Diane Moura on Why Referral Partners Beat Cold Traffic Every Time

Jordan Lally:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] podcast. We talk about marketing, sales, client acquisition, AI, and everything in between. Today's guest is Diane Mora, founder of ZenChange, helping organizations turn complex change into clear, scalable growth. Everyone please welcome Mrs. Diane Mora.

Diane Moura:0:20
Thank Jordan.

Jordan Lally:0:21
Very welcome. So can you please give us some context as to the problem you were trying to solve when you first founded this business and how has that evolved since first founded it to today?

Diane Moura:0:34
Well, it's evolved a lot because it was going on 13 years ago. So obviously things were quite different. I had recently left corporate America. So I spent a couple decades consulting with 30 to Fortune 500 and being in executive boardrooms and all of that. And it was quite a change to launching my own business because one thing, you're chief cook and bottle washer and you don't have the whole corporate structure behind you. So I had to learn that and have the right partners I aligned with and... you know, get the right people on my team. And a lot of, you know, what we started with back then was kind of brand message and websites, honestly. And of course that whole technology environment was completely different than what it is now. And then it ultimately evolved and we added social media and we added, you know, paid and all of those other types of things to grow into being more of a traditional marketing agency. And today we focus on B2B services, businesses for the most part.

So healthcare and legal are our two sweet spot industries. And we really help those clients too, as our tagline says, to get found. So that's kind what we're doing today. And then of course, everything has been enabled by AI now. So the way that we deliver is different than it was four years ago to quite a considerable extent.

Jordan Lally:2:03
even the last 12 months within my own organization, AI has rapidly evolved. Can give us some context in terms of headcount and the growth stage that you guys are currently at?

Diane Moura:2:09
Yes, 100%.

Diane Moura:2:16
So we're, I would say, we've been around for a while. We're very much of a boutique firm. we've got, we have strong financials, but we're able to do it with a smaller core team. So we have coverage across all of your traditional areas of marketing. from. know, web build and PPC and SEO and social media and copywriting and graphic design and all of those good things. Um, you know, we do a lot of CRM work and email work. you know, we're, we're at a, we're at a good comfortable size, but I would still characterize us as being boutique.

Jordan Lally:2:54
Gotcha, gotcha. All perspective, right? With that being said, I imagine that the monthly price, or is it a monthly price or is it a package thing whenever you work with these healthcare and legal companies?

Diane Moura:3:07
We actually customize for the client. if you kind of think of it as, we have a, we have a menu of, of core capabilities that we're able to bring to the table. But, you know, in, in all my years of working with businesses, as much as, you know, back in our consulting days, we used to. you know, talk about best practices. And there's definitely some core best practices, but each business is also unique. And, you know, as an example, all of the work that we're doing with AI is great, but there's some clients where they also need very much of a grassroots approach. And so, you know, in that case, we're helping them with trade shows, we're helping them with, you know, networking and getting found and creating their referral partners. And so it really, you know, we we start everything we do with a strategy. And it's, you know, it's very different, especially because, you know, lot of our clients are, are more in the services space that it's not like you're selling a widget and I just need to go run a campaign to sell your widget. It's, it's a lot more. detailed than that. And so, you know, we're going through some pretty extensive discussions with a client on, who are your target personas and how do you reach them? Where do we find them and what messages are going to resonate with them? And let's think beyond who's actually going to buy your services to who's going to refer you to people who will buy your services. Because that's, as I always love to say, the gift that keeps on giving.

Jordan Lally:4:37
I feel like that's my favorite part of owning a company or an agency one might say is the creative aspect, kind of putting yourself in your client's ICP. What is the best angle we can take? What are some of the biggest pain points? How can I take their company, their benefits, craft a message to where I now take this complete stranger and now they're a paying client? That entire process, it just inspires me. I am in love with nothing more but that. You know what I mean?

Diane Moura:5:06
Never gets old either, does it? I mean, I think I could do that for all the days of my life. And I would be, I would be the happiest person on the planet. Cause it's every time somebody comes to me with a new brand and it's like, okay, now let's dive in and let's figure this out. And you're asking them questions and you're getting them to really reflect. they, know, they might be a startup or they might've been in business for 30 years and you're getting them to kind of rethink their approach to the market. And it's, yeah, it's exciting. It's wonderful to be able to do that for clients.

Jordan Lally:5:35
Absolutely. Yeah, I feel like humans are designed to solve problems in the work that you and I are both in. That's all we do all day long is solve problems for clients. I do have a question on that though. You brought up working with a potential client. They've been in business for 25, 30 years. Have you received any pushback or hesitancy when taking your consulting advice? If so, how do you handle those specific situations?

Diane Moura:6:05
I think it's a great question because, whenever we're coming in as consultants, and you would know this as well, Jordan, that, you know, we have our expertise and our lens and our perspective, but we're not the ones that are in there running the company. And it kind of reminds me of, you know, back in my corporate days, one of the things that I did, you know, aside from marketing and operations was I helped businesses with organizational change management. So if we were implementing technology, the people have to use the technology quite similar to what we're going through today with AI, right? Because there's all these amazing tools out there, but especially I think the larger the company, the greater their resistance because you still have people who need to get the work done and as long as they still have their jobs, have to try to figure out a way to do that. And now you're introducing new tools. And as the old saying goes, nobody likes change other than a baby. you know, that also plays in, think when you're speaking with an executive about their strategy, but honestly, I really enjoy that back and forth debate with them at the beginning. And I feel like it really is a two way street. mean, yes, I'm coming in with a certain degree of expertise, but I'm not the one that's in the trenches running their business day to day. And chances are they're going to be able to educate me on some things that are very unique to their business. And I'm to be able to educate them on some things that they can look differently. So, you know, it really is a collaborative effort and not a, you know, I'm not dictating to them. I'm recommending, but then we talk.

Jordan Lally:7:41
I love how you say you also learn new things in the process because I completely agree. When I first started like six years ago, I had the dictatorship personality where like, you just paid me X, Y, Z dollars. Like I'm to tell you how to run your business. That obviously didn't work. And I realized very quickly now it's very collaborative, lot of back and forth. And like you said, to piggyback off of that, I learned so much about so many different businesses. Like, my gosh, I feel like I know nothing every time I learned something new. you know, but I don't like how you said that because I can definitely relate.

Diane Moura:8:12
Yeah.

I mean, it's cool though, because you think when you're having those, we come to a client with that consulting perspective and with the tools. So we're able to structure conversations in a way that can extract information that. can help the client to look at their business in a new light. So, you know, a lot of times we'll start with a digital workshop with the client and, know, we've got the, the Miro boards and we're doing, all the stuff that back in the day we used to do on the, on the whiteboards in a physical room with clients when we were flying all over the place, but now we're able to do it virtually. And, just having that foundation of sort of structured thinking and methodology really does, I think, allow us to. to get to the right result with a client, but to really help them through the thought process as well.

Jordan Lally:9:05
Absolutely, no, I definitely agree. In regards to client acquisition, both internally for your company and then externally when you install for clients, what do you feel like has been like the top one to two strategies you've recognized over the last few years?

Diane Moura:9:21
So one thing that, as I was mentioning, that as much as we're all embedded in AI and technology these days, and there's just this proliferation of digital everything, and in some cases, it gets a little bit overwhelming for your potential buyers. And when you're starting with those cold leads, you have to take them through your entire funnel. They have to be able to know, like, and trust you. and get them there from the point of they have no clue who you are. So that's a hard sell for most businesses, right? What's not a hard sell? What's not a hard sell is if I know someone and I introduce them to you and I say, Jordan, this person is really, you know, they're interested in such and such. Jordan is really amazing at this thing. I'm going to let the two of you talk. you're going to find that you're not really selling at that point. You're more kind of exploring and you're kind of confirming for that person that you really are the right fit, but you're already so much further down the funnel. So, you know, I mentioned earlier that I think referral partners are the gift that keeps on giving and you have to be strategic with your referral partners, but That's something that I find it's worked very effectively for us. I have a couple of clients who are their VCs and they just bring us into every deal because we've proven ourselves over the years. And I work with a client who's like a restaurant consultant and they bring us into their new concepts and client who's like an operations consulting firm and they brought us into a massive national deal. as well. you know, cause a lot of those deals are, it's not that some of the, somebody's necessarily going to be Googling to find you or looking on an LLM to find you. They're going to be doing that exploration. But if somebody they trust introduces you as someone who is trusted, that's going to work really well. So part of, as we're going through the process with clients of identifying their

Diane Moura:11:37
target personas, part of your target personas are who are those key referral partners who are going to bring you the actual clients. Because once you've established yourself with them, it just keeps flowing.

Jordan Lally:11:50
Can you walk us through great insights, by the way? I don't have any strategic referral partners, at least not at the moment. I find that...

Referrals are definitely the easiest sell. What's more convincing? Hey stranger, I'm a sales person. Here's my product. You should buy for, know, 5K as an example. Or, hey John, my friend over here, I think you would love this guy over here. Like he helped me do XYZ. I got this amazing benefit. You guys should definitely talk. Now it's like not a stranger anymore. Basically what you're saying.

So I guess two things answer my brain here. One is how can you build trust, the know, like, and trust factor and accelerate that process with cold traffic? The second question I have for you is how do you structure referral partners? Like how do you identify this is a great prospect for a referral partner? And then once they are a good fit, how would you structure that deal?

Diane Moura:12:49
Okay, so a couple of levels to that. So one is if you're gonna go out and expect to be trusted, you've gotta look trustworthy.

So that does come back to the digital, right? So you've got to, you your LinkedIn profile has to shine. All of your social profiles in fact have to shine. You need to have a really solid website that is built for CRO. So for conversion rate optimization, needs to like, if somebody goes there, they need to resonate with you, feel like, you get me and be interested in taking that next step. Because a lot of, know, what do we do a lot of times if someone, you know, sends an email and go, you know, Fred, I'd like you to meet Jordan. He does blah, blah, blah. And you know, you guys get together. So what's Fred gonna do? Fred's probably gonna, you know, check out the link in your, or, you know, copy paste, like your URL from your email and go, who is this guy, Jordan? And you're gonna go check out his website. And it's like, Jordan has a decent website. Jordan has a podcast. Jordan seems like he knows who he's talking about. Let me go and like scope him out on LinkedIn a little bit. I mean, not everybody maybe is quite as, you know, I'm potentially a little creepy when it comes to checking people out because I really wanna make sure that I know who I'm dealing with. with, right? I'm not just going to bring you into my network if I don't have that feeling of trust. But so part of creating that authority is digital authority, right? And it's making sure that, you know, what are you posting about? What are you writing about? What are the, who are you connected with? So, you know, that's one part of the justification. And then another part is just the proof of work, right? So before someone is going to introduce you, they need to really feel like you're gonna do a good job because now they're putting their own personal reputation on the line. Sometimes you can get into executive networking groups, not like your local Chamber of Commerce necessarily, not that I have anything particularly against your Chamber of Commerce, but it's just not quite as niche. But if you get into like an executive think tank type group where now you're dealing with the level of people that you feel are connected to the level of client that you would like to be,

Diane Moura:14:54
connected with and it could be an investment, but might be something to start with. And now you're showing your expertise to that group. You're developing trust with them and now they're going to feel more comfortable referring you. And sometimes it can start small, but you you get enough of that, you can snowball. And then with respect to who you should be looking to for your target referral partners, it's going to be who is either doing business with the clients that you want to do business with, or who is an advisor to the clients that you want to do business with. So like in my case, VCs are great because VCs are dealing with startups and businesses who need the kind of marketing and consulting help that my firm offers. And so if I can prove myself with one of their projects, well now that DC is gonna be really excited to refer and then it's easy, right? They don't have to think about it because all of these professionals they tend they have their circle, you know, like if you're all of a sudden if you get into God forbid you get into trouble in your business and you need a business attorney Are you going to Google like not to say that you wouldn't but you know, like for something complex, right? It's gonna it's gonna be litigation. It's not just I need a contract. Are you gonna Google like business attorney near me or Are you going to call your cousin Joe, who is a criminal defense attorney, and say, hey, Joe, who's a good business attorney that you know? Right?

Jordan Lally:16:29
Definitely, absolutely.

I think you brought up something that kind of answered the first question of building trust. was showcasing your work and I think education. The fastest way that I can build trust with strangers is through education. If I teach them something new, something they haven't thought of before, they can now view me as a peer and I have some expertise and authority on that subject. Now when it comes to like liking that person, that might come down to appearance, that might come down to you speak with your cadence, how you sound, X, none of that's really in your control. But your knowledge, your education ability, your educator ability, if that makes sense, is definitely one way that I like to use. Thank you for that. I feel like I should definitely look into referral partners. You definitely gave me some insight on that. Because like you said, is already there. Let's see. In regards to

Diane Moura:17:22
You said.

Jordan Lally:17:34
Hmm. As the team has grown in scale, what do you feel like has been the hardest thing to systematize and kind of pass off to another leader?

Diane Moura:17:44
My brain. But here's what we did. And this is where AI plays in, right? But mean, honestly, that's it, right? Because when you're a leader and it's like a, it's a common thing, you you're coming to the table with all of this experience and you have to train people who are less experienced to be able to take on more of what you were doing. So we tried different things. mean, first of all, you know, our company we run on.

EOS, is, you know, I highly recommend that for any entrepreneur, the entrepreneurial operating system. There's a great book called Traction by Gina Wickman. Highly recommend you pick that up. But aside from that, there's, you know, well, actually one of the things that is part of that methodology is that you need to have all of your processes documented. we have great. So we document, we spent time and documented, I think we have hundreds of SOPs.

Jordan Lally:18:31
Mmm.

Diane Moura:18:39
So what happens when you have hundreds of anything? You get to the point where people don't know where to find stuff, because now they have too much information. So then what's the next thing? So I'm like, OK, I got this. I hired a developer to build an AI chatbot that lives within one of our Slack channels and sits on top of all of those SOPs so that then the team could just go ask it some questions. Perfect, right?

But what happens? Now they don't actually use the chat bot. So how do you get it to the next step? So thanks to the beauty of AI, I then developed a number of custom applications that we use internally that kind of force you through the process of our methodology to do the different things that we do and embed all of those.

I'm going back to the word best practices, but it's true in that case, embed all those best practices, the standards, the things that normally that we would look for in QA, et cetera, et cetera. So now those are part of a system. So if you follow step one to six in this system and you have to, because the application is going to force you through it, then the outcome is going to be consistent with the methodology. So that's really been the evolution from. information overload to using AI on top of information overload to then just kind of putting everything into a custom application.

Jordan Lally:20:05
Absolutely, SOPs allows you to duplicate the process, duplicate yourself, one might say. When training staff when hiring, obviously you would probably vet this in the hiring process before fully bringing them on board. In hypothetical world though, let's say you bring somebody on, you say, John or Sarah, here are the SOPs that you guys have to follow. you know, two, three weeks goes by, they don't follow the SOPs or I don't know, maybe it's like three, four months goes by. They're not listening. How would you talk to that employee to ensure they're actually following, you know, what needs to get done so the business can grow.

Diane Moura:20:41
Well, so that was part of why we went with the apps, right? Because now John or Sarah are going to go through the system and it's going to essentially, rather than expecting that they're gonna read hundreds of SOPs, we're gonna take them through the process. And we're coaching them along the way. So it's not like a couple of weeks are gonna go by and we're like, what the heck happened? John and Sarah didn't use the process. It's that old, the learning technique of you know, like, I'm going to show you how to do it, then I'm going to watch you do it, and then you're going to do it on your own. And that's really the process that seems to work, I find with most people when it comes to learning something new. So that would be the approach that we would follow.

Jordan Lally:21:18
Yes.

Jordan Lally:21:26
That's funny. I do the exact same thing, so great insights there. Let's talk about AI and just AI agents. Internally, you brought up the chatbot. Besides the chatbot, do you have any other processes or autonomous agents that work internally within the organization?

Diane Moura:21:41
I would say they're not to the point where they're fully autonomous yet. There's still some work that needs to be done there from a security perspective before I'm ready to just unleash an agent to do its own thing completely. But they're guided and they...

They do a lot of a lot of the work that they help us. So within our applications, we give you an example of building a website. you know, we start with, because again, we're very zero focused. So we actually start with the brand story. So we have an AI enabled app that will lead. one of our team members through developing that brand story, you what are the brand pillars? What's the brand script? You who's the target personas, who are the influencers that they should connect with like that whole thing. And then it's going to create the brand script. And then we use that brand script in order to Well, first of all, we again have another AI enabled app where we have the whole site map and the, you know, all everything that we're trying to do with the website and the design direction and all of that. And we can iterate within the app on design direction as well. And then we feed it the brand script and we feed it some other information. Like there might be, you know, call transcripts with the clients. So when we're doing an onboarding call, you know, we just like load in the transcript, load in their pitch deck, load in like whatever other stuff, you know, email exchanges, like all of that.

We're going to feed the AI with that. then we've already structured the app for, we in particular follow the Story Brand methodology for structuring content. So we already have the app structured to deliver the content in that format. And then once we feed it all of that information, it's going to give us all of that content and then ultimately come up with

Diane Moura:23:35
a prompt that we can use to feed into the AI to develop a mockup of the website. so with all of that, now we should be pretty darn close to the end result. And of course we have, you know, our actual human chief editor who is like looking at the copy and making it, and we have to go back and forth with it. Cause you know, like AI is not, it's not a hundred percent perfect when it comes to writing yet. It's pretty darn good, but it's still neat.

Jordan Lally:24:02
It's hard to one shot. It's hard to one shot.

Diane Moura:24:04
It still needs some oversight and sometimes you look and you go, yeah, I forgot to tell it that. So it does need the context of the human with the expertise in order to refine it. But we get it to the point where it's refined and then we're gonna share that mock-up with the client and the client might say, well, you know, I don't like that shade of blue. They're like, great, know, quick change, boom. How about this shade of blue? Ooh yeah, that one's better.

Right. And they're like, I don't like this thing on the, you know, the third page. Okay. Boom. There it is. So now you're able to iterate so much more quickly with the client so that they're like, it's like you like this. Cause it used to be that you would just create the, the creative brief and you've talked to the client about, tell me about your colors and tell me about, know, what do you like about this? And tell me about your design style. And, and you're trying to get into their head and you know, it it was always really hard. And then you get to the point where now the developer creates. the mock-up and they've spent time and then the client's like, I don't know if I'm really feeling it or I kind of want this other thing. And then it's this big deal to go back and change. Now it's like, it's a minute and you're here. You want to see what it looks like. then once the client is at the point where they're like, yep, I like that one. Then we can go create it for real. So that is one example. And we do the same thing with content and that as well. So that's where I'm saying it's like, I'm not, I'm not ready to just unleash AI on doing marketing for you because the people overseeing the AI, you still need that context. I always like to say it's the 80-20. It's the 10 % human upfront, the 80 % AI in the middle, and the 10 % human at the end. And if you miss either of those bookends, that end result is not going to be as powerful as if you have someone who has the expertise and the context that can kind of guide the AI.

Jordan Lally:25:51
That is such a great, point. I've never heard of anyone say 10 % the 80-20 rule specifically with AI 10 % on the front end, 10 % in the back end. That's really good. I'm gonna have to possibly utilize that in the future one day. Absolutely. What you're describing to me sounds like a human in the loop.

Diane Moura:26:03
That could be a clip.

Jordan Lally:26:10
is one of the ways to describe how AI agents work, right? So if you can quantify time and money saved on that process you just described to maybe inspire someone who's listening that hasn't delved into AI how you and I are, like just to quantify it, how much time and money has that saved on that one?

Diane Moura:26:29
Well, I mean, I just, I just told you 80 20, right? So you think about that. If that 80 % in the middle is enabled by AI, then yes, you had to spend time with the AI, but you know, you could, and maybe you're not saving a full 80 % of what it took, but you're at least saving half, at least saving half. And, and the end result I feel is that much stronger. And that puts us in a position of being able to go to clients and we've done that and say,

Jordan Lally:26:45
I see.

Diane Moura:26:58
guess what, for your same budget, we're now able to do a whole lot more. And who does that like in the past, right? Who was it? You nobody would, your service provider would never come to you and go, surprise, we're gonna double what we're doing for you. And they're like, wait, what? So that is, you know, that's something that is great because now you can have that much more of an impact for their same budget.

Jordan Lally:27:19
No, absolutely. Like one of the things that we use too, that I think are mandatory, one is like a fully like full autonomous AISDR, like scrapes leads, verifies leads, enriches the leads with 10 different layers, sends the emails, replies to the emails, connects on LinkedIn, like literally A to Z fully autonomous. It's super bad ass. The other one I like to use internally for client management is essentially, like tracking metrics, but tracking metrics and then explaining what the metrics actually mean and how we can improve in a Google doc and spreadsheet combined fully autonomously. Like it's literally mind blowing.

Diane Moura:27:59
That's a great application because those are two things where, mean, the CSR generally that's more, that's something that was previously a human interaction, but people never really got data before anyway. Right. And so now if you're able to explore, like not only make sure that you have the accuracy, but you can explain it in human terms to someone who is not a data scientist. I mean, that's golden and all of those are, to me, that's all the low hanging fruit in a business to be looking at for, for AI.

Jordan Lally:28:28
Absolutely. Do you install any, I guess you kind of did, even though you use it internally, your client still benefits from it. I was going to ask maybe on like the Google PPC side or you said content, you also have agents there. I guess do you want to shed some light on the content website?

Diane Moura:28:48
So I was, kind of, alluded to it a little bit when I was talking about the website process, right? So that was, that's the idea of creating a content strategy, but then you're tilting it toward the website. You could take that same content strategy. And now, you know, if you're looking at, know, who are the, who are the influencers that maybe I want to follow and check out their content, you could just automatically scrape and pull that information.

You can do it to assess keywords and to create initial drafts and go back and forth with subject lines and all of that. So still with that 80-20 that I described. But the ability to just... really fast track that normal brainstorming cycle that you would go through either with yourself or with someone else when creating content is just, it's tremendous with AI. So that's what those tools are, are focused on. And it's, when you have, mean, you know, so we start when we have an onboarding call with a client and we go through and we're asking them some very specific questions in order to extract that input to the brand script. And then we're able to very, very quickly turn around and just feed them a document that says, here it is. you know, are we okay so far? So now you're able to kind of iterate on these micro deliverables to, and they're check-ins. They're not only reinforcing to the client that yes, we are working, but they're also, you know, they're checking in and making sure like the strategy is on track. So you can give them kind of here's the initial cut at the high level. And now, you know, here's what we're thinking of doing in terms of your overall content strategy. And, you know, here's the pillars.

And then here's a first pass at what we actually think the calendar would look like for the next 90 days. so using those tools just helps us to iterate and create more content than we would have been able to in the past, but still quality, right? Because that's the problem with, I think, how a lot of people are using AI today is if you're just going into chat GPT and cranking out a blog or cranking out a social media post.

Diane Moura:30:57
you'll have content. doesn't mean it'll be good. Right? Because it's all a lot of that context is all in the prompt.

Jordan Lally:31:13
Yeah, yeah. Okay, time out. Am I live? Can you me? You see me okay?

Diane Moura:31:15
Did, I just saw there was like a little error that said like trying to reconnect or something. So I think it, I think it lost me for a moment. So we may need to chop that part out.

Jordan Lally:31:27
Yeah, you were cutting in and out maybe because Riverside is, know, Riverside, it still picked it up, but you're back now in my back.

Diane Moura:31:35
Yeah, you're back.

Jordan Lally:31:37
Yeah, it's so interesting, like, God bless these people, but the individuals who one shot like a blog post or like a long form of LinkedIn posts, it's like, dude, like, you know, kudos for you for utilizing AI, but like, It can be utilized so much better than how you're, how you're utilizing it, you know? So it's so nice to speak with someone who actually knows what they're doing with these LLMs. The one thing I love about content, I call it content research plus repurposing. So let's take a lawyer that you possibly work with. You can ask Claude, which I love, opposed to chat, but nonetheless, they're both LLMs. You can ask Claude or chat, Hey, who are the five biggest influencers in my lawyer defense attorney space? It's going to say, okay, it's, you know, John and Sarah blah, blah.

Cool. Look at all their content. What are the best performing creatives? Now look at my brand repurpose these best performing creatives that are semi viral and repurpose it for my company so I can possibly become famous and viral. And it literally does it automatically. It's so, so sexy. I freaking love the thing. But however, like you said, after the end production of the content repurposing, you are going to want a human in the loop to like refine it, you know, make sure it's not AI written because you can definitely tell especially if you utilize AI all the time. If a human wrote it or like modify the AI and result.

Diane Moura:32:56
It's all those great stories you're seeing on LinkedIn these days, right? It's like, you know, those tear-jerking stories that it takes you through and then you get to the end, it's it's AI generated. Like, really? You had to do that?

Jordan Lally:33:07
That's funny, that is funny. I haven't encountered one of those before, but I can see what you're trying to say. Man, that would make me upset!

Diane Moura:33:15
It is, it's frustrating. I mean, I think like what you're speaking to is, is, you know, I keep reinforcing this, but it's context. So, you know, if you, the fact that we've actually been educated in the thing allows us to debate with the AI and to, you know, like we know when it gives us something, if it's good or not. And sometimes it gets a little off track and you know, especially if you're in a long.

Chat thread with it. Sometimes it sort of loses track of where it is and then it comes up with something and you're like what or like you'll tell it to go do something and it's like it's fixed you're like No, it's not fixed like and like I can't you know, sometimes I'm like, you know I'm always very calm and and you know, I feel like I'm very I'm very whenever if my team does something and you know, they need coaching like I'm you know, I'm always very even I get annoyed with the AI sometimes because I'm like seriously like

Jordan Lally:34:11
Yes, literally yes!

Diane Moura:34:13
How did you screw this up? Like I just told you three prompts ago about this thing.

Jordan Lally:34:19
Absolutely, I'm like dude you are AI you are like smarter than smart. How are you messing this up so bad? Stop playing dumb

Diane Moura:34:23
I'm just a human. I know it's wrong. I mean, that's where... So, okay. So coming back to context, if I'm... Give me an example. I had to... Almost a year ago, had what was fortunately a very successful spine surgery, but I had this thing that I had to deal with for multiple years. so I used AI to help me find my surgeon, which sounds kind of weird. but I decided to create a custom gem and like I trained in all the stuff and I told it, you what was going on and got it to find the least invasive procedure that was out there that was most leading edge. But did I use that to actually pick the surgeon? No, did I use it to interview surgeons and to ask them what I felt were much more intelligent questions?

Yeah, I did that because I know that I'm not a spine surgeon. So I'm never going to have that context and expertise to be able to just use what the AI spits out for beta. I think it's, you know, to a different extent, obviously, but it's a similar thing with marketing, right? As I talk to people who, you know, maybe they're an accountant and they're like, I'm using chat GPT to do all of my marketing. It's like, you never studied marketing. How do you know it's good?

So I think there's that balance, right? Of when you're looking at the 10 % on bookends on the human and then the AI in the middle, it has to be an educated human who has the context.

Jordan Lally:35:57
The output is only as good as the input, right? No, great, great advice there. Maybe one or two more questions, but over the next 12 months, what is something that the company is looking forward to? Ready, like links in the pipeline? Sorry.

Diane Moura:36:12
I mean, I think definitely super excited about all the changes that are happening in AI. that this kind of like, you know, a year from now, we're going to look back on this episode of me talking about, I don't think that agents are quite ready. I can guarantee you they're going to be ready. Right. So it's just like, they're not to me, they're not ready now, but they will be. And so I'm actually, I'm really excited about agentic AI. I'm excited about.

AI and robotics as well. think that's super cool. I'm a little bit biased because my daughter's a robotics engineer, but I just think it's, it's a fascinating field. And also when I was a kid growing up, I used to watch the Jetsons and there was Rosie the robot. I'm like, you know, life would be great if I had my own Rosie the robot. so, you know, I just think that that whole area is fascinating and a really exciting direction. So, I mean, you know, I've spent my entire career at the crossroads of technology and strategy in one capacity or another. And so, I'm watching what AI is really able to enable for us. And if you think about the people process technology triad, I think the technology is what's going at light speed. And I think over the next year, our challenge as leaders is going to be to figure out how to get the process and the people to catch up with the technology so that we can truly harness all of its benefits. So that's what I'm most excited about looking forward.

Jordan Lally:37:47
I do agree, it is some pretty fascinating stuff happening. Last question for you here, what advice would you give to an agency that's maybe three to five years behind where your company's at?

Diane Moura:37:58
I would say what I said at the very beginning is get those referral partners because that's going to help you land the significant clients that are going to really fuel your growth. So, you know, it's the gift that keeps on giving is, you know, join a professional, it can be small, but join a professional group, a think tank, someplace where you're, you know, they always say you have to level up a little bit, right? So, you when you look around the room, if you're the smartest person in the room, if you're the best compensated person in the room, you're probably in the wrong room. So, you know, get in, get into a room with the people that you aspire to be and gain their trust and they will refer to you and that's going to fuel your growth.

Jordan Lally:38:29
Yes.

Jordan Lally:38:39
Absolutely. You heard it here first, folks. All right, get those referral partners. It was a pleasure having you on. As you can see, I'm smiling ear to ear. I was laughing the whole time. It was honestly a really fun conversation. Thank you for joining us. course, audience, we'll talk to you all soon.

Diane Moura:38:51
Thanks for having me, Dordnie. It was great.