agents. Lanny also breaks down his workflow, from content-driven lead generation to AI-personalized outreach, and discusses the future of sales automation. 

If you're in sales or marketing, this conversation is packed with actionable insights on the future of AI in go-to-market strategies.

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Transcript

Audrey Chia: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the AI Marketers Playbook where we cover actionable frameworks to help you leverage AI and marketing strategies in your business. I'm Audrey Chia, your host, and today I have with me someone very, very special, Lanny Heiz. He is the founder of Enablement, a company revolutionizing sales pipeline generation through AI powered strategies. Now in his two person business, Lanny has achieved an impressive 150K in monthly recovering revenue by leveraging AI to automate their go to market and fulfillment process. I think what is interesting about Lanny is he has always been talking about using AI to build an all bound strategy, right? That helps companies create, you know, a much fuller sales pipeline Without hiring even more SDRs or the generation agencies. Lanny, you're one of the smartest people I have talked to so far, and I'm really excited to have you on the show.

Lanny Heiz: 0:51

Oh, what a warm introduction. Thank you very much. Happy, happy to be here.

Audrey Chia: 0:55

Awesome. So for those of you who may not know you, right? what would you tell them about yourself? How do you get started in this whole AI space?

Lanny Heiz: 1:03

let's start with the latter part. How do, how do we get started? So I was the head of sales at a marketing, run of the mill marketing agency. So we did some like Hopscotch implementations, that type of stuff. we did, every time I did cold outreach for myself, kind of, that worked brilliantly. However, scaling that didn't work because like I did some personalization doing it manually, just doesn't work. And then I hired and fired some, some lead gen agencies until I met my business partner today, Gilbert. And, we together found a way to. Scale personalization in 2020, 2021, without actually, well scale, scale that basically the way we did is we hired VAs in the Philippines, wrote some really smart SOPs and taught them like how to actually personalize, go on the website, go on the person, LinkedIn profile and like write some personalization that worked really, really well. cause nobody's doing that, back then and November 2022, which is kind of like the hallmark milestone moment for, for all of us, with the launch of JAT GPT and especially the API. So we immediately played around with like integrating it into Excel spreadsheets and like writing personalization. It was wonky back then, but it sort of worked. And, and that was like the moment I really realized like, okay, Hey, what we've been doing sort of manually in a. Smartish way can now be done by by AI and and ever since then I was like, okay, this is a rabbit hole I'm going all in and yeah, so never stopped since

Audrey Chia: 2:20

Wow, and and I think for our listeners, right? I actually met Lanny Perhaps about one ish year ago and that was you know, when ai was still getting started, right? But even then he was already leveraging what most people didn't know about it to start building systems and processes Now Lanny tell us more about Old way of, you know, prospecting and sales versus right now, what is in fact possible today?

Lanny Heiz: 2:43

Yeah. So I recently, last week I had a talk at HubSpot and taught like their sellers, like we did, we did a workshop with them. And, and so what, what I told them is I think also what would be helpful for, for, for the listeners here, right? We had in 2022, I already mentioned, we had like one moment that's the advent of AI. The second one was the raising interest rates of the Fed. So. And that led to basically capital becoming more expensive and companies need needed to become more profitable, cetera. So all that stuff and AI now made it possible to actually be more profitable, be more efficient with, with using you, using, using, AI's capabilities. Now, what that means is basically the old world, you raise some money as a startup or as a company, you. Try to become very profitable and like hire a lot of salespeople and, and, and basically grow the business that way, just by hiring SDRs that would then do call calling, call emailing, whatever, like just pray and pray, type of stuff. And well, some were smart about it and like us and hired some VAs in the Philippines, but most people weren't. And what AI now allows us. especially 2023, 2024, when it really got very, very powerful. I think here for Omini really changed something here as well. And just in terms of cost, and, and, and like what Minit can do now is basically instead of hiring a team of five, 10, 10 SDRs, we can, we can have one, maybe two go to market engineers, as we call them, that orchestrate everything. In terms of like AI agents, automation, et cetera, and, yeah, do the same revenue that you would do or more, with, with it, with a large team. We even had like one customers that had eight SDRs. They are down to two now. and they still made 3. 5 million ARR in new sales. and so yeah, like the, the, the, their projections were not affected by it. We had another customer from four SDRs. They went down to zero, just one go to market engineer. and again, like, yeah, they, they hit, what was it? Like one, one, one and a half million AR as well. So. Yeah, it's, and just like, if you look at the costs of an, of an SEO, depending on where you are, like costs you around 60 to 90, maybe, right. Like with bonus and, social security and like all that stuff. So, yeah. if you can cut that, like say for half a million dollars, in, in there, like, that's pretty good. Yeah, that extends your run rate. The proof

Audrey Chia: 4:50

is in the pudding. That's why it's so beautiful to see the integration of human and AI, right? Now, I want to double click on one thing you said. You said go to market engineer. And I think, you know, from the way that you've been speaking about, you know, workflow and processes, do you think the role of go to market and sales has changed greatly? And what is this new skill set of?

Lanny Heiz: 5:07

Yeah, no, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. So I think with, especially with sales and marketing, there's like a science and an art, to it. the old SDR role was pretty much leaning more into the art side of things as in like every SDR, like wrote their own sequences, maybe there was like some enablement going on that we want, like there was some templates, but it was a bit of Wild West to some extent, from, from, from what I've experienced. And, and, there was not much emphasis on the technical side of things. And now with, with the new tool set and tech stack that we can implement, it becomes way more technical. and, and so we leaning a bit more on the, the design side of things, let's say, for the technical aspects of it. So, and that requires a different job role and a different job profile and skillset that you bring to the table. So if you're like an SDR, right now, and you are very tech savvy or like I don't know. You just have a knack for tools. I think this is like what your role and, and your future basically could lie is in more of a go to market engineering role. if you're not, and you're more like the outgoing chatty type of person. I think that there might be still like, obviously if you go more enterprise stuff, then there will be. Always a bit like human touch, go to events and like network and like these type of things, they're not going to go away, quite the opposite to some extent, I'd like, we would still want a human touch. so yeah, you probably would lean more towards that now in terms of like, what's, what doesn't go to market engineer do, cause I get. Obviously it's kind of like a logical question. I think they, they sit at the intersection between like what marketing traditionally does or sales traditionally do, like defining target personas and, and reaching out to them. And I think what revenue operations or product operations would normally do is kind of like integrating that very technical world. and, and the creative world of marketing and sales, and just combining that and automating and centralizing ultimately the entire go to market strategy that could be done outreach, that could be content production for marketing. That could be, any type of like product related, PLG type of place, workflows, et cetera.

Audrey Chia: 7:05

Wow, and you can see that it's very interesting that you said, you know, a marketing or sales is a combination of art and science, right? You can't have either or, and also like how the sales role is developing, you know, especially in the past year. I think this is also a high time for anyone in sales marketing in any of our fields to figure out what are the new skill sets you need to adapt to in order to thrive in this new world of AI, because companies are going to rapidly I don't processes like that. and it's a matter of time and perhaps even a short amount of time, but over the past year, then how have you seen like the AI sales process evolve? Because we started off with just chat GPT, right? Then you have all these new tools, these new systems interfaces. Where are we, where were we one year ago? And where are we at now with like AI agents, for example?

Lanny Heiz: 7:48

Yeah, that's a good, it's a, it's a very good question. So yeah, as you, I recently had actually a LinkedIn post about kind of like the evolution and the levels. So I always say like level one is like your co pilots or your jet GPT or Claude. even if it's like a custom model, like that's a bit more sophisticated, but ultimately you interact with ad hoc. Like I need something right now. Please do that for me. I, and that's nice. If you have one off tasks, I don't know. You need to brainstorm something or do some market research about particular topic, then this works great. However, the more sophisticated version than like level two and three is where you integrate it more into automation. And then it really becomes more independent and actually. So 3d, like can replace, can start to replace employees. cause the copilot, this just makes you as an individual bit more efficient, but it doesn't really replace employees and humans, with, with taking away the laborious work. So, and this is kind of. Where we had some capabilities, I would say last year already. but it was very in its infancy and like now maybe it's like a toddler. where, where we are with, with, and like you mentioned the keyword here, like agents, that we, that we have the ability to create agents and set up agents relatively simple, relatively, in, in simple, simple ways, even if you're not an engineer. And, and, and, and they can do things autonomously. So just to give you a couple of examples, how we use, agent, agents. So one that I actually built on the weekend, which is just like a little side mode, a meal plan agent. So my wife's always like, Oh, what should we cook? And like that type of stuff. So actually it's just set up an agent that, creates a meal plan for the week and like grocery lists and like, and, and then recipes, and then sends to our WhatsApp group chat with our, housekeeper. slash nanny and my wife. And then basically my wife knows what to buy. My nanny knows what to, what to, what to cook. so you can obviously do little stuff, fun stuff like that. for yourself, but more on the business side of things. So one thing is we do is, is for content. right. Like one thing we noticed, or like one thing, a lot of people struggle with it. Like, well, what should I post about like, what's the hot topic? So we solved that, part of the agent. So the agent comes up with the idea by scanning, Hey, what's performing well on LinkedIn, what's on the news, et cetera. And like, how does that relate to. Our topic, which is AI sales and go to market and, and then comes up with ideas. That's being picked up by another agent that then writes content around that. And, and then we have like a quality assurance, agent that kind of like refines it and makes sure like it actually is smoothly working together. And so this way, the entire content production is actually automate, automated. I just, I don't know. Basically got them a, an approval step. Like, Hey, here's the content, please approve it. And then it's being scheduled on LinkedIn. so, so that works pretty nicely. and, and takes off a lot of, a lot of work. So that's one. How

Audrey Chia: 10:29

accurate is it? Like from a scale of like, I would

Lanny Heiz: 10:32

say 90 to 95 percent of the post I can leave untouched. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And, and, and, and the way I've built it is so one aspect I like, Yeah. Like one, one aspect of the agent and like content production that I think that makes it so good is like one is okay. Well, it's really in touch with what's, what are trending topics. So, cause it's like scans all the social medias, particularly Reddit and LinkedIn and Twitter in my, for like keywords and like Performing posts, et cetera. and then just, in the identifies topics around, amongst the best performing posts, and, that wasn't that easy to set up, but like, once you know how, then it's doable. And, and the second then steps, step was, okay, well, how can it. bright, good posts. that was just fine fine tuning, a model. And the last bit was, okay, well, how does it know about me and my market? And like, I think like a lot of like all these like Taplio and it's like super grow and like all these tools that write content for you, they lack that element cause they don't know anything about you. And I just fed it like a hundred page document about my market. and, and my. Myself. and, and so this makes it, this is, that's why it's so good. It's not just like your, your tapio written posts, which are, well, they're well written, like the copywriting, but they, they are, I could write them or you could write them. Like, yeah. Like it's just basically nobody can tell, Oh, this is Lanny. Right. and, and so if the agent wouldn't work for you necessarily, because it doesn't, well, it doesn't know about Audrey, right. So, so I think that one makes that agent so, so powerful. and, and, might work so well.

Audrey Chia: 12:03

Wow. I think that is really amazing to hear. And I think where everybody's at is still perhaps in the co pilot stage, you know, just using AIS and when, but it's a really amazing how you're already thinking like three steps. I mean, that's also what

Lanny Heiz: 12:17

clients, that's why, I mean, that's what kind of clients hire us for, right? Like to help them, and like, cause we want to be trailblazers, right. And like, lead the, or find the path forward, right? Like the path is not always very clear. so, so yeah, we are always have to be just very, very ahead of the curve. And it's also personality wise, I've always been like that.

Audrey Chia: 12:36

Yeah, competitive in a great way, but I would love to know, like, how, how do you see things? Because even from the way you're thinking about, you know, solving problems, it's really from a, I would say, very engineering ish approach, you know, like when you have a full overview of, steps, systems, and processes, like, how do you yourself think about using AI? Like, what has helped you in this process of cracking new flows?

Lanny Heiz: 12:55

well, I always started with the end in mind, right? so what do I want? Right. Like, so I described a copywriting agent, like another agent we have is that writes our email called outreach or well, all bound. so it's not, it's not an outbound technically, but it's more like an all bound approach where we, identify people who engage with us on LinkedIn. Right. Like this is also where like these agents really play together. We have content on LinkedIn. and then we follow up with people that engaged. multiple interactions with us. and then, then we reach out to them cause they didn't like us, didn't know us, et cetera. and how I built that, agent and, and general, so what I advise people is start with always with the end in mind. So what do you ultimately want? which would be, let's say really well written email. Okay. Well, write that email as if you did it manually, like what should say, and then you reverse engineer. Okay. What information would I have to give to like a trainee, like an intern, like a smart, what information would that intern need, to do that? And cause the AI is basically like that. It's very smart. It learns things very fast, but it needs instructions and. Knowledge and, and, and access to information. same as an intern, right? Like they don't have, they don't know anything about you that you already do. So, so that's how I conceptualize it, let's say you want to call the email and okay, well, what's the, what's the email, what information do I need to give it, where do I get that information, et cetera. And then you set it basically up step by step, same with content agent, right? Like. What do you ultimately want? Okay. Well, LinkedIn posts, that are personal. Okay. What information do I need? And then you start like basically solving that puzzle in reverse and which tools and like which buttons to click. That's ultimately then almost the easier part because the conceptual part is what's, what's hard. and, and, and like, yeah, everything else is just using a tool, right? It's kind of like learning how to use a screwdriver or like, yeah, something like that. But the conceptual part is way more important to me.

Audrey Chia: 14:42

Yeah. It's super cool. And I like how you say you started the end in mind, right? A lot of people use AI just expecting it to create the output you're looking for, but what they don't do is then they don't break down the steps to get there. So. Then you end up with something very generic,

Lanny Heiz: 14:55

that

Audrey Chia: 14:56

is super flat, doesn't meet your needs, doesn't convert. and you wonder why. and that's because you're missing like all the steps before, which I think is a very important part of the process.

Lanny Heiz: 15:04

Yeah. Yeah. It's like same with marketing, right? Like a new, like, I don't know, landing page, ads copy or like, just, yeah, it doesn't work.

Audrey Chia: 15:10

Definitely. And that's also the way that I prompt for landing pages. it's like an eight step sequence and nobody sees, but they see the final result. I think it's one problem, but it's so many steps in between, which eventually could be done by agents. Right. So I also have to think about how I want to engineer my workflows. But with that in mind, would be super cool for you to perhaps share a workflow with our audience, that would help them to really understand how they can leverage AI in their businesses.

Lanny Heiz: 15:34

Yeah, sure. so you want me to share my screen, maybe?

Audrey Chia: 15:37

Yes, so you can share your screen. So for listeners who cannot see the screen, I think Lanny can walk us through what we're seeing on screen as well.

Lanny Heiz: 15:43

Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm actually gonna do this, so you should be able to see a blank Miro page, is that correct? Cool. Okay. So I think we can do the, build this quickly together because then it's a bit more, more interactive. So the, so the way, the way I really, think, think about it is. If we run any type of go to market motion, we have a couple of jobs that we need to take care of. So first is like to create trust with some sort of, or, create trust. Right. with, with an audience, then we need to identify if I, prospects. but basically that trust us and also have a problem that we can actually, solve. And then we need to engage with those, right? So that's very, very high level, how I think about that as a, let's say, three step, process. Now, how do we do that? And this is literally just how we, do it. like what are the elements. and, and the workflow that ultimately leads us to, to, to create that trust. So the first I've already mentioned, so we have an AI agent, to create content. LinkedIn is our kind of like weapon of choice, here, but like if your audience is on our TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, it works like, Yeah. Like we do still obviously still need like some sort of like editor, but ultimately that the logic is exactly the same. So, that content will create, an engaged audience and they will create interactions and these interactions, our thresholds is like, once you have like five interactions with us, we want to know, Hey, are you a, IAP fit. So an IAP fit, that will be in our case, Hey, are you like a tech company that sells some sort of like software product, in, into a B2B audience or know B2C? And, it is that, like, is the, is is the value like something between like 10 to a hundred K, right? Like not too small, not too like super big.'cause then we in our process can really, really help you. So that's kinda like we, we just wanna see hey. Do you fit our, our ICP? So, and if you do, this is essentially then also like how we identify our prospects. So if you, if that is essentially a yes, what we then, do is, we So to do more research, into, into your company plus person, right. Kind of like, okay, well, let's say you're the VP of sales. I want to understand, okay, what's your background, like based on your LinkedIn profile, I want to understand what is your company offering, et cetera. So I just want to get a good picture. So when I say. I, then I mean my AI agent. So everything I do show here is a hundred percent automated. so, and, and with that research, I can then, do my messaging. I copywriting. so that can then be, well, what to, what do I want to send you? What do I want to reach out to, to you? essentially when I do think about like outreach, It's always, especially in our case, but in general is you don't want to show, don't tell, I think it's the best principle to think about it. I think, that also is like in marketing, like if you run ads, landing pages, et cetera, I think it's pretty similar there, but I think called out region or like outreach in general, you want to tell everyone that like you have the greatest solution or whatever. you want to find a way, Hey, how can I. Proof that I have it. so one, one, one way we do that is like, well, we have to, like, if you do a cold outreach, or like an email outreach, we, our messages have to be so good that they think like, Hey, I want this too. Right. And, and, we do that by providing them like really unique ideas of what they actually could do, for example, like, Hey, look, I saw you have like five SDRs, and. Yeah, I looked up the average salary in your location. Like you paid them probably X, Y, Z. Have you ever thought about like, bringing in some AI agents that could do kind of like the same, that would drive the costs down by X, Y, Z. I like, so we do, and we do that obviously, if someone has like a strong, Background or, or, or, or, or from just from a responsibility side of things. Like we have to deal a lot with like cost and cost optimization. so for example, if like a startup, like the run rate is running low because we know the funding rates are, or like the last funding was like a couple of months ago, a couple of years ago, something like that. So you really think about that. And, and, and like, so if you have a, like what we are, other things we can is then think more about. Like what type of campaigns they could run and like these type of things. So it's really, really personal. And the goal is ultimately, to really showcase them. Like, Hey, we've, what we promise we actually do in like, here's, here's the proof in the messaging. And again, this is how we apply it, but like to any this now there's like always, Hey, if you write an outreach message, how can you prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are capable of doing this? So let's say you do web design. Like why don't you find the. an AI based way to pre design a landing page. Right. Like something like that. Not just like, Hey, we do nice landing page. So like, Hey, he is something I've already done for you. If you're a copywriter, like, Hey, I rewrote your, your landing page copy. I think here are the improvements you can do same for SEO, same for like any type of like service. or also with software, like, yeah. Like, how can you give a preview of your software that is like zero friction? I don't have to log in. I don't have to register with my email, et cetera. This is what we. then do the messaging and obviously that works in tandem with the research, right? Because for the, again, we start with here and then reverse engineer, what type of data we need. and then it's just basically all about like, outreach. And, then we reach out to them. Like in our case, that's, done on LinkedIn. I have the copywriting is obviously different from LinkedIn as it's way more conversational. email is, it's a bit more, pitchy. I would, I would say, but it's just because we tested it works better. if we are more conversational LinkedIn and a bit more pitchy. on, on email, the last step then ultimately is, is, so we do classify our responses. We use AI, obviously to, to do that, like sentiment analysis. If it's neutral, it goes into an automated subsequence. If it's like very positive, then it just goes directly into my HubSpot. I'm just going to CRM, basically where I then say, okay, I get a task. Hey, please call that person. They want to book a meeting with you, et cetera. So. And in the meantime, well, in order to call them, obviously research the phone number in the meantime, so I can directly call them, et cetera. So that's kind of like the workflow that, and I said, the only time I actually, a human starts to interact with anything is when I get the very positive message, like, Hey, let's book a meeting with them. so, so yeah, and, and that's. The whole walk that I have is bits of content review, but I said like 90 percent is done. So maybe it's like an hour to one and a half a week that I spend on that. And, and then like just following up, doing discovery calls, et cetera. And yeah, like that books that books, there's like 30 meetings a month easily. and I said like, yeah, it brings us brought us to, to, to, to over a hundred K MRO, Yeah, just like, that's, that's, that's literally, that's all we do. That's, that's, that's what it is. Right. and, and it's yeah. like, and, and I see like what people try to do, like all the effort and the call callers and like, again, like we, we have customers that had like five, six salespeople make also a million dollars in AR same as us, but. I just run this basically, this is a part time, I also run the company and like make sure customers are happy and new strategies and product development, et cetera. so this is just my side gig basically, but yeah, like you can build this with, with AI.

Audrey Chia: 22:46

Wow. And I think it's amazing to see how you have streamlined the entire process like block by block. Right. And then that already gives you the ability to frame your sales process in a way that makes sense for it. AI to then work through it. my question is what kind of like, like, do you trust the flow? Like what kind of potential challenges you might be facing, you know, especially when you first built this system. I'm sure there are still like, you know, mini kings in this.

Lanny Heiz: 23:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, I mean, One, one thing. And I think this is where, well, one of the tools we used to build this was clay. And I think that's one really cool strength of clay is that they are not like a visual workflow builder, similar to let's say relevance, AI or, or make. com and like these automation tools. cause you probably could build something similar. also with those tools, but what Clay allows you is to really test. and like with AI, like one thing is like what I learned is like, it's a lot of just like testing and like, Hey, does the prompt really work? And okay, well it works for one. How about like for a hundred? Like, does it work for a hundred instances? And because there's always edge cases and you need to account for them. And Clay just helps with that back and forth. And most of the time is where I spent, that I spent was ultimately just, adjusting prompts. And like seeing how they work. So, so like iterating through it. and yeah, so this is also where we, and then again, then where some technical stuff that we need to figure out, like, how do we do that? And like, how, where do we get that data? But ultimately that wasn't the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge was always like, yeah, making it work at scale. And as I said, Clay, Clay certainly makes it much easier because you can test it better.

Audrey Chia: 24:18

Yes, absolutely. And that makes perfect sense. I think what is also, great from this example is you put in the heavy lifting and the hard work up front, like all the testing, experimentation, prompting, failing, systems process. But then once you get that sorted, you now have a flow that can work. Yeah,

Lanny Heiz: 24:36

yeah, that's, that's, that's always like my dream that I, you know, back in the day we, I said, like, we sat there at the beginning of the month, we went to sales navigator, Apollo or whatever, like clicked your list together. I was like, okay, well we reach out now to this industry with like, yeah. And then click, click, click your list. And then you reach out. the problem is like, you just have to do this. Like every time you want to launch a campaign. so, so what we are big on is more, do this, do this around signals. So one signal is yeah, the LinkedIn interactions, like technically you can obviously add signals here. It could be like job changes. Right. So, cause especially if you don't have a big brand on LinkedIn yet, like the strategy won't work necessarily. cause you need to spend the time on, on building a brand. so we can also do like, I don't know, job ads, news. Like we have a list of like 20 triggers that we ultimately could use. and depending on your markets and the offering, et cetera, like there's different, Signals that, that you could implement. but yeah, like ultimately the, the goal is always to have an autonomous system. I think that this is really where the power lies is like you say, you set it up, you test it, you obviously do some Q and A, but it runs autonomously because that's, that's where you want to be.

Audrey Chia: 25:41

Yeah, super cool. Thanks so much for sharing this flow, but I would love to continue this conversation, right? But I wanted to get your thoughts on what do you think the future of sales is going to look like? I know this is a tricky question, given we have seen so many changes over the past year. What do you think the future of sales is?

Lanny Heiz: 25:58

So obviously we have to define like the time horizon here, but let's just say for 2025, I think it will be more of the same, but faster. So that means, like model, the existing trends is okay. Well, AI and agents and automation, that's just going to be the market adoption. And like, it's just going to be more of that. so the shift away from SEOs from a, et cetera, to more agents and GTM engineers, I think that's, that's a big thing, that we will see for this year and, and, also like the, the, the, the years that, that, that, that come, Right. Like if I, if I, cause a lot of people like barely used even JATCPT. Like we just, like we are in such a bubble here. We have to be frank about that. we are in such a bubble. so, so I think this whole adoption will take longer. To be like, we all still early, very early adopters of these like workflows. So, so I always have to remind myself of that as well. so the whole adoption is going to be. The mass market adoption is going to be slower. so the systems that I've showed, like this is going to take like one, two years till this becomes like really widespread. Like I still talk to people that. To send emails manually like this still exist. so, and, and, but so yeah, like that's certainly one next one, two years. It's just gonna be that and, and more adoption of that. And then when we go to like 20 28, 20 29, who knows the a GI might be on the table then and, and. Yeah. And then like when, once AGI is in place, who knows, right? Like one thing I could see is obviously like agents buying from other agents, like in a sense, like, okay, well, the agent knows the business problems and goes out, talks to tools. And, but then this is pure speculation, but I could obviously see a world where the whole prospecting and the management of responding to prospecting is done programmatically. So, cause right now it's just basically the, the. Basically broadcasting the signal to the market is done automated. I could see a way where there's so much noise that we will have a need to respond to those signals also programmatically and kind of like the filtering out. Cause it's not that people don't want to buy stuff. It's just, it. Want to buy stuff that is relevant to them. And, and, yeah, so I could see that, that, that we moved to that again, this is pure speculation, but it's an interesting thought. I think

Audrey Chia: 28:02

I was also thinking about this question, even for like copywriting and marketing, right. I can see like how there's going to be hyper personalization at scale. Cause you, for example, in your use case, you're hyper personalizing your code emails. for ads, there's going to be a lot more. Perhaps more specific targeting and more specific copy that probably could also mean that consumers would then be. Bombarded with a wave of super targeted hyper personalized message. And then there will come a day where there's a challenge of, so how do you stand out when that happens? So that's something. Yeah.

Lanny Heiz: 28:33

I mean, to, you know, you know, the, I think of outreach and emailing and LinkedIn prospecting, very similar to ads. cause also the way we like test things is like the ABE testing, et cetera. The way we think about it is literally how I, cause I, you know, I My real background is in e commerce ads. Like that's like my, my background, like this was my first gig. so, so I have a very testing oriented mindset and I can really understand like how ads work. So I think there's a lot of similarities and a lot of overlap. and yeah, as you said, like if you have thought with like hyper personalized targeted ads, like that's, that's where stuff gets really, really interesting. especially obviously with companies, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, et cetera. They sit on so much data, about us. So there's also where this gets scary.

Audrey Chia: 29:14

But maybe that's also why like I, the human element might also matter, which is, which brings us back to the topic of like building a personal brand, right? building a personal brand in this era is extremely important. It gives you leverage for your outbound, your all bound, but B also then gives you this niche of one, which then still makes you human when everything becomes AI and to the topic of. Building an all bound system, right, Lanny? I would also love to get your thoughts on, you know, what was sales like before this all bound system, we were just doing outbound versus sales like now, like what have you seen for yourself and your clients?

Lanny Heiz: 29:48

So, yeah, what was sales like? So, harder? more laborious, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's been, it's certainly been a journey, and, and cause I had this idea of that system, the way I presented it to you about 14, 15 months ago, there was like, And I was like, before Christmas, I was like, I thought about it. And, and, then we just needed to find like technical, technical ways to, to build all of that, to capture the LinkedIn interactions, because that wasn't that easy because there was no tool on the market. So we first actually build our own solution to that. Like now there are tools on the market, but we've literally had to build our own tools for that first. so that was, and yeah, cause the reason was why I built that is first. I said, like, I hate that pain of like manually building lists every month, et cetera. The second part is just like it makes sales so much harder as well. Like i'm sitting in front of someone that's never heard of me. They don't know if i'm legit or not if i'm because i'm just like random guy that email I sent him an email But now i'm the guy like, oh, I love your content. Yes. I always wanted to yes I actually thought about chatting to you guys like hey, yeah, like Let's talk in, I, I know what you guys do. Love that. Let's talk in two months. I'm just going on vacation or whatever. Right? Like, so the types of responses that we are getting are so different'cause they're so more welcoming. And also in terms of like the actual numbers.'cause I told you like I'm a very scientific guy when it comes to that. Like we improved campaign results by 311%. Right? Wow. It's just, if we go for job changes versus if we could retarget people on LinkedIn. it's, it's literally a, a 4x, improvement. So, so yeah, and again, sales became, became, became much easier. Like we shortened sales cycles now to 10 days for, for five figure tickets. and, and the personal brand obviously helps with a lot of that.

Audrey Chia: 31:29

So for founders who are listening, if you haven't already started, do it yesterday

Lanny Heiz: 31:36

and make your entire team join you. Right. Like, I think it's not just the founder. Like founder is obviously kind of like the one with the, that, that kind of like lead with the torch, but the team needs to follow, right. And, and I think like you had Guillaume from, from Lemnist, like you talk to him, like on the podcast or something, if I remember correctly, and I think like Lemnist playbook. I'm not sure if they combine it with like an all bound flow that I showed here. but just the inbound they got from that, like terms of what they would have to spend to get the amount of impressions and eyeballs on LinkedIn is in probably in the millions, or like in the hundreds of thousands, at least, cause I calculated for us, like we, for the amount of impressions we got last year, yeah, we'd have to spend like 50 grand. That's just like free.

Audrey Chia: 32:17

That's right. That's the power of personal branding. And I think now is, we have this mini window where LinkedIn is still, it's starting to have more influx of creators, but it's not overly saturated yet. So if there's a time to seize like the blue ocean right now is the time to just go in and like, Basically stand your ground and say, this is my niche, my space. I'm going to own it.

Lanny Heiz: 32:37

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, and, and, yeah, I think like you posted something on LinkedIn about like, that's, I don't know, not even 1 percent is like, actually is a creator. I'm not sure if it was you, but like somewhere I heard around this number that the number is ridiculously low.

Audrey Chia: 32:52

Yes. That's why like, this is like the. Beautiful opportunity, right? But you can see also on LinkedIn, it's platforms algorithm is changing. It used to favor creators a lot. but in recent months, you can see like how many creators have seen a decrease in reach and impressions. But I think like the power is then. Consistency, right? If you start earlier and you start today, you're still going to get so much more.

Lanny Heiz: 33:13

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we saw that, we saw that right. Like with Facebook, with Instagram, like it just got harder and harder. yeah, because obviously these platform needs to make money and the way is to monetize that through ads, I think, but it's actually something we played around with. Like you can just boost your own content, right? Like, and then, the way we, we build our targeted lists, right? Like you can use AI to create like hype. Targeted list. I scraped like the entire German speaking market, like the entire European market and boiled it down to like the 5, 000 companies that really, really fit our audience. I mean, just play them out with like sending ads to them and like that just worked brilliantly. we reworking the funnel now and like. Doing a bit more sophisticated and a bit more targeted, to then really drive ad spend as well. And like, that's also like one, one topic that we, that we, that we are looking into, how, how, how that can work and, and how this can fit into the overall strategy. So maybe in six, maybe next year, like in the end of the year, we have a talk, like how, Use that also for ads and how ads fit into the whole strategy, but that's certainly also like a

Audrey Chia: 34:07

Looking forward to that, Lanny. That is something I cannot miss out on. Okay. And then to wrap things up, what is perhaps, one piece of advice you have for companies who haven't started using AI in their sales processes, but are considering doing so?

Lanny Heiz: 34:21

Oh, gosh, one advice that's, that's limiting you. No, I mean, so, so, so I think, well, it depends obviously what, what the problem is and like, why haven't you, right? Like that's kind of like probably like what stopped you. and then I would like reverse engineer from, from, from there if, if, and then obviously also what your biggest problem is, is it pipeline conversion? Is it pipeline generation, et cetera? So it depends a bit like for that. Generally speaking. Just play around with it as much as you can, just like a lot of it has to do with just like figuring things out and just follow smart creators, such as Audrey, such as me, and, and other people on LinkedIn or YouTube, like basically Twitter, like whatever your social media platform of choice is, follow smart creators there and learn from them. And then. It's learning by doing right. And that can be a silly project, like my meal plan agent. or that can be a business related project. That's going to drive millions to your business. yeah, but just play around with it. cause it's really a learning by, by doing. and then the more you understand the capabilities, the more you also. Get ideas, what else could I solve in my business using AI? Cause that's really, what we constantly think about is right. Like also like, how can we use AI for our customer experience? And like, cause right now we. We are able to create a campaign for them and like show them how to do it literally in five minutes, because that's all our agent takes. Like once you hit, sign up, and, and use our onboarding form, which is like three questions, which it's your domain and to reference customers and the questions. Three competitors and the rest is done by the agent and, and, yeah. And so the more you understand what they can do, the more inspiration you will also get. So just start early, play around and, and, get going.

Audrey Chia: 35:58

Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that, Lanny. And I think like even I, myself, I get super excited listening to. The possibilities that ai is unlocking for us now and will unlock for us in the future So Lanny, where can our listeners find you and who should be reaching out to you?

Lanny Heiz: 36:13

so well linkedin obviously we talked a lot about linkedin So just interact with me on linkedin and you might get an email. from from us if you if you fit my ideal customer profile, and well, what is the ideal customer profile? So we we work with with any revenue generating You Company that has some sort of like technical, solution. We, we, we like that because they're, they're usually tech savvy enough to also implement that. usually like that starts at like 10, 10, 10 to 50 employees or bigger, right? That could be, it could also be like, if you have an SDR team. and you think about like, Hey, how can we replace them? Well, reach out to us. that's, that's kind of like key focus for us right now. cause we just seen amazing results. So yeah, I think that's, that's, that's, that's, who will benefit the most from, from working with

Audrey Chia: 36:53

us. Awesome. So remember to like one of Lanny's posts, you never know, you might get your AI agent to respond, or

Lanny Heiz: 37:01

you can actually, actually what I just created. I haven't. This is the first time I talk about this publicly. So, cause I literally created this last week, DM me, we've created an agent that creates campaigns for free, and it gives you a hundred leads and exactly what you should send them. Like it literally gives you a list of hundred leads, the email address of those leads, the LinkedIn profile of those leads. And, Personalized email. So every single email is really personalized to that person. And it's not just like, Hey, I saw your LinkedIn posts. Like it's actually personalized around your product and how that product helps that specific person. So it's, so it's really, really well done. and we do that. yeah. And like what you got is basically an email with Nexus spreadsheet and you can just use that access spreadsheet and upload it to. Your em, let's smartly ops for the pole or whatever. so yeah, DM me about that. we will have that. We were working on a landing page now for this, but just DM me, if you, if you want that, this is probably the craziest lead magnet I've ever seen on the market.

Audrey Chia: 37:50

Oh my gosh. Okay, guys, you heard it. Don't miss out on this opportunity. This is the, this is a place where you heard it first. And with that, thank you so much Lanny for joining us. It was a pleasure having you on the show and thank you folks for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and hit the bell for more actionable marketing insights. We'll see you next week.