12 ways to land AI services clients (ranked)

12 ways to land AI services clients (ranked) Speaker 1: Today we're going to break down all the different ways that you can land clients that you can sell to when you're making money selling AI services. So we're going to go over all the different methods that exist. These are all like the major ones. I'm going to break down my favorite ones, why they're good, why other ones suck, which ones you should start with. And by the end of this video, you should have a playbook for knowing exactly how you're going to go out to the market and land Clients so that you can make money with AI. So let's start with, first and foremost, let's start with door knocking, right? This is a cold outreach method. This is where we simply go door to door in our town. Pitching AI products and pitching AI services to local business owners. So this is one that most people hate doing. I'm not going to lie, I don't enjoy doing it, but it is one of the most effective things that you can do in terms of cold outreach. I've always told people, if you need a client today or if you need a client this week, door knocking is the only method that's going to work for you. And again, how that works is we simply show up to a local service business, A lot of times I like to pitch them on what I call a tripwire offer or just like a kind of a free lead magnet. The one that I like to use is a free 15-minute AI assessment. So that's where I'll say something like, hey, my name is Corey. I'm a local AI consultant here in town. What I do is I help local service businesses find simple AI tools that can help them save more time or get more clients coming in the door that don't require a big budget or don't require much expertise to learn how to use. I'd love to spend 15 minutes just showing you one very specific way that AI can help your business. If it helps, great. If not, no worries at all. And I pitched that last week to two local service businesses, and both of those businesses scheduled a sales call with me. So those sales calls are still in progress. Whether they convert, we will see. But regardless, I'm two for two with this method in a week. No other method on this list are you going to be able to go two for two on, regardless of how good you are at them. So when it comes to door knocking, I'm going to put this in A tier, and the only reason I don't put it in S is because it is not scalable, right? Obviously, you can only knock so many doors in a day, even though it is one of the most effective methods by far. It's also the single best way to learn sales, period, but most people will not do it. Next, we've got cold calling. So, cold calling is another one of those cold outreach methods that is a grind, it sucks, nobody likes doing it. Not only is it less effective than door knocking, it also just requires a lot more effort. You could go and knock three to five doors per day and get so many leads you don't even know what to do with if you did it for 30 days straight. On the other hand, you could make 100 cold calls a day for two, three, four weeks and maybe have You know, five to 10 solid leads, maybe, and that's if you're good, right? Most people are not going to be good, especially if it's their first time doing cold calling. And I'm actually in the middle of a, what I'm calling like a building an AI agency from scratch series. So that's another video on my channel. I'm currently two episodes into that series. So you can actually check that out where I'm door knocking and cold calling live. Like I'm sharing the calls that I'm making, the doors that I'm knocking, I'm even recording those. And again, I went 2 for 2 on door knocking and I went 0 for 14 on cold calling in the second episode. So it's just not as effective. It's more scalable for sure because you can make hundreds of calls in a day. You can only knock a certain amount of doors in a day. But because of how not effective it is compared to door knocking, I'm going to put cold calling in D tier, right? Especially as most of these business owners are getting lots of cold calls, they're getting robo calls every day. Most people don't even pick up their phone anymore. So it's just not as effective as it used to be. Now next we've got content, right? Now when I say content, I'm talking about, we're not trying to go viral here, right? When we're talking about content for generating leads, this is middle of funnel and bottom of funnel content where we are educating our ICP, our ideal client profile on Basically helping to answer their biggest questions and addressing the biggest pain points they have as it relates to our product or service. For example, last week on LinkedIn, I posted a post about how I created a speed to lead AI agent for my business and how that agent looks at my e-mail inbox. Anytime I get an inbound lead, that agent drafts a response that's personalized in my voice, And then sends me a message on Slack so that I can review that message and send it quickly. Because the quicker you respond to new leads, the more likely you are to get the deal. Now, I posted about it on LinkedIn. That post got like 25 likes. It got maybe 1,200 impressions. And I got two qualified leads from that post. Now, did it go viral? Absolutely not. Did it get thousands of views? Absolutely not. But that's an example of content marketing that works because it's addressed at my ICP. People that are likely to buy from me are going to see that post. It's going to resonate with them because they all have that same pain point. They're losing leads by not being able to respond fast enough. So content marketing done right. Is incredibly effective. This is absolutely in the S tier. The only downside of content marketing is that it takes a long time to get going, right? I've been creating content for over three years now, and I feel like I'm just now at the point where the flywheel is kicking in. Now I'm creating content across every platform. I've got multiple businesses, right? We've got our AI service business. We've got AI Operator Academy, which is our community. We've got a lot of things going on. Content takes a long time to get going but once it gets going it's a huge moat and it is a money printer where you're not having to spend money on ads. Now next, the next one I want to talk about, I'm actually going to skip down the list because this one I'm really bullish on, is hosting your own event. So you guys might have heard me talk about the event that I recently hosted in Charlotte. We're actually on month three of me hosting this event. It's called AI for Business. It's a simple local meetup where each month we have 20 to 30 people come out. I just pretty much rent a room at a local coworking space. I invite a bunch of people on LinkedIn and I post in local Facebook groups inviting business owners to come to this event who are interested in AI. And what ends up happening is we get 20 to 30 people in the room who are all interested in learning AI or learning about selling AI or interested in learning about how they can implement AI into their business. And what ends up happening is a lot of those people turn into leads, a lot of those people turn into referral partners, and bottom line, because I'm the guy hosting the event, I am the perceived expert in the room. So, you know, it just generates a lot of opportunities. I liken hosting your own event in your city or town to SEO in the sense that like, are you going to get a client on month one? Probably not. Same way when you start implementing SEO on your website, you're probably not going to get a client on month one. Are you going to get a client by month 3? Maybe, right? But maybe not. However, month 6, 9, 12, 17, 21, you've created such a competitive advantage for yourself, both in terms of SEO and in creating your own event, which is why I consider them very similar efforts. So when it comes to hosting your own event, I put this in the A tier. It's very easy to set up. It's very easy to implement, but it does require some, you know, some hustle and like going out there, inviting people. Your first event might only have three people show up. You might not have anybody show up, right? So this is something that takes a while to get going, but similar to content after you've been doing it for a while, it's a massive competitive advantage and it's very hard to beat somebody who's got a local audience of their ideal prospects who all know and trust them. Very, very good method. And another thing, so I've got a free resource for you guys as well. So when it comes to hosting your own event, I put together this, this is like a master prompt. I mean, this is like five pages long. This is the prompt that I gave to Claude to build my entire local event framework. So I give it all my context, I give it everything about my team, I give it about my offers, and you can literally download this prompt for free. The link's going to be in the description. And simply remove my information, replace it with yours, hand it to Claude, Claude is going to research venues in your town. It's going to write the pitch for you to go and reserve the space. It's going to design your local event. It's going to create your marketing engine. This is pretty much a plug-and-play system for anybody who wants to implement this host your own local event lead gen method. And if you want to go even deeper on this method, as well as all the methods here in this list, inside AI Operator Academy, we've got a full course on just this one method. We've got full courses on warm outreach. Full courses on referrals and partnerships and all the different ways to generate leads for your AI business if you're making money selling AI. So if you want to check out AI Operator Academy, we've got over 250 people in there. You can go to aoa.community or hit the link in the description. Now, next up, we've got cold email, right? Now, to be completely transparent, I don't have a ton of experience sending cold emails. However, I know a lot of people who do, and they absolutely crush it. And this is one of those things, again, similar to SEO, where every single year, there's a crop of people that says, oh, SEO is dead. Oh, cold email is dead. Everybody's always trying to claim that cold email is dead. When in reality, it is far from dead. It's just the definition of a numbers game. Like you're not going to send 100 cold emails and get results. You're not going to send 1000 cold emails and get results. You might not send 10,000 cold emails and get results, but this is one of those things that works. If your messaging is on point, if your list is on point, and there's a lot of services and things out there like Apollo, like seamless.ai that gives you verified contact information to go and send cold emails to. Also, the infrastructure required to run cold email at scale can be expensive, talking a few hundred bucks a month, if that. If you're selling AI services, chances are you're selling a multi-thousand dollar ticket price. So one client that comes from cold email is going to pay for like a whole year of cold email at scale. So this is one of those methods that again takes a little bit of know-how, a little bit of expertise, definitely some tweaking to get right. But when done right is very effective. People are sleeping on cold email. I think it's super effective. It's something we're going to do more of in the future. So I'm going to actually put this in the B tier, right? Very scalable as well. Very, very scalable method. Next, we've got cold DMs. Now, there's like two different kinds of cold DMs the way that I see it. There's the cold DMs that everybody likes to send, which are super spammy, they're templated, they're clearly AI generated, and they simply don't work. Like if anybody spent any amount of time on LinkedIn, you've probably gotten one of these cold DMs from somebody that Doesn't know anything about you, like they haven't even viewed your profile. It's clearly a templated message. It hasn't been personalized in any way, clearly written by AI. Those cold DMs are F tier, right? However, for the cold DMs where you've researched the prospect, you've done a little digging on what it is that they're looking for. If you can get intense signals, like there are even tools out there that We'll scrape people's social profiles, specifically LinkedIn, and figure out what have they been searching for on LinkedIn? What have they been engaging with on LinkedIn? You want to look for people who are engaging with topics that relate to what you sell. If you sell AI consulting, for example, then you can use some of these tools to find people on LinkedIn who are searching for AI consulting or AI vendors or AI governance. And then you can send them a cold DM and the chances of you getting a response to that cold DM is so much higher. Now, cold DMs are more effective or less effective depending on obviously the messaging, but the channel as well. So I'd put cold DMs in the C tier only because. If you're not creating content alongside cold DMs, it's going to be an uphill battle. If you send somebody a cold DM and they look at your profile and you've never posted or the last time you posted was six months ago or your profile is not complete or you like don't have a profile picture, I can't tell you how many cold DMs I get from people who don't even have a freaking profile picture, then you're screwed. So if you can combine Cold DMs with content, then it moves up, I would say, to B or A tier. But if you're just sending cold DMs, I would put it in C tier. Now, next we've got warm outreach, right? So, warm outreach, I define warm outreach as you're doing outreach to somebody that already knows, likes, or trusts you in some capacity. So, this could be people that you know throughout your everyday life. I always like to tell people, hey, you probably know 30 business owners from Previous coworkers, friends from church, friends from the gym, parents of your kids' friends that you could go and outreach to. And those people are so much more likely to have a sales conversation with you. And at the very least, you can do free work for those people in the early stages of your AI business to get referrals and get testimonials. So warm outreach is by far the best way to get started. This is actually the main method that we teach inside AI Operator Academy, because it doesn't make sense to me to tell somebody who's new to AI, who's trying to make money selling AI, to go and do a bunch of cold email or to go and send a bunch of cold DMs or make cold calls. Because everybody, I don't care if you are the most reclusive person in the world, you probably know at least five or 10 people who own businesses who you can do warm outreach to first. So for that reason, I put Warm Outreach in the A tier. I think it's incredibly low-hanging fruit. I think people have way more warm leads. In their phone contacts, and they probably realize, they've just never sat down to make a list of who those people are and then craft an outreach message to them that makes sense. So warm outreach, I'm definitely putting in the A tier. Not as scalable because obviously you're going to run out of people that know, like, and trust you probably pretty quickly, much more quickly than you would if you're doing any sort of cold outreach. However, it's a lot more effective, your hit rate, In some cases is going to be 30, 40, 50% in terms of number of people that you reach out to and the number of calls that you book. You will not get those metrics doing any sort of cold outbound, but obviously you're limited in terms of scale. Now next is in-person networking. So I really, really like in-person networking because I think getting out there in person is probably the single best way to build relationships because you can build more rapport, you can build a better relationship with somebody in person. Five minutes in person than you can in three months or six months of Zoom calls or email or text messages. You really can't beat in person. So when it comes to in-person networking, like how do we actually execute that? Well, chances are, if you live in a decent sized city or town, there's probably a lot of meetups or events or like chamber of commerce meetings going on where you just got to show up. Make yourself useful and talk to people. Like it's pretty much that simple. So what I probably would avoid are AI events because if you go to an AI event, you're just going to be talking to other people who are interested in AI. And if we want to make money with AI, we want to be targeting people who aren't as familiar with AI or they're more, you know, these are the type of people who aren't going to be going to AI specific events. So that's why I like going to more general networking events or like chamber of commerce type meetups. And just show up, have a really good one-liner that explains who you are and what it is that you do. Get people's contact information and follow up, right? But don't be pushy. Follow up and say, hey, great meeting you. Would love to grab a cup of coffee and see what it is that you're working on and see if there's any way we might work together. Right? That simple. So in-person networking, I'm actually going to put this in the B tier. I think it's very effective. It obviously doesn't scale very well because there's only so many rooms you can get into in person. And it's a numbers game similar to cold outreach. Not everybody you meet in person is going to be a good lead. However, if you get out there and talk to enough people, the leads that you do find from in-person networking are going to be very high quality and the sales cycle is going to be much shorter because you shook their hand. They trust you. You didn't cold call them. You didn't even DM them. They didn't consume your content. You actually have a physical in-person relationship. All right, next we've got referral partners. So referral partners are truly one of the most powerful, one of the most potent ways to get leads, but it is one of the hardest to get up and running because people are not going to want to send you referrals if you don't have a track record or if they don't trust you at a very high level, right? So when I talk about referral partnerships, I'm talking about Other services that have your ideal clients as their clients and then they essentially recommend you to their clients anytime their client has an AI related need, right? So a great example of this is one of my referral partners is a CPA. So he runs a CPA firm. He's also a business strategy consultant. So most of his clients are seven and eight figure business owners, which are my perfect ideal client. So we have a ton of overlap there, but I don't compete with him. He's selling business strategy and CPA services. I'm selling AI consulting. So we're not competitors, but we make really good compliments. So whenever one of his Strategy clients or whenever one of his CPA clients has an AI-related need or needs implementation of some sort of AI or automation, he sends them to me. I take good care of them. I keep him in the loop because if he sends me a lead and I don't keep him up to date on what's going on with that lead, he's not going to want to send me more leads. So I just over-communicate with him. I take really good care of the people that he sends me. And then if I end up closing a deal with one of the referrals that he sends me, I give him 10% of the deal. Now, 10% of the deal is not so much why he's doing it. He's doing it because he needs to look knowledgeable in the sense that he needs to have an AI guy ...in his back pocket that he can send his clients to. And for those of you watching this, think about how many of you have service people in your life, whether it's your realtor, your insurance agent, your CPA, your bookkeeper, you name it, who their clients are asking them about AI all the time. And they're not AI experts, so they don't know what to say. But if they had a really good person to refer to, someone like you, One, it would make them look good because they're like, oh yeah, I've got a guy. Here he is. Two, it's going to be free, warm leads for you because referral leads tend to be so much easier to close. They have way fewer objections. You borrow the trust of the person that referred you, right? So it's inherently an incredibly high converting lead source. For that reason, I'm going to put it in the, actually the S tier. This is truly, One of the, if not the best ways to get leads, again, it's just not as easy to scale and it's a snowball effect, right? The better you are at what you do, the more that people know you, the more referrals you're going to get, but it takes a while to get going in the beginning. Next, we've got borrowed audiences, right? So what does it mean to borrow somebody's audience? So this is like a great example of borrowing somebody's audience is doing something like podcast guesting. So this is one of my favorite things to do. In fact, I'm literally guesting on a podcast in 55 minutes. This is a podcast that gets 20,000 to 50,000 downloads per episode. I've been on this podcast four times before. Every time I'm featured on this podcast, I get inbound leads. Every time, right? So that's a great example of how you can borrow an audience to add value, not only to you, the value to you is obvious. You're getting in front of lots of your ideal customers by being on a podcast, for example, but it also gives the person whose audience you're borrowing It gives them benefit in the sense of it gives them content, it gives them a way to add value to their audience through your expertise. And I'll give you another great example of this. I mean, you can obviously probably think about all the ways that you could apply this in your AI business. You could guest on podcasts, you could run joint webinars with your CPA, for example. You could, like I did a local meetup with a realtor In my town back in January of this year, she invited all her clients and all her realtor buddies. I presented on AI for 15 minutes and I got a client out of it, right? I borrowed her audience of clients and realtors, added value and got a client. So it's a pretty simple concept. Just another example to drive this home, a friend of mine who's in the real estate education space. He will go and partner with guys who have credit repair communities, right? So he sells a real estate coaching program. He'll go and partner with people who have big credit card funding communities. He did a guest workshop inside of a guy's community who sells credit card repair services. He ended up making $150,000 from a 45-minute workshop inside this other guy's community by borrowing his audience. Because his program's $10,000, he had 15 people who attended that workshop end up signing up for his program. Right, so that shows the power of borrowing somebody else's audience. When you borrow somebody else's audience, you also borrow their credibility. People in their audience trust you implicitly because they trust the host who's having you on their platform. This is a very, very high leverage lead gen strategy. Again, it takes a little bit of sophistication, takes a little bit of know-how, it takes, you know, knowing how to talk the talk and get in the right rooms. But if you can do that, this is absolutely an A-tier lead gen method. All right. So lastly, we've got two more. We've got paid ads. So when it comes to paid ads, again, this is something I personally don't have a ton of experience with. I have not run a ton of paid ads in my life. However, again, just like cold email, I know plenty of people who have made a ton of money. I'm talking like fortunes from running paid ads. So I'm not going to beat a dead horse here because like I said, it's not my area of expertise. But paid ads are probably the closest thing to a real life slot machine as could possibly exist, except the difference between a slot machine and paid ads is you know the money that you're going to get out. If you put a dollar into the paid ad slot machine and you're good at running paid ads, you're going to get three or four dollars out every time. And you can keep doing that over and over and over again. So paid ads is one of those things that requires capital. It requires a skill set. You've got to know You know how to buy media. You've got to know what good creative looks like. You've got to be able to look at your conversion rates and know your numbers down to the decimal. Otherwise, you're going to probably burn a lot of money running ads. But if you can do those things, and learning them is not hard, right? There's courses, there's YouTube channels, you can have AI teach you how to run paid ads. If you can do those things well, It's as close to a money printer as you can possibly get. Definitely not a beginner-friendly method. If you're brand new to making money with AI, I would do things in the A tier. So I'm going to put paid ads in the B tier because of that. However, when it comes to scaling, paid ads is probably the best lever you can pull to start scaling very quickly. Now, lastly, we've got marketplaces and directories. So when I say marketplaces and directories, I'm really referring to things like Upwork or Fiverr. Now, again, these marketplaces, are they a good kind of proving ground to get some initial case studies and to get some initial money coming in the door? Absolutely. But what you're going to find on an Upwork or a Fiverr is that you are competing with, you know, talent from overseas. You're competing with guys in India and the Philippines and places where the cost of living is so astronomically lower than what it is here in the US or in Europe or in Canada that You're going to get beat on price pretty much every time. Now, if you are an elite salesman and you put together really compelling proposals and your follow-up game is S-tier, then sure, you can probably charge a little bit above the baseline on a Fiverr or And Upwork. But in general, what I don't like about those marketplaces is that they are a race to the bottom. And AI and automation is such a hot industry right now. The number of people offering these services on these platforms is going to continue to skyrocket. And because supply is going to skyrocket, demand is going to stay the same or roughly increased, but probably not at the same rate of supply. Price is bound to come down. So for those reasons, I put marketplaces and directories in the F tier. Again, if you're new, great, get on there, get some initial deals, get some case studies, prove your worth, get a little money coming in the door. But I can't really justify telling somebody to go on Fiverr or Upwork when they could just as easily go knock three or five doors a day for 30 days and get more leads at higher quality or at higher prices That are much more likely to close because again, you talk to those people in person and they are just going to inherently trust you more. So that is the lead gen method tier list in a nutshell. Again, quick reminder, go to the link in the description, download the full five-page prompt that you can hand to Claude and Claude will put together your full local in-person meetup event. That's exactly what I did to get 20 to 30 people coming through the door, all of which are referral partners, potential clients. And if you want to learn how to make money with AI, mainly through warm outreach and methods that don't require you to make a bunch of cold calls or do a bunch of cold outreach, that's exactly what we teach inside AI Operator Academy. Head over to aoa.community or hit the link in the description to join us inside the community. Thanks so much and I'll be back soon.