The Best AI Business Doesn't Touch AI

0:01If you walk around your city, it's highly likely that there are tons of multi-million dollar businesses on Main Street that get customers and they want more of them. They don't want AI agents to talk to. They don't want complicated things to manage. Uh what they want is more jobs, more calls, and less headaches. So, if you know how to use AI, I think selling to main street boring businesses is one of the best and

0:31most overlooked opportunities out there. So, let's talk about how you can actually identify where these businesses are, what they might need, and ways that you can strike up conversations with them to sell your services. So, we're going to talk about finding a local market, identifying these types of businesses, scoring their needs, and we're not talking about SEO and ad campaigns, picking the ones that you want to go after, and then some ideas

1:03for how you can develop a strong pitch. Of course, we're going to use AI to find, score, pick, and pitch. But what we're selling to them again is how to convert more of the traffic they already get. How to get more jobs, more calls, and less headaches. They don't want to manage things. I own a boring local business myself. I don't have time to

1:25set up and deal with complicated agents. Okay. So, why are boring businesses the best clients that almost nobody wants? Uh the first thing is that they're high ticket. So, one roof is, you know, 12, 15, $20,000. It doesn't take much for you to generate a few extra qualified calls in a given time frame and them to close a deal or you help them close a deal to show a very very strong ROI on what you're providing them. You know, look at a SAS company or an e-commerce company or something like that. If you're trying to help a business that has a 20 or4 or $50 a month subscription or is selling a $50

2:12product one off, you're going to have to get a ton of incremental conversions through the work that you're doing for them to want to stick around. So, if you can embed your services within a boring local business, the likelihood of them churning is also a lot lower. It's also not as saturated. So there are, you know, thousands and thousands of cities across the country. I like to think of two tier or tier 2 and two, three cities as a great opportunity. Think about, you know, St. Louis, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio, cities like that where, you know, the septic guy could be doing two to 5 million a

2:56year with a totally unoptimized website. Um, so there is a litany of these opportunities. Narrowing down into your niche could be just again looking in your current location, uh, in your backyard. You don't have to overwhelm yourself with trying to, you know, pick your niche and stuff like that. Pick your location, go and do the research, find the opportunities, get a client, develop a story, and then you can replicate it. Once you find that, you can obviously go to other cities and other areas and you don't have to just stay in your backyard, especially if you're offering a remote digital AI service. Uh, typically there are fewer

3:37decision makers. So, you're often times dealing with an owner, an operator, uh, something like that. They'll even probably answer the phone or answer a message on LinkedIn. They're not getting the type of outbound that all the sexy businesses everyone wants to work with are getting every single day. It's more provable uh jobs, you know, uh calls, uh things like that. We're not trying to get, you know, impressions and engagement and build audience and stuff like that. We want to be able to ultimately connect to the systems that they're using to prove our work and prove our impact. Okay? So, think of it this way. We're not necessarily in this

4:18example trying to go and create demand with running ad campaigns or SEO. Folks uh like like this that have these businesses get those types of pitches all the time. I do as well. What you want to do is help them fix a leak. And maybe that's a good branding opportunity for you as well if you're helping a plumbing company or something like that, right? Okay. So, which ones? Um if a job costs more than a flight, it's on the list. So, $500 plus per job or

4:47recurring. Um, it has to be like urgent. Um, I like to, you know, look at need to have businesses where, um, you know, if someone calls and the business has, you know, good customer service, they answer the phone, um, their likelihood to close that sale is quite high. If you have a leak in your ceiling and you call somebody, um, you want them out there

5:09and solving your issue, uh, right away. things like a remodel or new construction or these nice to haves have a lower uh sort of uh time to conversion and it can be a little bit harder to sort of prove a fast immediate ROI of your services. Look for businesses with over 50 reviews. So this is proof that the business works. Try to find

5:35businesses that do have good reviews. You want to trust that they can, you know, offer and fulfill a strong service. And then, uh, you know, do they have a goodiz crew that's out there kind of doing the jobs? So, what are some examples? So, there's home services, there's roofing, windows, sighting, foundation, solar, gutters. There's recurring services like pest control, lawn services, higher ticket ones like, you know, hardcapes and retaining walls and core aeration and overseating things like that. There's pool maintenance or, you know, fixes. Uh there's chimney services. I actually really like this one. There's septic services, grease trap services. Some of these also have recurring revenue potential. You can

6:20think about B2B services. There's tons. There's commercial refrigeration. There's fire sprinkler uh type services that folks need. Restaurants need hood cleaning and often times they're mandated to uh to do that uh every month. Uh there's fleet repair and automotive and all kinds of stuff like that. Um some are not a trade. So there's med spas. I like longevity peptides, hormone replacement therapy clinics, orthopedics, uh veterinary clinics. Um, you know, there's even like private schools and, uh, specific trade-based training schools, uh, you know, like helping drivers get a CDL and start a new career, uh, that you can look into. So, you know, one meta point here to think about is when folks think

7:09about servicing a boring business, they all typically kind of go to HVAC and plumbing. um think about, you know, one door down from that and you don't have to target the same local niche that everyone else does. That'll give you clarity in your branding, help you differentiate, help you tap into micro niches that are less crowded and more

7:32likely to get a response from you. Okay. So, the first thing that I like to do um when I try to identify who good potential customers are is a gap analysis. So, a gap analysis is basically like, hey, we're going to look at a market. We're going to let our AI and our workflows go out and analyze their websites, analyze their digital presence, and we're going to find the

7:59gaps in each one of those prospects. What are they missing? What's close to the dollar? What can we reasonably fix and offer these businesses? What could lead to a strong audit or lead magnet or assessment that could open the door in terms of generating a conversation with one of these business owners? So, they see like a finished thing with their name on it. You see a score gaps and exactly what you should lead the conversation with. So, here's what's wrong with you loses. here's something I made for you and how much time it could save you, how much money it could make you, how many more booked jobs it could

8:34get you, how many more phone calls it could get you, uh, typically wins. So, it needs to be transformation and outcome driven. No boring business owner cares at all that you can build a crazy workflow or AI agent or, you know, do anything technical, okay? Like I can tell you that from firsthand experience and you would be amazed as to how many people trying to start that are trying to sell AI services talk about the features of their work and their things uh versus what an owner actually wants to see. So your willingness to get your hands dirty, get in there and learn what these business owners actually are

9:11facing and actually want is an opportunity for you to go and capture. All right. So, you know, prospecting, uh, if you open up X, if you open up, you know, any website where entrepreneurs are chatting, uh, they want to sort of like yap about their product, they want to build an audience, things like that. Those things are

9:29great. I love doing that as well. However, with businesses like this, you need to get boots on the ground. You need to generate conversations and you need to prospect into these markets. That is the fastest way to monetize your services. So, you know, scrolling maps, opening 20 sites one by one, guessing who needs your help, writing a cold email, clicking send. We don't want to take that much time to go and, you know, try to uh, you know, generate opportunity. We want to automate as much as we can. Um, we don't want to spend two hours finding five businesses that might reply to us or might be a fit for

10:09our services. What we want to do is think about automation. Okay? So, we're going to talk about building some machines. These are some ideas that you can go and implement. We're going to use Zapier uh for this. It's a great way for people to build repeatable, reliable workflows and agents without having to, you know, manage infrastructure, spend a bunch of time vibe coding, debugging, uh things like that. Um, if you build these workflows, you can also imagine how you could go and offer and sell uh what I'm showing you here. And I'm going to include a skill uh in the comments, in the replies, in the description that can

10:51help your AI build these and other types of workflows for you without you having to go and individually configure them. Okay, so uh by the way, this video is sponsored by Zapier. Uh love the tool. I I highly recommend it to members in our community. So, you know, definitely give it a try and check it out if you're looking to move quick and uh get into

11:15selling AI services to local businesses. All right, so uh here's the machine in one picture. We're going to find a trade and a city. We're going to score the gaps. We're going to pick which one we want. And then we're going to develop a pitch, which is going to be like a packet in an asset that we can send to the lead. Uh we're also going to talk about some other ways that we can get um our stuff in front of these business owners. So again, uh if this looks complicated or if you don't want to set up something step by step uh in, you know, Zapier, I'm going to give a skill

11:50away that will allow something like cloud code to go and use your browser, set them up. I'm going to detail out exactly what these are, but let's kind of uh, you know, chat through these a little bit. So, let's talk about finding prospects. So, we're gonna have a table. That's just imagine like a Google sheet where the information is stored. Uh, think of that kind of like your database. All right? We're going to get, you know, the businesses and the details that we go out and find stored in one place. We're going to use Appify. If you haven't used Appify, it is an amazing tool. There's all kinds of scrapers that

12:26you can implement into your agents, into your workflows to go out and get data that you can hand off to an agent. It can interpret and uh it's one of the core essential tools that I've been relying on for my marketing workflows, my sales workflows for quite some time. So, step two is an ampify actor. This one is going to go and scrape Google maps. All right. and then it's going to spit out uh you know the the records within our table. So that that's basically what this first few steps uh

12:59does. So the next step is score. Okay. So each of the records we go and scrape from Google Maps. We're going to have Zapier's web reader go in and we read read the web page. All right. So it's going to go and pull data down from their website. Uh what's their copy like? What do they do? uh what's a description of the business? I've even managed to get things like do they have contact forms? Do they have a contact form, you know, top of fold on the homepage? These are all essential things that a business needs to convert more of the traffic that they're already getting. Business owners love

13:36efficiency. if they're paying for ads, if they're paying for SEO, if they have an agency, uh they would be better off converting more of what they're getting and more of what they're paying for rather than, you know, trying to get more traffic again into a leaky uh bucket. All right. So, after uh we read the pages, then uh we have an AI model within the AI uh by Zapier uh node here

14:02um that is going to interpret that data. It's going to analyze it and it's going to update the record with kind of the core insight about what's wrong on their website, where's the leak in their funnel, and what can we do to fix it. All right, so again, that's just going to update that database, update that table for us uh through the Zap. And here's an example of uh what what we get. So the list fills itself in. Uh we're scraping maps, we're finding the leads, we're finding what the problem is that they're facing. And uh this is real data that I did for Atlanta HVAC

14:39companies. I just picked one as ju just to run this example and show you the outputs. But you know, we've got, you know, real HVAC companies. We've got 20 records here. We've got their website. We've got the gaps which you can see like no email capture, nothing free offered, no phone on the page, no first step offer. Placeholder contact info is still live. copy was never rewritten um from an electrician template and this is a HVAC company. Um so a lot of these businesses don't even have a phone number that a visitor can click and call let alone like something like a lead magnet where they can you know capture

15:15high intent visitors and send SMS or email campaigns to educate and engage them and convert them down the line. So, there's so much lowhanging fruit out there in any niche, in any city when you look boring, when you look toward main street versus trying to go after all the sexy businesses that everyone else is. So, this is why I believe this is one of

15:37the best opportunities in AI. All right. So, um out of uh out of the businesses that we analyzed, it it kind of amazed me that there were the same three leaks across the board here. Okay, that's a pattern. Uh the pattern is nine out of the 11 that I looked at in this example had no way to collect an email. Um they did not have any sort of like pricing information or anything like that uh in the first step. And then nine out of 11 had something as basic as a phone problem. So again, not one of these is a problem with traffic necessarily. Uh a form, an offer, a

16:18phone number. Um, those are things that help you convert more jobs, more calls out of the people that are already coming to your website. Um, and the other benefit is these are often quick and simple things to fix. If you're pretty good with cloud code or coding agents, these are core basics that you probably do every single day that would feel like magic to a boring business on

16:42Main Street. All right, so uh how do we pitch? uh what kind of assets can we think about creating? How can we maybe, you know, get in front of these businesses with something compelling? Okay, so um the next step is that we're going to try to use Ampify again to get the contacts. Um

17:02we're going to get the phone number. We're going to look for an email address, you know, things like that. Um, and we're going to have AI in this step build uh sort of a packet, build an asset, build an outreach, uh, you know, kit for us so that we can go and and get it in front of the business owners. Now, I just want to kind of open your mind to what you can do. You can do this however you want. You can develop obviously various types of assets, outreach cadences, outreach messaging, different types of, you know, packets and and things like that. And there's multiple

17:36ways that, you know, you can try to prospect. We'll just kind of talk about like email and stuff like that here, but you can imagine um you know, you could do Loom videos and and send them there. There's just a lot of things that uh that you can do. So, imagine you wake up every morning and you have a readymade sort of packet. Maybe your VA does, maybe your Grockbot does if you want to get fancy of, you know, what number to text, uh what email to send to, uh the exact text that you know you need to do uh to to send out and then you know an

18:14offer and uh you know what the followup should be like. So you know this has all that already made for you. It's based off the the real data in the market. I'm not burning a bunch of tokens to go and get this information fresh every day. Uh I don't have a cron job failing in an app or something like that. Again, benefit of Zapier, it's reliable and you don't have to worry about any of that kind of infrastructure. So this is your data or your agents data that's coming, you know, each day and arming you with the go to market motions that you need so that there's no guesswork. Just open

18:51it up. Here's exactly what you need to do. Uh here's an example of an asset that you could create for a business. You know, hey, u Evans Air conditioning notice that you don't have a way for um customers who are visiting your website uh to, you know, stay engaged or submit their lead information or something like that. A great way to do that is a simple educational resource. I created one for you. uh great to have on your site at the you know top of the fold or in a popup or something like that especially for people who might be like leaving the site. It's a way that we can capture

19:27them and differentiate ourselves from the competition. Uh you know 90% of businesses in your local market don't have any way to capture passive website visitors and the person who does it first is going to be top of mind when they need that service. Do you think something like this could get you an incremental job, you know, every month or something along those lines? So, just to paint the picture as to, you know, how you can talk about the value of some

19:52of these things, some of these assets. Okay. So, um you know, the whole uh the whole thing here cost sense uh in in Zapier, which is really cool. um you know flip it on uh the assets are generated and you know you can go further and set up automated uh delivery and and stuff like that. So one engine um you know you've got the outbound, you've got the report style stuff uh you've got you know the audit and then it's the same thing every time. Um so I I've got some more details here. Let's chat through them real quick and then I want to talk to you about another way

20:35that you could get the leads in an automated fashion, which is one of my favorite channels right now. So, um you know, if you want to send a report, um you can do that. Imagine if you have a hyper local Facebook ads campaign. You hop on the camera, you say, "Hey, my name's James. I help HVAC and electric electrician uh businesses in the Atlanta area get more jobs and more calls from the people that are already coming to their website. I looked across all the businesses in the local market and 90% are missing this one key thing. Okay, so um enter your email. I'm going to send

21:12you this free report. Uh the first one to implement this I think is going to you know win or something like that. So just again to paint the picture of what you can do um you know open up something like uh Loom or whatever and go through the report, go through the lists of competitors. They probably know who these businesses are like what are the gaps, things like that. Like this is information that they would really want to know. Be careful not to over complicate it. Make it simple. But run a

21:41hyper local ad to something like that. Like I looked at 20 HVAC companies in Atlanta. Um you know that's that's the reports headline, that's the video headline. Uh you could imagine like a video sales letter that goes through it. Uh and then hey get your customized report to plug your leaks or something like that. Uh target a pretty tight metro like you know 25 miles just see if it works. See if you're getting any solid leads. Use a lead format. Um cool thing is too you can wire up a lead format to Zapier and then you can fire off something uh to that lead. You could

22:13store it you know in a in a table or a database or something like that. All right. So again, if you target a one local metro with something like this, it it may saturate quickly, but you're going to learn fast. You're going to know if, hey, does my hook, does my offer, does my niche uh make sense? Is my ad format resonating? And then your job is to continue testing these various combinations until you find an automated lead genen system that you can turn the dials on on meta ads versus, you know, uh picking up the phone and and dialing

22:44for dollars or something like that. That's really the holy grail is, you know, you can put $10 in, you get three leads, uh, one of them book a call with you and you close them, you know. So, you can set this up as a custom audit, too. Here's another idea for an automated lead form. So, you do a lead form ad. Um, you build a Zapier connection to the lead form ad. Um, the lead comes in with their URL. It develops a custom audit. It sends them the custom audit into their email inbox, you know, within a few minutes and uh then, you know, you have a link to sort

23:19of hop on a call or book a call with you. Again, try it in any city for any niche uh across the country and odds are you're going to find something uh that is going to be scalable for you. All right. So, um that's a whole funnel for selling AI services to uh main street boring businesses. Again, think it's a huge opportunity. I hope that this video sort of got, you know, your mind open to the possibilities of how you can package and position your services, how you can reach business owners in your backyard, and how you can leverage Zapier to help you get it done. again in the replies in

24:01the comments in the description. I'm going to have a free skill that you can use with your coding agent or you know cloud desktop or whatever it is uh to help you build workflows like this in Zapier um so that you don't have to go and you know manually configure them. You can get off the ground running. Who knows maybe it's also an automation service that you could package and offer on top of Zapier as your infrastructure as your backbone. I hope you enjoyed this video. I'm going to be talking a lot more about selling to Main Street, about offering them AI services. It fires me up. I hope it fires you up,

24:34too.