More How, Less Hype

Hi Reader,

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past few years, your inboxes, feeds, and networking events are filled with people breathlessly talking about the potential of AI.

Pilots. Proof of concepts. It's all about Potential.

Instead of more hype, we're going to show you every place we use AI in our Small Agency Assessment (currently on a Black Friday special), why we're using it, and how we compensate for its shortcomings.

1. Call Analysis

We use Fathom throughout the Assessment to transcribe calls, generate better-than-Zoom-generated summaries, and ask follow-up questions.

One feature we love is how with two clicks you can reframe the call summary into a number of popular sales frameworks (BANT, MEDDPICC, SPICED) which helps uncover where agencies are having the biggest struggles.

After the Assessment intake calls, we copy the AI-generated summary into a Google Doc and edit it extensively based on our personal observations that weren't caught by the AI.

For example, AI doesn't catch body language or nuanced tone of voice, but we've seen what shame, avoidance, and embarassment looks like. Those emotional cues tell a much deeper story that helps us calibrate our recommendations, such as leaning into confidence-building versus risk-taking activities.

Those edited Google Doc summaries then go into-

2. Deeper Analysis

Call summaries, transcripts, and our secret sauce of agency best-practices gets organized in NotebookLM, a tool that helps us connect dots and ask better questions. NotebookLM is better than ChatGPT or your AI tool of choice because it limits the scope to the materials we upload.

Great advice for a mega-agency like GroupM is terrible advice for a three-person SEO agency: NotebookLM helps us stay on the straight and narrow.

We use NotebookLM to create a draft Assessment Report. It's usually a little too generic and far too ambitious: if you follow its raw advice, you'll be investing time into too many activities to make any noticeable impact.

3. Polishing the Analysis

Once we've tailored our draft Assessment Report, we run it through a custom-built Google Gemini Gem. This Gem is coded to behave like a small agency owner, foibles and all.

This double-check helps us make sure we're on-target with the recommendations, rephrase certain points, and add nuanced "Why" explanations into the Report.

Unfortunately, just like NotebookLM, Gemini also tends to push recommendations to the middle of the road and is just as overambitious. Massaging the final Assessment Report is best done by human hands.

4. Making The Analysis More Accessible

After all of this, we load the final Assessment Report into NotebookLM and then generate an audio overview. This helps Assessment clients consume and understand the report in an engaging manner.

We have to add several layers of direction into that audio overview so it focuses on the recommendations, otherwise you are rolling the dice that it produces something useful to an agency owner.

Clear the Noise With A Small Agency Assessment

If you want to start 2025 with clarity on your biggest opportunities and risks, our Small Agency Assessment comes with a $750 coupon for any of our standard trainings in 2025. This offer only lasts until January 1st, so book an assessment today!