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The Messaging Mistake Everyone Makes on LinkedIn (And How to Fix It in Two Sentences) · Selling AI

• Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into the state of outbounds, specifically LinkedIn automation at scale and what's actually working in 2026. I have Toby Blatchford Tag on the show today, and Toby is the founder of Lead Lab, a UK-based business that manages thousands of LinkedIn profiles for clients, ranging from two-person startups all the way to enterprise teams with hundreds of profiles being managed to help generate ⁓ pipeline. Here's what we dive deep on. Toby started Leader Lab seven years ago. It's a 40 person telemarketing outfit, but a great pivot story to LinkedIn automation. And it's really one of the cleanest case studies of like kind of riding the shift into what's outbound is today that I've really heard. So in today's episode, Toby and I talk about why cold telemarketing died, but there's still some remnants of it. ⁓ two ends of the spectrum where like LinkedIn outreach actually works. And ⁓ another thing is things around no shows and meeting management to help get us from interest to qualified pipelines. ⁓ we'll also of course dive into a little bit of where AI fits into the stack. All right, let's dive in. Toby, thanks so much for being on the show. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Great intro, mate. I appreciate it. I need to get you on most of my podcasts. Warren Kucker: Exactly, just be a hyped man. that's awesome. Well listen, I love to dive in a little bit into backgrounds first. So you started League Lab seven to ten years ago, to pivoted a couple times along the work. What was the moment you realized like you needed to kind of pivot into a new business model? And ⁓ so how does that take us to where you're doing today? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Well yeah, w originally we really started the business probably eighteen, nineteen years ago as a telemarketing agency. And then we like you say pivoted around COVID, ⁓ probably six, seven years ago, ⁓ where the business changed dramatically. We were doing I think pre COVID we had about forty ⁓ code called B to B telemarketing, everything from selling part time CFOs to ⁓ coffee to businesses, you name it, B to B telemarketing, code calling. ⁓ and it w you know it was quite a boom boom market at the time was st Not lots of technology is getting in your way from a telemarketing perspective that there are now. ⁓ but at the same time, clients were paying us six, seven thousand dollars a month for one telemarketer with a dialer, with data, et cetera. And you're already, you know, seven grand behind the eight ball from a service point of view of getting return. ⁓ and it was getting harder and harder ⁓ from a telemarketing perspective. And we had this sort of the Eureka moment where we had an ⁓ international team manually doing LinkedIn outreach. And this just came from myself, to be honest. I used to nine, eight, nine years ago, I used to go on LinkedIn myself and just manually connect a message with people pretty much all through the night because back then they didn't limit you as much as they do now. ⁓ and that was great. So then we got someone to do it internationally for us, just c consistently. ⁓ and we were getting all these leads and then we were selling people telemarketing. And we had this moment where we're like, we don't even do telemarketing ourselves and we get it at a cost. ⁓ at the time it would have been quite hard to grow that team internationally and manually do it for clients, et cetera. But COVID let us restructure the business, build the right softwares to totally change the company. And now clients can work with us for as little as $620, 450 pounds in the UK. ⁓ we actually have more clients in the US now than we do in the UK. and that will take a minimum of three profiles, connecting and messaging, generating leads for people. But The CPA is loads better than telemarketing, so our business hasn't really looked back. ⁓ and it's been all around all around retention really. And it it's ⁓ nice to be slipping into companies as a really solid marketing pillar inside their business. Warren Kucker: That's awesome. Yeah, let's start with ⁓ beginning of the transition and then we'll kinda come into where we're at now. So where and why do you feel like mm telemarketing and cold calling kinda died as an art form? What was the reason behind it? Where are you seeing now? ⁓ how do you talk to about this with your clients? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Well, I ha I had a we had a sister business that was ⁓ also did B to C telemarketing company, smaller company had about fifteen to twenty staff in it. And I sold out of that one because I believe that ⁓ unless you were going to do social ads in the long term, B to C telemarketing was always gonna be a dying art. Now, if you look more recently, Apple have brought in the iPhones that stop you from being able to ring anyone, basically. It says you have to literally say who you are and it comes up on their screen. So if you're selling something cold, good luck. But that's sort of traveled through the business as well. So all those sort of things were big red flags for us that we sort of knew that it was going to go that way, whether it'd be B to B or B to C. And we were getting such good results internally that we just thought that it didn't make any sense to stay in that market. The other thing is we lost ninety percent of the company overnight. ⁓ because everyone, all the telemarketers clients were like, well it's COVID now we don't need you now. for obvious reasons. ⁓ so we pretty much had to start the business again and we already knew we were fortunate that we'd spent the last couple of years prior to that creating an unbelievable lead flow from LinkedIn Outreach. and so we just l fell into it really. I COVID was terrible for everyone, it was terrible for ourselves. But in the long term, it's created a hell of a lot better company. giving a hell of a lot more value to people, and in return for us getting much better attention. ⁓ Which i which is fantastic. Like you say, we manage over a thousand profiles now. ⁓ and that's because we do a good job. We manage the data management, the the response management, we write the messaging journey for people. All they do, our whole mantra as a company is that you only go on LinkedIn when someone's interested, flip the script, stop being a consumer on LinkedIn. ⁓ LinkedIn monetizing you, we turn it around where you're monetizing LinkedIn and which is the key thing really. Warren Kucker: That's awesome. Okay, cool. Let's start with ⁓ again the negative hypothesis here. Like, what do you think people do wrong when they're do ⁓ they're managing, let's say, LinkedIn outreach? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Great. So we do a webinar every every three weeks. So I I'll I'll send a link to one you can put in the link if anyone wants to try and find out some more stuff. But over the top, the core three to four issues are ⁓ when they're building data, they trust sales navigator too much. ⁓ we we cleanse at least thirty percent of that out. To do that, you need the proper ⁓ tools to do that. ⁓ two is messaging journey. from an automated point of view. People write too much about me, me, me. No one really cares. They really want everyone's we're all selfish human beings and it's really about what's ⁓ interesting to them. So you have to communicate the benefit to them within a sentence or two, or else they're on to the next message. ⁓ and then follow up is really important. How you follow up, but also the tools you use. So a big part of what we do i is the enrichment that included, which means you get mobile numbers and email addresses. So when you do get a positive response on LinkedIn, You don't wait a week. So you can imagine there's people out there, and I've just given you three of the top examples of where people go wrong. But they go and get a bit of LinkedIn automation software themselves. They have a right ⁓ job of writing the message, they do it with one profile, they don't follow up the leads properly, so the data's not done right because they haven't cleansed it, they've trust sales navigator too much. Good luck getting that right. Do you know what I mean? There's and that's just because of years of experience. So we do the webinars to help people that want to do it themselves. But where the LinkedIn outreach gets really powerful is when you scale up with more profiles. So again, managing more than one profile yourself on automation tool can be a bit of a pain in the butt, to be honest with you, doing the data, doing all the response management, et cetera. So that's where we come in. It's not just the service, ⁓ it's the ex expertise and experience in how to do it right. ⁓ and ⁓ more importantly for our clients, and I think why we're growing is an affordable price point and sustainable for them. Warren Kucker: Okay. Gotcha. Interesting. cool. Let's let's pull into those individually. You say trusting the data in sales navigator. What how could the data in sales navigator be wrong? What what could be w what's the pitfall there? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, yeah. So what's what's advantageous to LinkedIn is that you have more eyeballs to sell to for in mails or for ⁓ sponsored ads. Now you've got to remember LinkedIn don't love LinkedIn outreach. They want you spending money on those two channels, the ⁓ in mails and the ads. So Sales Navigator isn't built for mass outreach. ⁓ it's it's built for ⁓ outreach, but also to look to look targetive, but not very so for example What we use is softwares like Licks that pull the information from ⁓ sales navigator into a spreadsheet or whatever. And then from there, we'll remove at least 30% of it. And what you'll find in that 30% is MD of my taxi, ⁓ a student of this, you know, all these things that just aren't really the perfect data set that you want. But if you do any marketing and thirty percent of your data wrong before you start, you're giving you you you know, you're already got one arm tied behind your back anyway. So it's just a really in part of the process if people are going to do it themselves to ⁓ if they're gonna pull the information from sales navigator is to really cleanse it and remove the wastage because there is always wastage at scale. Warren Kucker: Awesome. Interesting. Yeah. ⁓ and you know, like there's job shifts that are happening. One thing I've never done, but I started to lean into a little bit more, is like sales navigator, LinkedIn is generally like what it says is gospel. But people move on and don't change their rules all the time. And so like great, then I enrich the email and the email address comes back with a different domain, right? That's not in any of their profiles. I like ⁓ well, I can't right. I'll just ignore the email. It's actually the opposite, right? Those two data points together, you should make a smart decision between the two, right? Like ⁓ job title, role title, change those things. That's interesting per purview of like you're still dealing with a little bit of a messy data site set at like its baseline there. ⁓ Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, one thing we do as well at the back end as well as the sales number is is the cognism stuff. So if you might have heard of Zoom info or lead ⁓ info, which are as well as cognism, which are the premium data enrichment companies, ⁓ which are a really good safety net for that stuff to make sure because that's as up to date as you're gonna be able to buy. it's quite expensive, but again, our money is made on long term relationships. So those data points ⁓ and being able to access those data pi points via mobile or email. is extremely important as well as obviously their LinkedIn page, which we couldn't do anything without ⁓ in what we do. Warren Kucker: Gotcha. That's awesome. Cool. All right, let's move ⁓ one step up the chain then. So let's talk about messaging. You said that a lot of messaging is about like me instead of them. that they need to see value in the first two sentences. Give us more on that. What is what is what does a bad message look like? What does a good message look like? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, well, we've had a copywriter ⁓ that's been with us, ⁓ my business partner, even, you know, eighteen, nineteen years ago, the first seven years of the business before COVID, before we did LinkedIn Outreach, we built it off we built the company or the telemarketing company at the time off mass email marketing that appeared to be personal. So he took that skill and developed that over seven years. And then that does it translates to LinkedIn, but it's also very different. At the end of the day, it's a chat, it's a software platform, it's very different to email. The fundamentals are similar. Now I'm not an expert in the copywriting. We that's why we have one in-house. What it tends to be, and again, I I can only explain this in the simplest format because Harry, ⁓ my business partner that does all the copywriting for our clients, it is a true expert in it. So I understand that talking about it loosely is great, but it's not from the horse's mouth, if you like. and what it really comes down to is you've got such a small window of opportunity to get their attention. They will go into their inbox. They will have five, six, ten, whatever in their inbox, depending on how long they've been on LinkedIn. They are gonna scan scan through it and they're gonna decide whether they read ⁓ more than two sentences every time. They make a decision then and then they carry on. So it's okay to have more long winded content at a later date or further down the email, but the first engagement is is everything. ⁓ because otherwise they're not gonna respond. And also You know, some people will just do a follow up message, they do it once. Don't underestimate the third and fourth message in a campaign, ⁓ because they well will get people to go back to it and pay attention when maybe they wouldn't have because you've only tried once, for an example. The other important thing to say for people out there for the really quick win is don't sell a connection message. ⁓ that's a strong no because it negatively affects acceptance quite dramatically. Warren Kucker: ⁓ yeah, so ⁓ in that vein there, how does it differ than like an email message? What's kinda like core? Is there's like just like core to the point? Do you ignore? Yeah. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Well you've got to I I think the difference is yeah, so what we try to do is like make it feel like a chat because people are much more ⁓ inclined to respond quickly to a chat. Now don't get me wrong, there's a load of issues with email. You can see if you've been so to on email before even opening the email, you can see, ⁓ that's a sales email, I don't need to open it, delete. ⁓ in a in a message, and the the beautiful thing about social media is people, even though it's on LinkedIn, they get the same endorphins they get from their Instagram and their Facebook when they've got a little red dot of it of an in mail or a message I should say, which is great because it you know, the chemistry of that makes someone want to read it. ⁓ but getting making it feel like someone's just literally wrote it to you then is the key secret. ⁓ if it looks like it's a messaging journey, which is I r the irony is of what it is, ⁓ you're gonna lose because people are aware of what's going on. They're not stupid. ⁓ so yeah. Warren Kucker: Yeah, yeah, interesting. ⁓ make it look like a chat is something that I've heard a little bit more than I used to more recently, right? Like 'cause again, I mean, relatively recently I'm putting their first name with a comma, best warren, right? Like at the end of messages, right? Like, ⁓ but it's not an email, right? It's a chat message, right? So I'm like, ⁓ especially with you see it's either a perception or a reality that a lot of these messages are pre written with that's a AI, right? So there's like not as much thought into it, right? So like great. You're trying to find ways to get around that. Like how like abbreviations, things that like sound more like messaging that you would receive in your text message inbox is something that I've leaned into a little bit more. ⁓ I'm sure the AI will catch up at some point. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Sorry. The other thing is the more formal you are, the more of a hassle it is to reply. So the more relaxed you are in your outgoing, the more relaxed they can be in their response. Because at the end of the day, they're representing their business. So if you come and I, you know, every business is different, right? And every one of our clients has to sign off our messaging journey. And if you look at one end of the spectrum, we've got people selling hundred thousand pound CRM systems to people selling life insurance to directors for two hundred pounds, ⁓ you know, these brands vary, right? Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: But it's key to remember that it it it doesn't have to be not everyone has to be the same. ⁓ so just being s it's really hard to say, but like light. Light means people are more light to respond because they're not they don't look at it and go, ⁓ it's an email I've got to respond to. They look at it and go, that benefits me. Yeah. No, how much? Whatever. You just want that tiny bite. That's the real game. It's about getting that buying signal out of them. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: So I think a long people write long information, you know, string off all their achievements and what they've done and whatever. And I think people lose they don't have the attention span anymore. Every every five years, attention spans are getting dramatically less. how people consume content is getting different. So hence why we do podcasts, right? Video is shorts and stuff like that. People won't exclude it quickly. And it's the same with messaging. You have to communicate quickly. long form cold. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Right. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: The other thing is if you're in a one to one with someone, back and forth, send them send them an essay if you want. You're you're past the point, but at the initial end of the day, you've got to remember your code outreaching to these people. You don't have their time. You're not you don't you're not entitled to it. They've not entitled you to it. So benefit them quickly enough to where they want to respond to you is is really the the baseline summary on on how to make it work. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it, right? Like you The ease of response is a j general like gate in terms of whether you're gonna get the reply, right? Like even in just a regular scenario, if I get a text message where it's just like, Hey, how are things going with the business? How are things with Rowan? Right? Like and I have like a thoughtful reply to it. I'm like, all right, cool, I'll get back to that. And or if it but if it's just my mother and being like, You wanna chat to on the phone tonight? Like, yeah, call you later, right? That message, I almost never get back to that first message, right? I forget it all the time because I have to Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah. Also they've said ⁓ No, no. Warren Kucker: thought thoughtfully responds, we should be treating the sales journey like that. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: It's really interesting as well, like we see a lot of people where they, you know, on email, on text, ⁓ you know, ⁓ on social media ads, where they're they're allowing you one click. So they're sending you their outreach or their advert or whatever, and it's just one click and is this interesting to you? Yes or no. Again, ease of ease of bite, you know, ease of getting that ⁓ buying signal. Because how easy is it for someone to say, just click a button that yes, this is interesting to me. At that point it's a lead. And then now you you can go and work it, you can call it, you can email it, or whatever. But if you said, you know, write me, tell you know, I can try and think of an example. Do you think that my CRM system, how do you feel like it could benefit you and da da da da da? Then they've got to write this big long spiel and they're like, I don't have time for that. But like and that so I I ⁓ in a similar way, I will follow a lot of Instagram ca accounts because I get advertised to them by them and I think I don't want to buy now. But that's actually really interesting to me. So I'll follow it ⁓ as an example. And that's ⁓ again, ⁓ a really easy way to consume stuff. So it's the same with messaging, trying to communicate a really easy way for them to continue because they know clicking that yes button they're gonna hear from you, right? They just don't want to deal with it right now, but they are interested. Especially busy MDs. One of your jobs once you get the lead is to move it from priority number twelve to property number three. No, getting the lead is half the battle. And then that's really when our telemarketing ⁓ background comes in and we advise clients on how to follow up on leads because getting the lead is only half the battle. Warren Kucker: Yeah, it's a good it's a really good way to look at it. ⁓ in particular, I've heard a lot about ⁓ even in sales process, right? Like when we write emails during an opportunity management as sales folks, we write them like very formally in almost like a business case memo-e kind of scenario, right? But you get on a call, you generally don't talk like that, right? So like are you you're slacking them? In a scenario, I'm starting to see that more and more people are still a small percentage, but are are selling in Slack, right? Hey, let's connect Slack and you through that. That's not how you would write in Slack. But you get into an email format. Then I have this email that I'm sending. Hey, you were supposed to follow up on X. Did you do that? ⁓ I sent over a business case. Here's the four value propositions. ⁓ and then in particular, it's really important that we speak to your CFO. That's a lot to process. Even if you're extremely interested in moving this along, that's three heavy to dos for the buyer of your product, right? This takes us all the way back to messaging, right? Could you end up in just a very casual back and forth conversation? ⁓ to build someone into that slightly worn lead that you could start like re ⁓ figure. Yeah, it's an interesting way to look at it, right? Take me up. All right, so one more step of the journey you talked about. Let's talk about responses. ⁓ what are some rules of thumbs when it comes to great, I send a message, they respond to my message. ⁓ what's the problems gaps there? Yeah. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah. A cafano, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, well there's two categories. There's two there's two categories. The ability to follow up, i.e. the enrichment. When we talked about companies like Cognizum, Lead Zoom, Zoom Info, that sort of thing, which people often get wrong because if they're on LinkedIn Outreach and they just message them on LinkedIn five times after they've said they've interested, which is, you know, kind of crazy, but it it does work it does work. But ideal world, you've got multiple touch points because they might not go on LinkedIn again for two weeks. But if you've got their mobile number as well, you can ⁓ you spoke to my colleague Warren on LinkedIn. He asked me to follow up and answer some questions for you, or if it's yourself, that's great as well. Or email, because they, you know, those mobile touch points, you end up communicating on the platform that they're they most want. So it's not about you anymore, it's about them. You've got the interest byte at the front end, but they might not be regular LinkedIn people. They just happen to go on there once a month to check their messages. ⁓ and now they're either gonna call you back or text you back, whatever on WhatsApp, or you're gonna communicate with them on email. And then you end up in the world that they want to be in, but you found them in the best CPA or the best way of getting to them, as far as we're aware, anyway. ⁓ so that's one part of it. Then obviously it's about the consistency of follow-up. I think we've worked with a lot of ⁓ businesses that are ⁓ high-value products. A part-time CFO is a great example. You get CFOs. That are extremely experienced, extremely valuable, extremely smart. They'll get a lead, they'll send an email, they might, they might call it once. ⁓ you ask them three weeks later, I Yeah, I them an email, they never email me back. And it's like, yeah, that's that and you know, these are these are extremely some of the smartest people in the world. And you're like, Okay, that's great, but this is a lead that's come from cold outreach, and you need to be consistent with it to push it over the line. They didn't come to us via Google, it's not their top three priority. It's probably in the top 10 or top 20. And you have to be consistent with them to create urgency to get that into the top three. because you know, ⁓ you know, Warren as as myself as small business owners, there's a million things to do always. And there's a million things you know you need to do, and you can't do them all straight away. So if people I've always looked at it as helping people, if they've bit and said they're interested, that consistent follow-up, the amount of times Over the years, especially in my telemarketing era, people used to thank me for being persistent because it saved them a job of worrying about did I do or I didn't do it. ⁓ but yeah, that that's what it comes down to, the ability to follow up and the consistency of following up. Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's an interesting. what I find interesting this is ⁓ and I've come more to this again. So outbounding in sales has just become it's be it's harder, right? Like and it's always been hard, honestly. But what's happened is that like technology has made it so you don't have to be in person to sell as much. So you can sell to anyone anywhere. And when you could do that, the amount of sa selling that goes up just makes a lot of lot more noise, right? So let's take a step back from that then, right? Like what I actually found I had an interesting perspective from someone who wasn't in sales recently that talks about I was telling about some issues I'm having in my sales process, which is always the case. Sales is a a journey from interest to signing a contract and then taking care of a customer. And every start of the process is a process that should be analyzed, what's working, what's not. How do I fix that part of the process? And so I was starting to see a no show rate sp spike up in particular my my sales journey, right? And someone mentioned to me, like, listen, like, what are the age groups of the people that you sell to? And I'm like, honestly, I sell to like 60 year old CROs and 22 year old account executives, right? Like, ⁓ that's the that's the range, right? It's like cool. And they all get like a calendar invite with a Zoom meeting on them, right? And I'm like, Yeah, right. And it's like, Well, I'll say this, like, the sixty year old likes to go golfing and the twenty two year old like likes to watch a short clip to see if they might want a follow up call, right? So like, why are you like you're choosing the standard way for them to get the information that you wanna get to them? in this kind of like journey that you're talking about, it's like great, like you're you're just trying to spark some sort of like non-pure negative response, like something that's not like, hey, not interested, take me off your list, right? Anything above that starts to give you the keys of like where where do they want to communicate, right? And how do I get in front of them? And how do they understand that it's worth getting a little value, right? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: It's buying Yeah, yeah. Buying signal. Buying signal one. That's the terminology we use it, a buying signal. Any question is a buying signal. You sent them content and if they if they've got a question about it, that is an implied intent. Why are they they're interested, right? 'Cause they're asking. Warren Kucker: Right. It's interesting. Is there any technology that you see that kind of like collates that communication for you? So I think the problem is so I use instantly. I LinkedIn, I used to use Hey Reach, I'm back to doing hand to hand comment on LinkedIn, right? Like instantly is great, but the inbox replies are t ⁓ tough, right? Like you have inbound leads coming in, you have your outbound messaging. All of this lives in like so many different environments. It's hard to stay on top of that quick response rate. Have you have you seen anything that works well, your own tech in particular or something else there? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean look, y our tech can do email as well. ⁓ to be honest with you, our opinion at the minute of email is that it's not you're better off having more LinkedIn profiles if if you have the potential, just because the CPA is at least forty percent better across pretty much every every sector that we work in. like we used to two and a half years ago, two years ago, we used to sell our packages with ⁓ email as well. So all the packages would be, I don't know, three profiles, three email domains. I'm making up the numbers here, but And then or or ten profiles, ten email domains. And we got to a point where we were doing it because ⁓ I think obviously we've been doing it for about four, five years at that point, where we would speak to a lot of people that thought they wanted email outreach because that's what they knew, and LinkedIn automation was a lot newer then and not so commonly common knowledge five, six years ago. ⁓ so we would sell it as part of the package, and then after doing it for a couple of years, we were like, look at the numbers and it was like it's pointless. We're much better off giving them more value in this other channel and just dropping it all together and just hyper focusing on on the outreach, on the LinkedIn outreach, sorry, because the results are so much better. ⁓ and then a couple of years ago something did change dramatically in outreach on email. And look, that was actually great for our business because the amount of people that were used to having ⁓ email outreach channel as one of their marketing pillars, they would lose it pretty much overnight. So obviously people weren't looking to fill that hole ⁓ and we picked up a lot of clients ⁓ twenty twenty four is when the big changes happened on email. ⁓ I think there might be a bit of a comeback for email. ⁓ again, I don't live and breathe in that space anymore, but I'm seeing a little bit of a comeback from you know, I work in other masterminds and stuff like that. we don't do it still just because our ability to spend money elsewhere is so much better. but ⁓ I don't think it's dead at the minute. I think it's worth people to take another look again if they are. ⁓ not that something we do, but ⁓ don't be don't be shy to it. Warren Kucker: That's awesome. That's awesome. All right, maybe let's say two more questions here. So in particular, ⁓ let's talk about AI and this and this process, right? How are you using AI a little bit differently? I know there's like kind of common common ways to use it. How are you guys finding your leveraging it best in this part of the process in terms of writing or process or anything like that? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Well, we are we do have AI dialing ⁓ at the minute. We also are reseller of AI dialing as well. So how we personally use it internally, now don't be wrong, we use loads of AI softwares for for data building, for certain technologies for for automation, but from a telemarketing, from a lead follow up point of view, ⁓ we use it for AI dialing. Now, how we use it internally is we just use it for old leads. Like we still believe there is value in a human calling our hot leads. ⁓ we feel like companies want it, companies engage with it better. But what we've decided is after a certain amount of attempts of cold calling with a human, ⁓ it becomes almost poignant for a human to keep doing it. so what we've done is obviously slash our telly marketing cost by after X amount of call attempts, we then give it the AI to take it from there. ⁓ Which what that does is maintain the amount of leads you get, but at the same time absolutely slash the base staff cost. ⁓ because the own their only real value is in the first X amount of calls. After that, it's just not worth the cost of a human resource to do it. Warren Kucker: Sure. That doesn't. Cool, cool, cool. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: ⁓ yeah, and it's a it's a const I think AI calling in particular is a constant polishing effort. Like the amount of times we have to change it and adapt it all the time because there's there's there's millions of outcomes in those calls that you just can't pre plan for all of them. So it is a c you know, we've been doing it for about a year now. ⁓ and look, we have to polish it less now than we used to, but at the same time it still constantly needs polish. It's imperfect and Also, I think AI calling isn't for all brands. ⁓ we have lots of clients that wouldn't touch it with a barge pole ⁓ from a brand perspective. and AI inside LinkedIn is a really hot topic at the minute because LinkedIn are absolutely petrified of it. ⁓ because as you can think from a a platform point of view, they don't want a world where Toby goes on to LinkedIn and speaks to Warren, but Warren's AI And Warren's AI is told into Toby, Toby's AI, that the whole platform falls down as soon as that day comes. We've done, believe it or not, Warren, we've had clients that do AI companions, literally AI girlfriends, believe it or not, ⁓ who target rich, lonely MDs to to you know give them that AI companionship. And LinkedIn can tell when content is written by AI. Don't tell me how they do it. I imagine. When AI content's created, it normally creates an average, which is one of the bad things about AI, because it's pulling all that information from the world. And ⁓ but LinkedIn is is a huge issue for them because they can't have that. They can't have a world where LinkedIn does that. Like an automated message that's pre agreed ⁓ and goes out, you know, is fine. There's no way they can stop that because people could do that manually, whatever. But to be bespokely coming back to every question in a certain speed, in a certain manner. They can spot patterns that will tell people, tell them sorry, that someone's using AI attached to their account. And I've seen it myself. I've seen people lose accounts from it. So we stay well clear of it. And also from a service point of view, ⁓ we have an international resource for a lot of our service stuff to keep that cost down to clients. But Western speaking, very very human still so that you don't feel lost. I feel like The last two or three years, everyone's been clambering AI, clambering AI. And there's almost from a service perspective, there's a flip now where people just don't want AI. They don't want to speak to someone and get their problems solved, especially for a service business like ours. So don't get me wrong, we use it behind the scenes, but when it comes to client facing, it's it's it's lim minimal. Warren Kucker: human. Yeah. Good, good, good. That's good to hear. Awesome. Great. Well, Toby, it's really enlightening. This is a great conversation around like where out pounds at and like some good best practices, specifically on LinkedIn. ⁓ where can people find you if they want more content from you, ⁓ your webinar, your website, blog, anything like that. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, so yeah, so yeah, the the website is theleadlab.com. ⁓ we on the on the website you can sign up to our next webinar. I think it's in three weeks now. We had one yesterday. we had over six hundred registers for it. ⁓ obviously because we've got a lot of connections on LinkedIn. One of the byproducts of having lots of connections on LinkedIn is you can invite a lot people. So we can do that, but also people who Google us can go and do that. obviously Toby Batch for Tag, I'm on LinkedIn myself. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: We share all our clips from podcasts and stuff like that for a little trying to give value constantly because we believe it comes back to us in the long term. and yeah, they can book a free LinkedIn health check. There's no cost involved, there's no sales pitch unless they want one. ⁓ they can literally click it and show us your profile. You can show us messaging journeys, we can share with you successful ⁓ stuff we've done before, give you advice, we can tell you your size of market, we can look at ⁓ your profile universe. We can rent you profiles. massive believers that people go on and then sell us because we've helped them. So people can find us on our website and book a webinar or a free LinkedIn health check if they wish. Warren Kucker: Awesome. Great. Well looking forward to seeing where this continues to go, Toby, and appreciate taking the time sharing so much good knowledge with our with our listeners. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Pleasure Warner, it was great to speak to you.