AI Traffic from ChatGPT Is Worth 4x Google, Says Perryn Olson

0:00 · Introduction.

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] podcast. Everyone, please welcome the winner now, the Perrin Olson. Perrin, how you doing to my friend?

Perryn Olson:0:09
Good to see you, Jordan. And I am the one and only Paran Olson. I'm probably one of the few people that can actually say that. I've looked it up. I'm the only Paran Olson on Google. So I think I'm the only one.

Jordan:0:15
Actually, yeah.

Jordan:0:23
No, definitely, definitely. That's super bad ass, my friend. Now, for those of us that do not know the name yet or the brand just yet, can you please tell us what you do and who you guys serve at the highest level?

Perryn Olson:0:36
Yeah. So I'm a fractional chief marketing officer, CMO at Alt CMO. And we specialize in marketing and growing construction companies. Everything from general contractors, trade contractors, construction tech. We have another CMO team that's more on the talent acquisition side of that, and then even construction materials. So kind anything that's revolving around that construction industry, we've worked in. been in this industry for 20 years. It's just a lot of great people.

They need a lot of help on the marketing strategy, particularly on leadership. There's a void in the upper end of marketing leadership and construction.

1:00 · What A Fractional CMO Actually Does

Jordan:1:12
How did you first manage to get into marketing for constructions? I know it's been 20 years, but I guess think back in time.

Perryn Olson:1:17
Yeah, no, it's, it's, there's a day, man. It's a, uh, random referral 20 years ago from an IT firm. Actually, I went and worked at for about five years. Um, they, two clients, they referred me, um, back in oh five and then it kind of grew. then, uh, the boss, the owner of my firm, was at the agency, I was at time, um, went to a conference, talked about niche marketing and we started kind of looking around. What do we like? What do we don't like? And, um, really like construction and had about

Jordan:1:27
No way.

Perryn Olson:1:45
I was six, seven clients already in it. Really didn't like working with doctors and lawyers, so we got rid of them and just started niching down. so I was just kind of took it as a career opportunity. I was in my mid twenties. like, okay, I could get there faster. Essentially that, just try to learn everything I could about the industry. Started reading engineering news and reports and other construction publications. Got certified as a construction marketer in two different groups. Got heavily involved in a group called SMPS, which is specific to the... architect, construction, marketing, and business development community. I've been heavily involved in that now for nearly 20 years. I got my certification in that years ago and became a fellow in that organization a couple years ago. So it's just, it's one of the things that kind of took an opportunity and then just seized the day. now it's looking back, I've learned a lot, still learning. I was at a conference a couple of days ago and still learning things and still sharing. was, there's so much to it. so much to learn and do, especially now it's the world is changing, the world of marketing every day now.

Jordan:2:49
I feel like marketers are really on the front lines of business, you know, whether it's tactics, marketing.

Perryn Olson:2:54
I wouldn't have said that a few years ago. No, I totally would disagree with you, especially in construction. It's almost like we're put in a cave and like, know, in construction marketing, a lot of times it means proposals and that shift is transforming. But yeah, we're definitely now getting in the seat at the table and helping shape the brands and having conversations of like, how do we show up in AI? And AI is actually opening up all of those questions where, you know, two years ago, most construction executives didn't give a shit about SEO. they were just like, Ben, they're done that. Nobody looks for us on a website, which is completely wrong. And I have plenty of stats to show them that. But now they're like, how do we show up in chat? I asked chat to T, you know, about who would you recommend named like their client, you know, their service, their market. And they're like, we weren't there. And I'm like, how do get there? I'm like, one, we need to do SEO. Two, we need to do PR three reaction. You do something right. Like there's a lot of good things we need to do, but we need to take a step back and actually do good SEO. start showing up in all these AI tools. It's a moving target, but it's, it's, it's answering. feel like Chatty is a more authentic result than Google. You can kind of spam your way and get up to Google, but if you're doing the good things, being an industry leader, the AI tools are definitely going to you up.

3:00 · How Perryn Ended Up In Construction Marketing

Jordan:4:16
My mistake. You know, I've actually heard that. think, basically you can pay money to be at the top of Google, obviously through, Google PPC, or you can just create amazing blog content, you know, right for keywords, even though, but you can say you're number one, even though you're not number one, but with AI SEO and chat, GPT, LLMS, they say, okay, you can say you're number one, but we want you to prove.

Perryn Olson:4:26
Yeah.

Jordan:4:46
Getting back to what you said about let's do some, let's earn, let's earn some media. Let's, you know, get some awards. So we actually can rank, in LLMs. With the data that you have, do you know, I guess the percentage of individuals, companies, businesses looking up construction curies or inquiries via LLM, opposed to Google?

Perryn Olson:4:46
Yeah.

5:00 · Why Construction Companies Are Finally Paying Attention To SEO

Perryn Olson:5:12
It's still very much a black box on that. what we're seeing was we did a study a couple of years ago, kind of wondering, because for years we've heard, my partner and I is another CMO and we don't really need to worry about SEO at all. So we're like, forget it. We're going to go look at the biggest companies in the industry. And there's a publication, ENR, engineering news record that publishes the top 400 contractors. They do that every year. So we took that top 400.

And then say, let's go use our SEO tools and say, do they give a shit about SEO? And just look, we, we rank them off of things like domain authorities, spam score, backlinks, and then page speed. And we are able to build out the industry metrics. And it was very clear. Those bigger companies care about it. Like they were, they're definitely have above average, domain authorities and for their size. mean, some of these companies are billions of dollars. They're big companies. they definitely care.

You know, it's not initially, it's initially we've been told for years. says we're built on relationships and low bids and all that stuff. Yeah, that's still can be part of it. But if you want to get out of low bid and really have a relationship with the brand, not just one salesperson or one project manager, you got to have that brand led and not through SEO will come in. So they know exactly how many are coming from, from, you know, chat, chat, know, Claude or things like that. It's, it's still small.

But my business partner talks about it as a gold rush. Years ago, when iPhone was new, nobody really had mobile websites. And also you start watching Google Analytics and mobile websites went from 1 % to 3 % to 5 % to 10%. You started seeing traffic from Facebook as that sort of becoming thing. And we're starting to see the same thing with the LLMs. Now we're starting to see on our Google Analytics reports and stuff like that. It's, look, we got four queries from Jack2T this month. We're getting five next month. Like you're starting to see it start ticking in.

But it's not, even if we don't have the numbers, just the peer stats that we do know is universally Google search is 2.4 words. Okay. And generally when people even do a two or three word keyword search, they're probably going to get frustrated, not found them. And then they do a very, you know, longer one, which most marketers on long tails. We want those five to eight word search terms. The average number of words in a LLM query is like 42 and growing and

7:00 · The AI Gold Rush Nobody In Construction Is Talking About

Perryn Olson:7:35
It's just like, think about it. So we're already seeing, and Semrush did a great study last year, and I hope they keep updating this, is the traffic that you get from an LLM is 4.2 times better value than from a Google search, because the people are more qualified. They're ready to buy. There's more intent. And so if you think about the averages for it, means there's also some that are way longer. We had a client that got this amazing rock star of employee, a senior estimator.

And construction in the Establishment is a really critical spot because it needs a lot of experience. It's kind of a thankless job. It's one that's retiring at one of the fastest rates. So they've been looking for this one job. They spent a lot of money on recruiters. They spent a lot of money on all the job boards and all. And they got this one guy and they asked him, hey, how'd you find us? He goes, I put like a page and a half query into CHPT and you guys got shortlisted contact. You interviewed and all went well. So they even asked him, can you show it? And it's huge. It's like.

He asked, you know, he was moving from one market to the other through his wife's job. And he says, I want to be in this area, this far from a neighborhood we're going to be in. I'm looking for an electrical contractor that needs this criteria. And he listed up all kinds of stuff. But look, when he got there, he was, he was happy. He was shortlisted. It wasn't this, let me put job board and reach it. Like, and he spent, you know, couple hours probably doing all that versus weeks potentially of finding. And I think it's just a different way. And we look at things. I've now spent more time. writing content, I spent more time even buying things. bought the monitor that I'm looking at you on right now, a couple of months ago. And I probably spent an hour of chat to be teaching, trying to find the perfect monitor, but I gave it all these parameters that I'm doing. Look, I'm a fractional CMO. sit at my desk all the time. I'm using a web camera. Like I need something that, you know, I'm used to going, going from two screens to a wide curve screen. Like how much of a curve do I need? Like all these things I'm asking it. And then when I found that thing, I hit purchase as long as it showed up and it wasn't broken. No buyers remorse. just.

100%. It's like, as soon as I put it up, I'm like, I've been happy ever since because I did the work. I did way more work than I would have done before. Before I would have gone like Amazon or Best Buy and looked around and I hope this one works. And yeah, I would have been doubting myself, but I know this one, was the right purchase because I did the homework.

Jordan:9:53
Right. It's interesting how we as humans trust AI on a whole other level. I know I do. But getting back to yes, and we definitely tend to trust people who have intelligence for whatever reason. You know, it's like this AI thing that knows almost freaking everything. I'm gonna trust that thing. You know?

Perryn Olson:9:59
It's because it's smarter than we are.

10:00 · Why AI Solves The Wrong Problem (And How To Fix That)

Perryn Olson:10:07
Yes.

Perryn Olson:10:10
I will say is I will think it's so I'll give a nice after that. I just saw LinkedIn comment right before we hopped on this guy said, why would somebody hire a consultant versus using AI? And he is the quote that I pulled out of it was AI will do an amazing job solving your the wrong problem efficiently. And that's where the human part comes in. You can tell website, you know, this is case for is like, you can tell AI build me a website and it will go build your website. That might not be the problem.

That's where you need the expertise of a consultant or a fractional or even a leader in your team to really understand what is the true problem. And then it can help you figure out from there.

Jordan:10:53
100%. Someone broke it down this way on the podcast and I will always remember it. But they said that utilizing AI is an 80-20 split. 80-20 split meaning that 10 % context in the front comes from a human. 80 % of the workload is from AI and then the last 10 % is like the human in the loop to verify whatever the hell AI just said is accurate. The more educated you are, the more seasoned and experienced you are.

Perryn Olson:11:09
Mm-hmm.

Perryn Olson:11:15
I love it. Yeah.

Jordan:11:22
that increases the, I don't know, efficiency or the outcome from that 10 % context initially, right? So if you, a fractional CMO in the construction space, or to, I don't know, play with cloud or play with chat and come up with an actual game plan on how to solve XYZ problem, I'm sure you will have a far better output than me trying to get that same outcome in the construction space specifically.

Perryn Olson:11:27
Mm-hmm.

Perryn Olson:11:49
Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. And vice versa. And I saw that firsthand the other day, I was leading a round table discussion at a marketing conference in town. this is, it was about content marketing and using AI to properly, know, everyone kind of understood. don't just copy and paste what it is, but it really comes coming down was building longer queries, longer prompts. so like somebody's even showed me, you know, she's been in the business. couple months and she's like, look, here's what I put in a chat to be T can you give me some feedback? And I'm like, you're not giving us specifics. You're not telling at the end goal. You're not telling it the audience, like just tell it more information. Or even I like to do a catchall on every query. I do is ask me questions. They understand the better understand the scope of what I'm asking and to improve your results. And it's amazing. Some of the questions like AI should have told you that. And then I go back and fix the prompt, you know, cause I think a lot of us have like kind of a cheat sheet. you know, prompts that we like to use. You know, I'll go fix that kind of that template I'll use, but also it's like there's almost every time whether I'm using ChatRoot, Gemiini or Claude or, you know, played around a lot of different ones. They'll ask me some questions like, well, that's interesting. What, sometimes it's like, why do you care? And sometimes, oh, I should have like, I didn't think of that. It's kind of that blind side. And one of my favorite things to do with AI now is like use it. call it pressure testing is before I go present anything to us, one of my clients, cause I'm generally the only CEOs or you leadership teams or even boards. I'll go put that into chat. like, you know, here's the background of the company. Here's what we're trying to, the initiative we're trying to solve or problem we're trying to solve. Here's initiative. Here's what I'm thinking. I'm presenting this to the CEO or whoever tomorrow, you know, show me where I'm pushing too far. Where questions they might be asking. What's my point? What am I missing? Kind of help me shore it up. And it was hilarious. There's one day I was, I did that, got some questions at all and I go talk to the CEO and I started laughing. What are you laughing at?

I've been with him, you know, two years. talked a couple of times a week and so we got a good report. I'm literally laughing in his face. He's like, what? I'm like, I told him I did this whole pressure testing and even asked what questions will make the CEO asked. And the first two you've just asked in a row, like for nearly verbatim. And he's just like, damn. I'm like, are are you like, are you using chat? She'd be T on me right now. And he's like, no, I'm having a conversation. You have like literally the first two questions are what you would ask, but it's.

13:00 · How To Pressure-Test Your Ideas With AI Before Big Meetings

Perryn Olson:14:12
typical CEO stuff. So it was really interesting to kind of do that. And you can do role playing with that and stuff like that. And I was talking to a sales manager one day, he's like, yeah, the role playing I used to do in my trainings, well, now a lot of the conversations aren't phone calls or in person. They're LinkedIn messages, they're text messages. He goes, what better place to role play is than through an AI and role play with somebody. Here's the person I'm talking to. Here's their LinkedIn profile I'm talking to. Help me role play this, how this conversation might go.

And you can play different paths. Like they're really pissed. They're really happy. They're excited. They're not excited. Like you could do all that stuff and they are, and it was just play along. Like it's just, it's cool to kind of do those kinds of like scenarios.

Jordan:14:53
No, absolutely. And I'm currently working on a, a custom tool basically for internal usage, but, a role playing partner for, for actual sales calls, right? Like why waste a potential sale or why practice or role play on a live consultation where you could possibly, you know, fumble the bag. What am I saying? No, just role play with AI. Like there's no, no high stakes. It's reps has practiced and it's actually really, really good. So I love how that sales manager is utilized.

15:00 · Using AI To Role Play Sales Calls Before They Happen

Perryn Olson:15:07
Yeah.

Perryn Olson:15:21
On them. I'm here. One of the, I was on a webinar a couple of weeks ago, watching it and saw my AI for sales and they're talking about using some of these, like the note takers and like some of them you can put in a bit more of an agenda and like it can even help coach you live. Where you're going through the, Hey, remember to ask about their budget, you know, get a timeline. Like, I'm like, it's interesting to kind of get that little nudge. Um, you know, was almost like the old school sales, the whisper in your ear things, you know.

Jordan:15:48
No, I saw those ads on Instagram whenever I'm doom scrolling. Don't do it that way. But I'm like, these are fricking bad ass. I think everyone is guilty. know, like, Meta does a damn good job of keeping us on the platform.

Perryn Olson:15:52
Yeah.

Perryn Olson:15:58
Oh my god.

That is their job. That is their number one goal, which is interesting. That's a really interesting whole thing of like running a business where you don't own anything. Know that they don't control their content, but yet they get you hooked. You know, the idea of Airbnb doesn't own a property. Uber doesn't own a car. that's, those are really interesting business models in themselves. But like the fact that we are addicted to content and meta TikTok, LinkedIn doesn't own the content necessarily.

Jordan:16:04
BOO!

Jordan:16:31
It's the software behind your dialogue. No, you're good. It's just really interesting to think about kind of where the future could be, you know, like just kind of leveraging other tools, arbitrage, know, leverage other people's stuff.

Perryn Olson:16:31
A little philosophical on us, right?

Perryn Olson:16:45
Yeah, no, it's the idea of the time with AI will have the first solo printer or billionaire. And I think people will be surprised how young that person will be.

Jordan:16:55
Right, right.

My mistake, daydreaming over here about that one thing that you just said.

Perryn Olson:17:01
No. No, mean, you're all about high ticket sales. I'm sure the brain that just made that brain spin of like, yeah, we're going to have a 20 something billionaires running multiple AI tools one day and probably not need literally not know what to do with the money.

Jordan:17:18
You know, you know, I mean, don't get me wrong. Like I definitely utilize clock code all the time. Like clock code is always open. I'm always utilizing it. I definitely, I don't want to say replace full-time employees, but like it has made my job a whole lot easier. has increased efficiency. Like nobody's business. It's, it's fantastic. But the simple fact that somebody can become a fricking billionaire, one, one person show from utilizing AI. Like I definitely do believe it, but it's just like unfathomable to actually.

Like think about it, holy shit.

Perryn Olson:17:48
Well, knew it could happen to us years ago when I first got into marketing animation. I've been like in fusion soft was the only marketing animation software. They were kind of showed kind of a extreme case point and they talked to, they would show this one diagram and it's just like messy spiderwebs and infusion soft. The way you've has a visual tool where you connect all your emails and all your widgets through this spiderweb thing. And they were talking about, they have a customer that is built an entire company and it takes you two years to get to him personally.

He supposedly lives in Asia in some island, know, sipping his, you know, um, his little Mai ties and stuff. And every day he checks email for five minutes to see if anybody showed up. Cause he's built this entire framework of, you know, if, if this, you know, he sells something and then they upsells this or cross sells and people have questions. It has all this routing thing based on this basic logic. it's like now whatever he did, anytime somebody finds him, he then builds another tool to put into place that kind of. keeps kicking the cannon another month or two. and it all comes from him because it's his business and all. And this was these 12 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, but that was without AI logic. mean, he could probably build that in a day now, know, AI logic, what we spent him months. And it's, he was literally living on good life with a company and auto one person company on autopilot. And he just literally spent five. So that's what he said. He spends five minutes every day checking email to see, and then he'll go. spend an hour to fix and whatever he's got to do to continue to push out the deal and he just raised money lives in a country that the dollar was a little stronger and, you know, living a good life. It's like, but yeah, put in the work though.

19:00 · The One-Person Business Built On Autopilot

Jordan:19:27
that's super interesting. no, for sure. For sure. When you are working with, you know, construction companies, in what areas do you utilize AI? Obviously for content and SEO, but maybe do you utilize AI in any other way or platform?

Perryn Olson:19:43
Um, I've been using one of the things I like AI is not just the efficiency, you know, expanded personalization. Um, a lot of, most of my clients have multi-markets they serve or sub markets. So we're trying to expand on that. Like, um, right now I'm even building a tool. One of my CEOs is more on the tech side and he was at a conference and somebody showed him this AI tool that can build like flyers on demand. And I was like, yeah, we totally knew that because they're.

They've got three main product or service lines of each, some multiple product lines underneath, and then they have four verticals and we want to go sub verticals on some of the, could just, we could easily build out a hundred flyers in their library. And a lot of it would be, you know, the 80 20 role that 80 % of it would be the same, but it's like, man, if we could just build a tool that would spit that out for the sales team, it'd be amazing. Um, but I think that's where AI can be really cool is about just building out a more personalized approach for our customers.

So that's where I'm trying to, and even just consistency. Marketing is getting wider and wider and harder and harder to do. So just little things of like the brand standards of how do we use certain words? we use multifamily hyphenated? Is it one word? it uppercase? Like this is those little things that can throw off content. Like it's one of those annoying things that you can't pull or it's one of the issues with all cyber infrastructure. You're always trying to look for relevant words.

You know, we get a new project. Hey, this is really exciting. It's a good opportunity. How can we show a client the most relevant work we have in the past? It's been like, let's look at the Excel spreadsheet of projects we've done and see if we can brainstorm a few. Now you can literally dump in 50, a hundred years of work. Assume you've got history and all that and just say, here, find me what's relevant. You know, and sometimes you still got to get creative. data centers are a big opportunity for a lot of contractors.

Um, and I've got a client the other day. It was like, Hey, we're being asked to do like a private data center, not one of the big mega ones for like meta Google, but like a smaller one for a company they want to build. they like what data centers, no data center experience. So we're like, so we had to add a reverse engineer. What makes a data center unique? What makes that special? What, what are the concerns that somebody who's building a thing or hats, we broke it down to like five criteria and then we built the matrix of projects that fit that. like this company client in particular has a lot of work in industrial laboratory. So like.

20:00 · How AI Helps Construction Companies Personalise At Scale

Perryn Olson:22:04
Very critical fine tuning, like things that have to be like five decimals measurement accurate. That's all very important in an industrial lab. Well, if you can build that, you can probably build the data center. They got to deal with massive amount of cooling work on busy sites. we figured out all these things work. They got to be in the middle of no where's so we find out what projects were in the middle of nowhere. So we built all that out and we're, we started to a memory that like guys, let's just dig in. we.

We were using AI tools. So we started just asking like, Hey, what projects are in rural areas? What projects are over the square foot? What projects mentioned complicated mechanical projects? So we were able to go from a list of like two or three for each category to like 10. So it's, just made us a lot better and stronger because we're going off of memory essentially. And I also got in that team, we've got two new people in the marketing to see one marketer one proposal. like they don't have the institutional knowledge.

So that's the only thing that AI can really help is just maintain institutional knowledge between you and the company. Everyone's eventually going to quit, get fired, get hurt or die. Like those just, or retire. Like inevitable, somebody's going to leave. So you can't rely on this for now. And that's a huge issue that the truck industry is to resolve. Like, um, I've got some clients that are like this constant interviewing superintendents and foremen and things like that. The guys that are in the field, the women that are field that are about to retire.

Like just tell us the stories of these three projects. Tell us these challenges. Go through these things, how you solve it. And they're just trying to capture that institutional knowledge that's about to walk out.

Jordan:23:39
What you said about personalization and how you utilize AI to be candid, that's essentially exactly what we do from an agency perspective is we basically run cold email. But I think what separates us is it's hyper, like the, the outbound, the initial outbound email was hyper personalized to their ICP, what they sell. We also like enrich their data, 10 different layers, right? So the recipient of these emails, like,

Perryn Olson:23:48
Awesome.

24:00 · Hyper-Personalised Cold Outreach That Actually Converts

Jordan:24:06
How the hell do they know that? That was really good. They obviously researched my company, fucking AI and all that. The second thing is drafting a personalized deliverable or a personalized lead magnet. So opposed to asking for time in our outbound messages, we say, hey, here's a personalized free thing that's valuable that I know you want. Do you want me to send it over? And most of time, we're like, yeah, send it over. Cool. Well, essentially what this does is it allows you to build trust before trying to sell.

Perryn Olson:24:09
Yeah. Yeah.

Perryn Olson:24:27
Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan:24:36
And it also allows you to showcase your expertise to also build that trust. That's how we use AI internally. It's super freaking bad ass. And then in regards to like storing memory, right. It, cause you said, but people, know, they lead the company. I have to train somebody else and it takes time. Cause like you have to read the SOP docs, whatever the case is. But if you have all this stored within AI, within some LLM, like this new hire can just plug into the system. and be ready to go. know, like the ramp up time, there we go, the ramp up time between fricking hiring and I don't know what the hell I'm doing can be condensed, which saves businesses obviously time and.

Perryn Olson:25:16
yeah, mean, you talked to most CEOs been around a while. They'll say, and a new employee takes almost a year to become profitable. I mean, that's, that's scary. mean, they can be satisfactory maybe in a month or two, but to be truly profitable. It's like, then I'm always like, then why don't you give a shit about your people around the team? Why do you give new hire bonuses? You know, there's kind of a flip side of that too. If you really want to keep people with, you know, what I'm also seeing going to SOPs is it's kind of a sore subject. I've been seeing a lot of people develop these really long SOPs in AI.

And, um, nobody can follow them because they're, they're so long. They're so detailed. The only thing that can really follow them is other AI, you know, so it's, you almost have to keep going back to that as a resource. Um, that's what I've been trying to get slow. I'm look, who's following this? Is this intended to train AI? Like it's the big brain standards thing that we're just going to run things through. We built a widget on our website that you can drop a photo of a construction site. go through the entire OSHA handbook and make sure there's no OSHA violations.

That's a huge thing. I'm not expecting a human to go through on all that stuff. Or is this something for humans? If it's for humans, then you need to make like a cheat sheet. And you can have AI still do that, but it's as crazy of like, sometimes AI is giving us too much information. I was demoing an AI caller the other day and my one feedback was, she didn't shut up. She would just keep talking and talking. I'm like, there's no human would do that. And she also never said, So I was like, that was a telltale sign. was like,

Jordan:26:46
Right.

Perryn Olson:26:46
If I would have called this not knowing it was a demo, I would have followed along that it was a nice person on the phone and stuff, but she was just a little too thorough. You know, it was kind of like, you know, back in school and teacher asked a question that one kid asked the response for like five minutes and you're like, it was a yes or no question. That's what, that's what this AI tool was doing. So I was talking to the person that was selling the tool and they're like, oh, we can tailor that. We can make a much shorter answers. That's what that client, the demo with the client wanted. Okay. was like, damn, was just, that was when I could cut her off and she would respond.

27:00 · Using AI Callers To Reach Leads After A Hailstorm

Jordan:27:20
We have

Jordan:27:25
curiosity were you definitely not for like on behalf of your clients or just because you were curious?

Perryn Olson:27:30
As for a client, we had a couple of use cases where a one of our clients does roofing and siding. And when they get a hail storm, it's kind of a, do you get out there? And so we have a really small sales team, competitors, competitors. Like we have three salespeople, some are competitors of 30. So how do we get the market faster? So we have the data we can pull and all the companies have kind of the data. have these tools that tell them where the hail hit. But it's okay. How do we get in front of these people just to ask? about appointment settings and things like that. that's what we're kind of used to is how do we get AI to essentially comb through a list of 500, know, 5,000 people and just get to the market faster. And now we're looking at kind of assuming other use cases out of it, but that was really what was starting. was just, you know, how do we just purely get burned through, you know, hundreds of phone calls an hour.

Jordan:28:23
No, for sure, for sure. It's a great way to reach back out to leads, right? Was this pure cold calling or like, did they opt in at one point in time for a new roof?

Perryn Olson:28:33
That's where we're trying to figure out where, how far do we want to go? Um, we know that we can already scrub if they're not on the do not call list, but this would be more of a cold outbound. and sometimes even just, did we do kind of a softer sell was like, Hey, based on a record you were effective on the hail storm. that true? And so they like press one for yes, you know, and make it feel very automated. So you're human. Okay. You know, yes, you get a tailed the image or you're unsure. Can I send out, you know, Jordan to go check out your roof?

He's available tomorrow and he'll be in your area, things like that. What's interesting is that also, I was kind of concerned about like travel time, but like the AI can also figure out, okay, I'm talking to you in your neighborhood and I'm over here in this neighborhood and there's a 20 minute drive between them. Like, can you put another appointment that's closer by? Cause hailstorms are very localized. You know, it might come through a whole city, but certain neighborhoods get pounded and the neighborhood, you know, a block over doesn't get hit at all. So.

That was the other thing. was just kind of, could we even use this as the essentially clean up the data just to fast people. Um, so there's just, there's a lot of different use cases for it. Um, but you just, you want to still be authentic. I mean, I think that's the big thing with AI, whether it's your writing content or using voice, we've got some clients that are using a avatars to push out their content. So we feel like that's a better way to help display with air, but we're, we're calling it an AI. Like we're not trying to hide it. It's an AI tool. Um,

Jordan:29:38
No, for sure.

30:00 · AI Avatars The Future Of Construction Content Marketing

Perryn Olson:30:00
We didn't export one client. Yeah.

Jordan:30:01
Yeah, I haven't saw it.

Like me, like a clone of me? Or what do mean by AI avatar? Or like...

Perryn Olson:30:07
Yeah, we, yeah. mean, so we, we had a client, so it's about efficiency. One way we do content like thought leadership, trying to build authority. We always start with our subject matter experts. We don't start with AI and we'll use, not only we use a tool that will help us interview them and then create that first blog post essentially the core. And then from there we can use AI to essentially recycle and repurpose it through Facebook, meta, LinkedIn, all that stuff.

And then we also can push it through different tool that will help build an avatar. And so we'll take that blog post, make it a video script, push it to the avatar. But there are, we do have a capability of taking like you and making you just need like a five to 10 minute video. Um, we have to, one of our clients was like, cause he was thinking like, well, I don't, I don't, I'm already the face company as the CEO owner, but I don't want to, I don't want to have that happen to me. Cause if I'm not the subject matter expert. you know, one of my team members says, I don't want to be the spokesperson for that. Cause then somebody will ask me, Hey, slow your video on XYZ. And he goes, I don't want to sound stupid because I don't want to talk about it. so we're like, okay, well let's do the artificial one and we'll just have a sort of, the cool thing about using an avatar is, is, one is to speed the market. I you've done video production. takes time to set up and get ready. You guys, you still have to put your face on and wire or at least be in the mood to be on video.

And then the outtakes and all, versus if you're using a digital avatar, you can basically give it a script and within a few minutes you've got, you know, an hour long video, potentially. the, less outtakes and all that stuff, but it's also the person doesn't ever quit. Doesn't age, doesn't die. Doesn't get, you know, doesn't get on the news for the wrong things. Doesn't get arrested. Like all these things that don't happen, but you can kind of control. you know, it's, almost like a Disney character that is like stuck in time. That doesn't, doesn't change. You know, so it's, so you still want to be authentic who it is and I would never impersonate. So I don't want to somebody's hair. AI. No, I'm not like, I even have one client, of an attractive marketing manager there. And she's like, I'd love to have an avatar. Cause she's like, when I just, was a spokesperson for my last company, I kept getting all the drone messages and they were very inappropriate. like Lisa, they're doing it to an AI.

Perryn Olson:32:28
tool, whether they know it's AI or not, at it's not me. I like, oh, as I like, knew that happened, but I didn't think people literally would do that to you. Like she was, she would do like interviews and stuff as the marketing manager for a construction company. And she's like, I would get all these DMs and stuff. It's like, I don't want to deal with this. So it's, it was, it was interesting.

Jordan:32:34
for sure.

Jordan:32:49
Alright.

When you are working with your clients, what do you feel like is the mandatory, I guess, one, two, three steps that has to happen in order for them to like skyrocket their company? That's probably a horrible question. Let me phrase it like this. When you're working with

33:00 · The #1 Problem Almost Every Construction Company Has

Perryn Olson:33:04
No, it's, I would say at least, yeah. Okay. You want to go? want me? I would say, I'd say the biggest issue I find is, all right, the biggest issue I find with most construction companies and across the board, almost all companies is they don't know who they are. You know, what is their company stand for? What is their brand personality? Things like that. So like just use the brand archetypes often with my clients. Like, okay, are you the Jester or the Outlaw or the Rebel? Like whatever. And they're like, I don't know.

Jordan:33:10
Go for it, go for it, no go for it, go for it, yeah, yeah. No, no, you go, you go.

Perryn Olson:33:34
Like it just, like that tells me a little bit the company, but then really honing in that ideal client profile. they're notorious. Every business owner will do this, especially because they're, we can make that work. Like, no, I didn't ask you who can make it work. Profile. I'll ask you the idea. Who's the epitome of perfect client. And I like to bring in operations because the worst thing I think marketing can do is drive revenue with the wrong clients. Cause what happens then is it just, it's, it's a long sales cycle. It's painful to service them.

And you also insert really impacting employee retention versus the opposite. If we start with what is operations really like generally is a faster sales cycle because it just clicks like that hyper personalization almost happens this organically. And everyone's like, Hey, we like working with you. And you can almost cold call people like, Hey, I'm calling you Jordan because you're my ideal client profile. Cause here's why, like you just list off. Here's all the things that you do that we think you're the ideal client profile. And we think we can help you.

You kind of soften it up a little bit, but like that's essentially the message. Um, so just nailing those two things, then everything else is actually, I want to do is this reverse engineer. What, what I need to do to get in front of my deal. You know, whether it's digital ads or conferences, you know, I'm big on like lumpy mail is what I'm trying to get all my clients to do. Um, you know, it's just, how do I get in front of that person? Because that's what matters. It doesn't matter what I think. And it's not parents process that goes across the board.

It's, you know, what is this client and this idea of client profile? How do I get in front of them and make them care?

35:00 · The ICP Score Sheet That Helps You Find Your Perfect Client

Jordan:35:11
100 % and if you are struggling to know who your best ICP is, just look at your best customers, look at your best clients and like who got the best results from working with you. And just a reverse engineer for that, okay, this company had, you know, a couple of employees, they were in this location, they had this type of mindset. I don't I'm just kind of making things up, but I think you kind of my point. Just look at your best customers and go back.

Perryn Olson:35:34
So I, I did it. Yeah. And that's something I, I usually build out like a whole score sheet, like a matrix score sheet with my clients, like different categories that are firmographic, same size, location, services, niche markets, things like that. And then I'd build out the pointing system. Like ideal gets three points. Um, great gets to good makes one point. Okay. And then there's negative points, you know, most clients are all us based. So like if they're in China, that's negative two points, whatever.

Um, cause you're, you're trying to, but then you can even push that in your CRM and delete scores and all off of it. But it's like, I want to be able to, to get a list of a hundred potential clients, run them through this ideal client, um, profile score sheet and help tier them is what I'm trying to get to. And it's just a great exercise for them to understand. So you get that. I did a test recently. I found a prompt, um, subscribe to newsletter, like this marketing prompts and every day they should send me a new email.

And most of them are very consumer based and I don't really care. This one is really, was like how to understand the psychology behind your ideal client profile. I'm like, that's not good. So copy and paste the prompt, put in chat, should be T list out. Here's my top like 10, 12 clients. Just all game was website addresses. Um, and it came back and it was like, it definitely pulled some of the firm of graphics. Like, you know, you guys work with contractors, you know, between 50 and 250 million. Yeah, no shit. Um, like some of that stuff, but then it got into like, um, some of the psychology of her, like the psyche. I was like, said two things, particularly that I thought was interesting. The companies we tend to work with are the CEOs are hiring. So they think marketing can't keep up with their growth. I was like, yeah, that's definitely a conversation we've had that I don't think anyone's ever put it that way. And I've never written content or done my own podcast about that. Um, the other thing that was interesting was they're winning, but they think they should be winning more. And I'm like, that's really interesting. It's like this athlete who's like good, but they know they can be like, what? great. That's why they hired the different, they switched coaches that coach got them to be good. But now they want to switch to a different coach because they want to be great. And it's like the kind of that Kobe Bryant black Mamba thing. And it's like, Ooh, that's, that's powerful. And it's interesting. went and asked a few of my clients. like, Hey, I'm just, I'm spot checking this. And one of them was like a hundred percent. That's what we heard. Sweet. just, was like, I mean, it gave me a bunch of other stuff, but there was like those two lines and like we hired a new business developer for ourselves. And I was like,

37:00 · What AI Revealed About Perryn's Own Ideal Clients

Perryn Olson:37:58
a center that like, Hey, you know, here's the firm of graphics, all this stuff, keep looking for. These are the two things I want you to talk to people about. And she started using it. And she's like, man, the conversation is totally shit. We put in our cold emails, like the cold emails, like, Hey, you concerned about marketing, not keeping up with the growth? I mean, as a construction CEO, there's only two answers. Yes or no. Like, no, I'm not concerned about that because I don't really care about marketing, marketing is whatever. Or like, yes, I'm highly concerned. Like how the hell are you going to help me with that? And then they.

Jordan:38:21
Exactly, exactly,

Perryn Olson:38:27
understand what we do. So it's, that was really an interesting tool. Like, you gave us a very objective way to do it. And I shared that with a friend the other day and she's like, how the hell did it know that? like, I don't know. Sometimes I don't want to know AI works. just, what are they? Look, there was a couple of things that were, don't think it was right at all. And that goes back to your, 80, 20. I put in the 10 % of the exact clients were looking for, not all my clients, just my best clients. And then that last 10%, I was going back and looking, okay, this good stuff. That's stupid. But it's, but yeah, it's, it's interesting that it's to get that objectiveness sometimes, right? But the band, honing your ICPs is the most important thing for anyone. And, I've had clients ask me, Hey, do we need to build a new company? Do we need to, but do an acquisition and stuff? And sometimes like that was if our ICPs are the same, no, it all goes into the same brand or if it's completely different than, yeah, we might need to split the company.

Jordan:39:08
Absolutely.

Jordan:39:18
.

Jordan:39:28
I see. Okay. That would definitely make sense, right? Cause then your messaging has to change. You know, if you have two completely different buying personas or ICPs, if you have message for A, ICP, message B is not going to work or for ICP B, message A is not going to work. So I definitely understand why you would ask, should we split up?

Perryn Olson:39:43
to me. Yeah.

Yeah. And you figure everyone has already got two audiences. You have your client audience and your employee audience. You can even further your potential employee and your current employee. Like you already have two audiences just going to your website. Like, and that's a big issue. think a lot of people are missing the boat on is just internal marketing. But, you know, so then you start really wondering, and I've got a large contractor.

Jordan:39:59
I heard a-

40:00 · When You Should Split Your Company Into Two Brands

Perryn Olson:40:10
500, 600 employees and we're talking about reorganizing the company. they're just like, it seems like things are not growing. They're just like grinding inside the company. Like there's just some things that are working. And I've been like, I've been there for two years. I'm like, we've always had this issue of like, how do you promote the different service lines? There's six different business units. And so we're, it was interesting, but the leadership team is going down one path of like trying to reorg the company. And I've been presenting this other path of like how to make this easier to essentially build, break the company into two or three based on ideal client profile.

And we were running in parallel and then like kind of compare notes and like, it's the exact same thing. So they're trying to deal with some other like mechanics of how they do it because, you know, different locations, different personalities and stuff internally, they got to work through. And I'm like, okay, we're going to split this website into two. This website gets merged back into the other one and like how that's all going to fit. And like by the of the year, we're going have two very distinct companies, but it's going to talk to this audience so much better and just people are going to understand what they do.

Like that's one of the biggest issues people just don't understand. What do you guys do? They do so many things. And if we can break it into two, we do this for that industry and we do this for that industry. And I'm being vague on purpose just to protect their own privacy. yeah, was a little bit we're building out two large brands based on our ideal.

Jordan:41:32
No, absolutely. And then, Perrin, I do wish you had more time, maybe like one or two more questions for you. First one is, is looking back over your 20-year career in construction, I mean, what's one piece of advice that you would give your younger self to accelerate the growth?

Perryn Olson:41:37
Yes.

Jordan:41:50
have the right growth of your own.

Perryn Olson:41:56
stay authentic. That's the big thing. think is just stay who you are and just dive in. When I first got into construction, was kind of like, this is an ostrich syndrome because I never worked in construction. I didn't have my why for a while. And then I kind of found it as I want. really like helping companies grow and just it's fun to construct. are very human. it's just, but I didn't work, I didn't come out of construction. A lot of people ask, Hey, you picked construction, you started in the field.

No, I was never working in the field. I've done home renovations. I've done dozens of construction sites. And actually in the process, I actually kind of was reminded, my grandparents, my great-grandparents had a painting contractor business and stuff like that, but it wasn't like building buildings company. So it didn't click even for the first few years. Like, my family comes from a construction background. This wasn't the way I was thinking.

42:00 · One Piece Of Advice For Your Younger Self

Jordan:42:52
Gotcha. And what is one thing that your CMO company is looking forward to in 2026?

Perryn Olson:42:59
We've been expanding our capacity. We've just hit a couple years that we've been in business. This partner and were really the main two for a long time. And we've been actually reading capacity issues. Like I'm personally out of capacity. I can't take on another client, which is a good problem. So we've been bringing in other CMOs with other specialties and we're ramping up ourselves. And now our plan is a little bit more to build a pipeline that will go get the capacity. Because we know we can recruit CMOs if we have the clients. versus in the past, there always this chicken and the egg. So we've, I think we figured that out now. We're going to build the egg first and then find the chickens and go from there. that's, we're really, we're really, that's exciting now is it's, like we have control. Our goal is to be, you know, 12, 15, 20, you know, fractional CMOs across mostly the AEC industry, but even just professional services, you know, so we'll expand out a little bit more.

43:00 · What's Next For Alt CMO In 2026

Jordan:43:38
Ha ha ha!

Perryn Olson:43:57
be able to really help. think this fractional model is really powerful for companies. It's great lifestyle for our TMOs. It helps us diversify our revenue. So there's a lot of win-wins. I've got a new client that their core value is win-win-win. And I just feel like that's what we're doing with this model.

Jordan:44:16
I like that, win, win, win. Let's see, and where can they find you, my friend? On social media, et cetera.

Perryn Olson:44:21
Yeah, so I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn and parent. You spell my name right with the Y and you'll find me and then alt C mode net.

Jordan:44:33
Perfect. Well, thanks for hopping on my man. You're obviously clearly knowledgeable in the construction space and just marketing in general, obviously AI as well. You are dropping some serious gems on how we can use it more efficiently. So thank you so much for coming on brother.

Perryn Olson:44:45
I enjoyed the conversation. No, I appreciate the invite. It was a great conversation, Jordan.

Jordan:44:50
Yeah, absolutely.

No, for sure, for sure. Audience, we love you. We'll talk to you soon.