Proven Sales Strategies for Your WordPress Agency

0:00This episode of the WP Minute is brought to you by Pressable. You know what the best hosting feels like? Nothing. No panic alerts. No mystery downtime. No, hey, is the site down? Slack messages. That's the Pressable Experience WordPress hosting so reliable, you forget it's even there. We keep your site fast, secure, and up 100% of the time. So you can get back to building, selling, blogging, or binging CAD videos. No judgment, whatever you want to do. Go to pressable.com slash WP Minute and try hosting that disappears in all the right ways. Pressable.com slash WP Minute, pressable.com slash WP Minute. Thanks, Pressable, for supporting the show. Alley Feldman, welcome to the WP Minute. Yeah, thank you for having me. Head of global sales at hosting.com. I guess before I continue hosting.com is one of our pillar sponsors. Thank you hosting.com for supporting the work that we do.

1:02I think you and I are going to have a great conversation. I grew up in sales, started with a car dealership, my family owned a bunch of car dealerships, and then I went on to start an agency ran that for a decade, worked at an enterprise hosting company for about three and a half years as an account executive, albeit sales. And you know, whatever podcasting here I am, I gravity forms in doing the WP Minute. Everything is sales to me, but what about you, Alley? What's the day-to-day like for you? Are you constantly in your CRM tracking all of your sales folks in understanding where the leads are coming from? Break it down for us. Yeah, so my day is very varied. So I have teams globally across the globe, so we're in the UK, US, and Australia. So obviously working varied hours, catching up with the team, doing some coaching sessions, but actually I like to spend more of my time speaking to our customers. So going with my team to their meetings with our customers, understanding what's going on in our agencies, going to a lot of networking events, and following up with great connections

2:03that I've made at those events, and really just understanding the agency landscapes that we can keep on top of it as a team and as a business, and make sure our products from the right place as well. I'm sure the agency owner out there, especially like the boutique agency owner, two or three people, wondering how to level up their game, how to get to the bigger customer, although not always, more money doesn't always mean better, maybe we'll unpack that in a little while. But there are folks listening to this going, hey, I'd like to have this sort of relationship with a hosting provider that can be a partner alongside of me. What's the mindset of an agency that you work with that says, here's how they serve customers. Here's how they think about business, right? They're not just building websites, they're doing what else, what's your thoughts on that? Yes, a really interesting question, because we see a lot where people all have the same type of mindset and succeed, and the people who are trying to succeed, and they're not

3:04necessarily thinking about the mindset or way of doing it, they're trying to win that next big customer, as you say, whereas where we've seen agencies really have success and go from freelancer to one or two developers to the deep up into a bigger agency, has been two areas, really, which is niching down, so really focusing on what they specialize in and who they want to specialize it for, but actually the main one is when they strip it back and start looking at their processes internally and how profitable every part of their process is, and therefore productize that offering rather than just sell everything. So they actually look at all of the services they provide to clients, who their most profitable clients are, take the services they're providing to them and productize it in a way that is easily repeatable, almost cookie cutter, so we can resell this service, we can resell this service at a profitable price, and it allows them to focus, and then you kind of get away from the, let's have a two week plan to build a proposal for a new client that

4:05we want on board, that we don't win, and you perhaps do that three or four times until you win one and you've lost a lot of time, instead you've got a repeatable process so that pitching becomes quicker, and then the build becomes quicker, because it's all repeatable and scalable and process driven, that allows you to do more volume, and have more time back to actually then focus and grow. By the time this episode comes out, dear listener or viewer, there should be a, hopefully everything goes right by the time this episode goes out, there'll be another course at the WP Minute.com slash courses. The first one that's there now is hosting Dakota, it's how to pick the best WordPress hosting provider for your agency, and the next course is obviously going to forget the title because it's still being developed right now, but it's about scoping WordPress projects, and some of the stuff that Ollie just mentioned are actually in both of these courses, where there's a lot of folks in the agency game, they go, I got to build some, like in order to

5:08move up, I must build something custom, it must be so unique and so in-depth to get the bigger dollars, like that's the only way to go about it, but what I want to unpack is what Ollie mentioned about process. I say this all the time as a recovering agency owner of a decade, like honing down on the things that you do really good, like I always say the core competency of the agency, and putting that into a repeatable package, it doesn't, it doesn't push you into retail if that phrase makes sense, it doesn't push you into, you're just this place that does this thing over and over again, it's not like a warehouse of websites, but it does focus the customer's attention, so they understand like where your core competency is, and it focuses your team's attention into like, yeah man, like 80% of the projects, this is how we react, 20% of the projects, we do a different thing. What are your thoughts from boots on the ground Ollie on like getting somebody to get over

6:10that like, oh I'm not just, I don't want to create a done for you service, I don't want to create this retail offering, I want to be bespoke and custom and hands on, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean I like to refer to it as moving from a construction site to a bakery where you have set recipes, set ways of doing things, just you can customize it and tweak it and change it, but you've got your core range of products that you're just making all the time, and that also allows you to predictably scale because you know, oh, when we have five more of these products, we need another developer or we need another option manager or whatever it may be. But the key thing that I see is it allows you to show the value of what you're offering and allow the customer to understand it, which what you're saying there, and I think that's the hardest piece that I've seen agency owners try to figure out is that understanding actually we need to sell on the value, not on the technicality of what we can build and the features that we can add into it, they need to focus on more of the value and what all those features and technicalities are going to give you as a brand to this working with that agency. And how we've seen them get over it is more than not working with someone who's done it

7:14before. So working with a mentor, joining an agency peer group where they get into go to, you know, a no-holds-barred boardroom session where you speak with other agency owners, talking about your problems, where you want to go, and being shown real world experience. I mean, we do that a lot of our customers as well, where I've been working with agencies for 15 years, and so we've seen the ups, we've seen the downs, we've seen what's worked and what's not. So we can start to have that conversation with them and let them see what's possible, and then we'll typically direct them to an agency networking group or a peer support group or mentors who can then, you know, give them that hands-on experience to get them up to that next stage. Yeah. Oftentimes, everybody starts at different stages in, let's say, their agency career. Of course, we have AI, we're going to talk about AI in a little while, to help level up and get some of this expertise, which I say, like, if I had AI when I was running an agency, oh boy, like, same thing like when I think, if I had AI, I was in college, who

8:16boy, my GBA would be, I mean, it's flying. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that in a moment, but I think a lot of people forget, to be fair, it's not that they forget, they're just under so much pressure to survive in the early days, in the latter days, of running an agency, like, they got to get that project. That's how they feed themselves, and maybe they're a small team of people. So I totally get, you know, the lack of oversight, but sales and marketing, the packaging, the presenting, like, you can fulfill this thing, and especially with AI today, like, a lot of people can be able to fulfill these things, but can you build that rapport and that trust in that sales process to get that customer, say, yes, this is the agency we're going to sign with, because I X, Y, and Z, what do you think, where does trust land for you in that sales process as the agency owner, and then maybe as the hosting company as well? Yeah, I think it's hugely important. And I think that's why so many agencies when they're starting out, and actually even

9:18when they get pretty big, are still founder, led sales, because that's the person who is the business. And so they come across in the right way to build that rapport and give the trust, but it can be really hard, especially where a lot of boutique or small agencies are set up where someone leaves an agency, could be a developer, could be a designer, where they start doing enough freelance work on the side and go, you know what, I'm going to set up my own agency, and they start, and I don't have those skills. I think that's where they can really struggle in the early days, because they're not used to building rapport with people and having to go and have these conversations. And I often will implore them to go and study, go and study some sales, study how to build trust and rapport with people, because it makes such a big difference, particularly in the early days. If you haven't been in that client-facing role, you've been in the background as a developer, it makes such a difference. And then investing in your own team as you get bigger. So you want to move away from found-led sales and create a scalable, repeatable process as in the agency, you need to then empower your staff to do the same thing. So it's the right training and the right guidelines, really, in playbooks that they follow

10:23through to build that trust. How we do it here at hosting.com is very similar. I mean, all of our account managers are extremely well trained. They've been in this industry for a long time. They're not sort of fresh out of college or that first job and coming in here. We have got experienced people. We do have those sorts of staff members in different sales teams and linked different things. And of course, they can move between teams within the business. So we have experienced people who know the industry, know the product and know agencies and have worked with agencies for many years. And then the main focus is we are consultative. So the one thing I do not want my team to be doing is selling. They're not car salesmen. They're not out there to try and hammer as many deals as possible. It's about building relationships with agencies so that we are there and trusted when they have a problem. Because when we speak to an agency, nine times out of ten, ten times out of ten, they'll have hosting in place. And they're probably very happy with it and it's probably doing a very good job for them.

11:24But at some point, they'll come across a problem, be it a scalability where they're getting bigger, be it support, or be it that they just want to speed up their sites or improve security. We've then positioned ourselves as a trusted partner already through our conversations and our meetings and networking events that when the time is right, they then reach out to us and we have that conversation to onboard them. Of course, it goes the other way as well where we reach out to someone and downboard differently, but is very much relationship led and then consultative understanding their pain points and surfacing them because we work with thousands of agencies. We understand the pain points so we can help to surface those pain points for them and then finding the right solution to solve those pain points. A duality here that I want to talk about, I want to talk about the free land, the agency owner and then I want to talk about salespeople, obviously not because I have feedback there. As the agency owner, this is why we were talking earlier about like process and packaging

12:25up a solution and having already done for you turnkey's kind of solution. Is this allows you to really refine the sales pitch, the pre-sales process, the sales pitch, the core competencies, whatever, and it can lead people down a path of understanding of the customer. For example, running my agency, like that are the biggest project, now remember this is in the thick of things running my agency was about 15, 20 years ago, something like that. The projects back then, all WordPress, my biggest project back then was probably 75K. We had recurring retainer fees, our biggest clients maybe over their span of their retainership was maybe 300 to half a million dollars in spend with us for a few years or whatever. Sizable projects, but then when I got to a company called Pagerly where I worked for a few years, I saw things on the other side of the fence where I was like, oh wow, there are

13:27a lot bigger projects happening at this enterprise level. I thought I was in the enterprise, oh no, no, no, I realized like, oh there's this whole of the world here and as a new salesperson, promise I'm getting to the question, as a new salesperson, what I realized was, oh, I just didn't know anything about like big media or higher ed or government websites and once I knew that process and once I could understand that as a salesperson at Pagerly and understand how they bought websites, which is the underlying, like how they bought websites and agency projects, the whole thing unlocked. It's so few about like, what plug-in are you using versus like, do you know how to speak to this customer and understand their buying process and that's when things unlock. This is a long, loaded question about how do you get your own sales folks to think that way and how do you think an agency can like go down that?

14:29Really, really good question, I'll answer for us first. The key is staying up to date with what's going on in the agency world. Having so many agency clients that we're speaking to and have great relationships to and we start to understand any changes that are going on in that business. The number one way the team does this is being part of the agency community. We both sponsor events, put on events and attend a lot of events and that doesn't mean we're attending just to try and win new customers and get leads. There's events that I have my team event purely for learning so it could be an ops event where they're talking through the struggles in an ops team and how to solve them and they start to see that picture and they're starting to hear the stories of what these ops leaders are going through. The same from a development point of view, the same from an MD founder point of view, what struggles are they seeing because it's a different struggle that the ops leader to the dev leader to the founder is seeing and they're hearing the real stories and how they were solved and then they've followed up those conversations and you do that over many

15:29years and you have a really good pulse on what's happening in the agency world and we're events all the time. I mean, I'm at two more events this week and I've already been to one this week. In my team, the UK's got an event every day next week and we've got a lot going on on the US Australia as well so we're always out in the community to really understand what's going on because it makes such a difference that when you truly understand the client you're selling to or the area you're selling into that you can help them surface those pain points. So I loved how you put it earlier in terms of like do you know how you want to sell this thing or how they buy it? It's we know what that's successful agency looks like and what they're doing and therefore we can see what's not being done right and rather they're doing all you've done this wrong. It's well, this is, you know, it's a grain pain where you are now and actually this is how you get up here and you start to surface the reasons behind it to help people understand because we're not trying to sell something they don't need if they're not ready to scale up and move into that enterprise space or into a completely different set up to what they're on. It's not right right now and we'll have that open on his conversation as well.

16:32And then from the agency's point of view, oh, yeah, sorry, not continuing to say from an agency's point of view, I think this is where niching down really helps because if you're not niched down, you could be having 20 different conversations in a day with 20 different, you know, pain points they're trying to resolve and 20 different outcomes they're trying to fix whereas if you super niche down, it's always repeatable. You might have three different options that you're going down. It's easier to show that you're an easier to really understand that market basically you're in the vertical you're in and therefore know the problems and how to solve them, how to lead someone to the solution. I think if you are full service and going everywhere, you then have to kind of go higher level from your verticals. You know, is it an e-commerce site and they're trying to convert? Is it a SaaS product that they're trying to get signups or is it an informational site and it's trying to be super clear to understand and navigate and, you know, you have to then focus on the different verticals and focus on that higher level by doing that's the hardest sell than when you niche down and you can truly understand the marketplace and

17:33customers. It's also the hardest to manage too, right? Because I think like we were saying before, if you're in that, if you're founder led sales, which like 99% of like the agency star, that's what you are. And you're doing these quotes. I mean, my God, I remember this the sleepless nights going into the weekend and be like, God, I got to build this quote for this person and I got to think about all this stuff. And I have to put it into a doc and I have to pitch it and present it and everyone was different. I'm like, okay, what am I doing for this person? If I had refined it, which I eventually did, like halfway through my agency tenure and realize. But like up until that point, I was just like, this is just not going to scale. Like I can't be custom quoting everything all the time and I just don't even have the time for it. I want to put each other putting that aside. I want to put each other both sort of like in the sales hot seat. I've often, you know, obviously, I don't I forget what the exact motto is, but I think like the best selling is consulted of selling or consultative selling, whatever. As a somebody who's been in a sales position, mostly all of his life, myself, sometimes

18:41I sometimes that can be a crutch. And I'm curious how you balance that with your own sales team. You know, whatever, I'll call myself a seasoned sales person or whatever, but it can also be a crutch because sometimes you're like, I had this phone call with this big enterprise. You know, I think they kind of write. They only need to stick with Drupal. But my sales manager, maybe Ollie in this case might say, no, no, Matt, we need to hit quote of this month. We need KPIs. So I'm glad you were really consulted a consultative on that phone call. But like, where do you make that balance of like, I'm a helpful person trying to like solve your technical issue to, oh, we got KPIs, we got to hit here, we got to hit, we got to hit this budget. What are your thoughts? Yeah, it's a really good question. And it is a fine line to walk because we do not want to be car salesmen, double glazing salesmen where, you know, you're just going hard for the sale and the clothes. It has to be the right fit. And that's the key piece. It's actually the very first conversation, rather than the last conversation. In the first conversation, we can understand timelines, what does success actually look

19:45like? You know, why would you be choosing to move and what, what does success look like after he's moved and understanding their entire sign off process internally contracts everything else? Because if we know that upfront, we know that we can then be harder on our clothes because we know what success is going to look like, we know the problems is going to solve and that allows you to focus on the clothes in that way. If we have that information really loose up front, all those, you know, certain points that stick out as actually, you know, this person is not in a position to move really, we'll have a very different type of conversation. But the entire process is still very consultative because we're trying to understand the pain points that we can solve. Because if we can't solve them, we're never going to get to that end point of the conversation. So it's very much in that initial discovery call meeting where you need to find out as much information as possible about, you know, your influences inside the company of selling to who are the actual decision makers, what are the entire sign off process look like? But most importantly, what are they trying to achieve by going through this process and

20:46what a success look like at the end of it? Because by understanding that, not only are you being more consultative because you're ensuring that you're meeting their timelines, their needs and given the right solution, but it also allows you to close better at the end as well so that you can manage that cycle and ensure it's not going on for six months, 12 months, two years or never closing. I need to take the odds for that. Yeah. Yeah. Again, another one of those huge lessons when I started getting into the enterprise. And this is a great lesson for, again, a freelancer of any size, as you start to move up and you start to get to bigger businesses, bigger brands that you're trying to sign, you know, I'll never forget selling into, I don't even remember what kind of business it was, media business or something, I would, I don't know, I was talking to the head of marketing and they'd say, yeah, this is great. This is great. We got this is exactly what we need. We need to host with you. We need this WordPress site. We're done. Like, this is it. I'm like, I got my first sale. And then they go, okay, so let me just introduce you to our procurement department. I'm like, the procurement department, like, what is this all about? And then it was like, fill this out, sign this form.

21:47We need to do legal. We need to do a info sec audits. We need to do all this stuff. And then we're going to put you up and I'm like, wait a minute, the guy just told me he was ready to sign. And like, no, no, no, this whole process now has to be executed. And again, another light bulb moment, like understanding the stakeholders or the champions or influencers, as you said, in the thing, super important. And sort of like, these are the muscles you start to build up over time, agency and sales and stuff like that. Where do you see the most opportunity for selling into WordPress? Is the agency out there listening to this going, okay, I got a niche down. I need to like build out like this turnkey solution. What is it for you? And more particularly, what is it for hosting dot com? Is it lose sites? Is it membership sites, media sites? Like, where do you see the opportunity these days? It's a really good question. And it is evolving constantly. We have seen a really big uptake in media sites and blogger sites, particularly where

22:47the blog bit they then turn into a woo site. So it'll be a blogger that's coming up on social media, they have a huge media gallery that links back into everything they're doing. And then they become a woo site when they start selling merch. We're seeing that happen a lot. If you're on agency, it depends whether you want to go for cookie cutter at scale, where you want to do volume of sites, or whether you want to have less clients paying more. And that's then really where the woo sites come in, because the additional benefit to a woo site over a standard site is the maintenance plans. You're occurring wherever you can get off the back of that, you know, you can have that client on a retainer. Because that website is making money, they need to ensure it stays in line, they need to ensure it's updated. They'll probably be bringing in new products all the time, and that's when you can then sell those additional products through to those clients where you can build recurring revenue. And I think as a small agency, that retainer piece that recurring revenue is more important than winning a huge flashy project when you're trying to grow, because it covers the bills. You know, I'm sure every agency founder for the first two years of the agency is struggling

23:51sleep, worrying about cash flow, worrying about the wage check coming and having to pay the staff, having to pay the rent if they've gone off this. And as soon as you can get some clients on the retainers that cover all of those bills, then you can go and win the flashy project work. But I think that's where woo really comes in, because it allows you to build out those maintenance plans at a higher level to cover your costs quicker than if you just look at media sites or anything else. Yeah. I mean, it's also, you know, one of those things where, I mean, those folks, hopefully, the WooCommerce sites that you're building or consulting on, those are the folks making money. So it's like, it's very easy to sort of like make that that, I don't want to say trade off, but to convince them to say like, okay, you need us to, you know, build this stuff out and manage this stuff for you and so on and so forth. Partnership and leads always a big thing, I think, an agency in hosting, is there like a workflow or way that hosting dot com approaches.

24:54What I'll say sharing leads, you might have a different phrase for it. You know, agency's been working with you and like, hey, we want to be a partner, but that also means like, how can you get customers in front of us? You can't do that for every agency that you service. So like, what's the tears? Like, what's the step, uh, stair step approach from like, I'm a boutique agency to, I'm a hundred person shop, like, we're just hosting dot com sort of fill those gaps. Yeah. Really good question. So our agency partnership program is only in its first phase currently and we have a much bigger and more in depth plan launching in the coming months, which I'm really excited about. I can't wait for that to come out. And that will be a don't against too much detail, because it could change, but it's really exciting must be built there at the moment, how that will work is we do get leads very often on a daily basis, well, we'll be working either with an end client of an agency and they no longer work with the agency, but the hosting still with us and then they need a new agency or will oftentimes have, you know, someone who's just been hosting their own site that they've built and now they've grown big enough and they want an agency

25:55and they'll come to us for advice of who to be introduced to. In that scenario, how we currently work is we have a list of preferred partners. So it's people who we know and have seen have done a good job who we have a really close working relationship with. So, you know, we understand how their business works. And from that, we know that that'd be a good fit for the lead that comes in. We will always give a minimum of three options to the person. So we never just say, hey, this is this one agency and we do keep track of who we're passing things through to as well to keep it as varied as possible and not just have one preferred partner that everything's getting passed through to, but that's how it works at the moment. And that is a very manual process within my account management team. And they will be passing them to customers as against leads obviously. But the new program that's being built allows people to source the agency themselves within the platform. It's really exciting what's coming so it's, yeah, I won't go into too much detail because it could change. We've got some exciting things coming in that space because it's such an important part

26:57of the relationship now where the agencies want as many leads as possible from the hosting provider and the leads are there. They do exist. So we want to make sure that we're giving them out in a fair way and also managing that hand over really smoothly because we don't want it to just be, you know, every time sometimes I'm for writing down any emails, introduce two people together. We want to make it a really smooth, nice hand over process as well. And because obviously we want back to the internet for ourselves as well as there's benefits both sides from doing so. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of the stuff that we've talked about up until this point is a lot of trust, a lot of human capital, a lot of relationship building, as we close out, let's just talk about AI. Yeah. The complete opposite. No, not the complete aspect. I mean, kind of to put that out. I'm curious. Your thoughts on maybe how you're leveraging AI on the sales side of things and then we can just dissect from there. So AI in the sales process, do you leverage it? Is it helping not helping finding some positives or negatives? What's your take? Yes.

27:57So we utilize AI a lot. We've tried AI in many ways and we're going to be using AI in different ways. So I can happily run through it. So we have AI in our CRM system and we have AI in our email system. So we're a Microsoft house, we use Office 365, so we have co-pilot and we have the sales version of co-pilot. And what the biggest benefit to that is is twofold. You can ask it a question and it has access to all of your emails, all of your company documents and knowledge bases and it can surface the question. It could be as simple from this particular version of Jumla, is it supported on this server that we sell? So it can be a really basic question. If it's not saying we're selling that often and it will surface the answer for them. But where we see the biggest benefit is, if someone emails us, it's already bought up all the context, all of the documents we've now worked on together, the quotes we've worked on together and it's already suggesting how to reply to that email. If we have a meeting book and it could be the pitch meeting, it will bring up the pitch

29:01documents we've created it will bring up all of the previous conversations, condensed it, tell us what our previous talking points are, our key talking points and metrics are this time. We have some custom GPTs in there so it knows our sales processes that we go through and it will tell the staff if they've surfaced the right information in the calls, if they haven't, it will prompt them to surface the information on the next call or follow up email. It ultimately writes the follow-ups for us and the action points. So that's, I think a lot of people are using AI in this way, particularly meeting assistance on that side of things and that makes a big difference and I haven't had it run a test smoothly, it's having co-pilot integrated to everything because as access to emails and teams and documents and everything makes it very smooth. I use AI in team reporting, so AI builds all the reports for us every month and obviously you can just, by using a text prompt, change the report, change the data you want to view in surface, which as a sales leader saves hours if not days a month in reporting and makes a really big difference. And then an area we've tested AI and seen it not to work very well was a AI outreach

30:06tool. So we have tested having like an AI SDR that is connecting and meshing people on LinkedIn. And it did great volume, but it was a super low conversion rate because the meshing it was building was clearly AI and not human fed and that comes back to their relationship piece where it's missing the nuance of if one of my team would read you out on LinkedIn, they may have picked something up off their personal LinkedIn, like, oh, you live in Vegas. When I was in Vegas, I went to this really cool little pub. Is it still there? A little bit of context that AI just can't match, they'll start a relationship and start to conversation. But we are creating a new N8N process using dripify and Claude and open AI where we create all the campaigns and we create the messaging and there's about 180 different campaign routes that someone could go down and it truly personalizes it to them and writes it as us and actually this will be sending it as us directly as well and it won't

31:09be sending 5,000 a day. It will be two or three messages a day done in a past truly personalized way and we will prove the messages before they send as well and that's going to make a big difference to us. And from an agency standpoint, one of the coolest ways I've seen AI used in an agency is a Manchester based in the UK agency, although they are actually a global agency called Butterfly Effect and they've done a talk on this so I'm sure they'll be happy me talking about it. But they created their own GPT that listens when they are going to a discovery meeting. So if they have a new brand that they want to pitch to, they basically have a laptop as a fifth person in the room and it's just listening to everything that's going on. The key part to this is that GPT has been onboarded to that company. It's gone through the full onboarding process that a new member of staff would go through. It's gone through that pitch process. It's gone through that pitch decks. It's gone through how they work, how they price things. And what this enables them to do is at the end of that discovery meeting, it's already

32:12built the pitch deck, it's priced the job and it's all ready to go. So instead of them having to go back to the agency using six, sometimes 12 hours of staff's time, there's no longer billable because it's for a pitch. It's done and they can pitch it there and then. And they're seeing a huge uptake in how many clients they're winning because in that very first meeting, they're pitching back the proposal, they've priced it and everything is ready to go. So they're not, you talk touched on earlier how long it would take to go away and build out these custom decks every time. And yes, you get more efficient in your layouts and how you're doing it, but it still takes time. Whereas they've used AI to do all of that for them. So it completely removes that. I can't help but think of like this dystopian future of like the terminator following you into the room with the standing quality. Yeah, who's that? Oh, that's the guy who's going to give you the sales pitch at the end. Our closing rates went up 3,000%. No kidding because the thing looks like it's going to kill us in the room.

33:15Absolutely. Hands out. Yeah. Sign here. Oh, God. No, but that's great. And those things, yeah, it's, everyone's, this is an overused phrase. Like, you know, times are wild. Things are changing so fast and it is crazy how like the negotiation process, like those key points of like negotiation, like, what are we getting? What's the value at what cost? And like, I don't know, like the inference of like those discussions happening in real time, like you walk in with somebody and the customer is telling you what you need, you know, it's going to be a wild time where I'm hoping like that human trust factor wins in all of this. Right? Because, you know, like if you imagine, and I've said this before, like if you imagine, like Facebook's glasses, meta's glasses, you know, with LLM in the in the future, not that far away, where if you go back to, you know, the roots of like being a car salesman, if somebody's wearing those glasses and I'm saying, okay, this Cadillac Escalade is now

34:19$100,000, like the best price I can give you is $98,500, they go and they're just looking at you and the glasses are calculating the negotiation and telling them like what to say next, right? Like that's, we're not that far off from like that real time negotiation for good and bad, right? Like, like, human it for good for humanity for like somebody puts a contract in front of you that says, oh yeah, your your cell phone bill is $50 a month. And then if you ever cancel its, you know, $10,000 cancellation fee, somebody can literally see that contract and decipher that in real time. And there's a there's a benefit on the flip side of people not getting screwed over on bad deals, right? And these things are going to help, but it's also going to be like, there's not going to be much room for negotiation in the future. So like your pitch has to be great. Yeah. And I think that's where it's the human element of AI can probably do this in the future as well, but it's that element of truly showing the value, showing you've

35:21understood the problem and can solve it in the right way. Because at that point, the price shouldn't matter. Price shouldn't be the negotiation. The negotiation should be how much of the value are you getting? Yeah, what's the outcome rather than how much is it costing me? And you know, in a woo site as an example, it's what your conversion rate is going to be, how much traffic it's the site going to get and what your revenue going to be. It's what can we deliver at the talent, the value we're going to give you over the, it's going to cost you 50 pounds for this side. Yeah. He's only felt that you can find him at hosting.com, all the anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks or to sign up for any kind of partnership, maybe get in line for something, anywhere else you want them to go. Yeah. So it's the best place to always reach out to us on LinkedIn. So you just type all the servant on the only person on LinkedIn with that name. And if we took me a message, it would love to have a chat. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to the WP minute part of the Matt report media network. This episode wouldn't be possible without our amazing pillar sponsors, pressable,

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