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Stop Fighting the Robots: Combating AI Slop Feedback From Your Clients · Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I got this voice note this week from one of my clients, Jasmine, who runs Darlin Marketing.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: She's fabulous.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: You all should go check her out.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: She's doing incredible work.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: She just is one of the best minds in social media.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think she's so awesome.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: But she asked me a question that was so good and so relevant to what a lot of you are dealing with right now.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I asked if I could turn it into a whole episode.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: And she graciously said yes.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: And even better, she actually is going to let me play you her actual voice note in this episode.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of me paraphrasing it, I'm just going to let you hear it straight from her.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Take a listen.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Susie.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're having a great week.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to reach out quickly to get your input on a problem that I've been running into.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing a lot of outreach and I'm getting some responses finally.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I noticed that now when I'm sending my proposals, people are popping them into Chat GPT or Claude and sending me a really, really long laundry list of questions that I've never run into in my sales process before.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And also things that don't really matter.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Things like if I go to a content shoot, how many pieces of content can we expect to get that are like totally dependent on the team and the shoot and how everything goes?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my first question.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: My second question is also about AI because I've noticed that it started to impact some of our client systems and processes.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um a lot of people, especially if you're like brands or website or socials, are starting to send long blurbs of AI slop, and it's getting a little bit more and more difficult to kind of use our expertise, implement it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then also people are acting really surprised when we deliver um deliverables based on their AI slop.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So just wanted to get your thoughts on how to handle this, how it can impact the sales process and how we can kind of get ahead of it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so good, right?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so real.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you're out here selling anything right now, I know some part of this hit home.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Jasmine actually asked me two things in there.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: There are two different problems with two different fixes.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: So let me take them one at a time.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with proposals because this one ties straight back to something I talk about all the time, the two-call close.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: I really believe that the two-call close protects you with AI and AI responses on proposals because it doesn't leave a lot of room for your clients to not bring their objections to you in a conversation.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't listened to the two-call close sales episode, it's linked in this one.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, go ahead and check it out.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think it'll be really helpful for you.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: But just in case you're super busy and you've only got time to listen to one episode today, let me get us all on the same page.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: The two call close is essentially a system that I used a lot when I was at Lost in House to get people to close faster and keep the conversation and momentum going.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: This really decreased me getting ghosted, and a lot of my clients have seen great success with this.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, a prospect is going to schedule a 15-minute call with you.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: On this 15-minute call, I want you to ask them questions like tell me the backstory of your business and truly try to get to know them.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I don't necessarily need the focus of this call to be you telling them all about how they can work with you, how you can solve all their problems.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: I promise you there's time for that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to get to that later.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: But this first call is all about them.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: So you take that info, you say, Hey, thanks so much for sharing all this.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: I do think there's a ton of opportunity for us to work together.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: You give them your one-liner.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Here's briefly what we do, here's how I got into this.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: This should be about 60 seconds.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, Listen, I'm going to put together everything I learned on this call about you and what you're looking for.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to put together a proposal for you.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to film a quick Loom video walking you through it.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a time next week, next Friday, whenever, that we could meet to review this proposal together?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I can answer any questions.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: The trick here is booking a time for you to answer the questions about the proposal, any questions that they have.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it can still happen, but the likelihood of that happening decreases substantially.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now let's come back to Jasmine's question.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So in this scenario, I know she's using the two-call close method.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: I know that she's moving people through this first call, filming the loom for them, jumping on another call.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: In between, right now, she's getting these long lists of questions, right?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's things that clearly people are uploading the proposal into Chat GBT or Claude and saying, What should I be concerned about?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: What should I be asking her?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: They look at the first couple bullet points and they say, This is awesome.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I should be asking these questions.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then they're sending this back in.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: I get why this is really frustrating because Jasmine's sitting here reading through this list going, you know what?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: The reason you're hiring an expert is because I've got it handled.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can trust me.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Your questions need to be about things you're actually concerned about, or hey, do you have experience in this?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't need to be a long laundry list of all the things that could possibly go wrong, picking apart everything.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: You have to trust your service provider to be looking out for you and have your business's best interest in mind.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now back to the two-call close.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Jasmine has a follow-up call scheduled with people who are sending back these long lists of questions, right?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so my advice to her is that she hits reply and says, Hey, thank you so much for sending over all these concerns.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be covering them all on our call next Tuesday or whenever it is.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Super excited to answer all of this.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: If they came back and they were like, No, I really want answers to this before we move forward with any other meetings.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: My advice to Jasmine would be that she still film a Loom video and provide an answer.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: The absolute wrong answer here is to copy and paste their questions into your own chat bot and say, answer these questions for me.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And now you're having a robot versus robot debate over email.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: No one's going to get their questions answered.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Trust is not going to be built.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: The best thing you can do when it comes to AI slop and proposal questions is to try to make it as human in conversation as possible.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you feel like you're getting hit with AI, go more human.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: More human, the better.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, at this point, if you're sitting there going, wow, Susie's pretty anti-AI, absolutely not.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: I use AI for everything.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I actually consider myself an AI nerd at this point.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty into it.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: I just think that when clients are coming back to you saying, My robot doesn't trust you, which is essentially what that list is, you have to come back to them and kind of point out, hey, um, I'm a real person and I want to build trust with you and have a conversation about what our relationship long term can look like.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: If they do come to her second call, right, as a part of her two-call close process, and they're like, great, let's run through our questions.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: What she can do is pull up the list of questions, screen share, and say, I want to go through each of these bullet by bullet.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're going to be things that they backpedal on because they don't actually care about this.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you get to be like, hey, no worries.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like if they're pushing back on something that feels ridiculous and nitpicky, be like, hey, I wanted to understand why you're concerned about this.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Did you have a bad experience in the past?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: It just forces them to, not that you're trying to catch them where they're like, oh, I don't know, I put this in chat, but you're trying to get them to admit what they're actually concerned about so that you can coach them through this process and be like, no, no, no.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: The reason you're coming to me, remember, Jasmine is a social media expert.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: The reason they're coming to her, the reason that they're coming to a social media expert is because they want somebody that they can lean on, who has their business in mind, who is looking ahead for them and can help them grow in a way that they can't on their own.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so to wrap up Jasmine's first question, the best way to combat AI slop in response to proposals is to make it as human as possible and take back the conversation as best you can via Loom, or even better, jumping on a call with this potential client.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's move on to Jasmine's second predicament here.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: She is sending clients their work.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: They are throwing it into chat and sending her back revisions, some of which they haven't even looked at.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so she's making revisions and they're coming back to her and saying, I didn't want that.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, that's what you sent me in the email.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you are boiling with rage just hearing this story, you and Jasmine would get along well.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is insanely frustrating.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's happened to every service provider that I know at this point.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's probably happened to you if you were listening to this episode.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Jasmine runs a social agency.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: So today we're going to be specifically talking about rounds of revisions because that's what agencies deal with the most.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're a service-based business and you're listening to this going, I don't take rounds of revisions, the way that this applies to you is clients who are writing in saying, I'm disappointed with this, or um clients who are constantly moving their calls, if you're a coach or something like that, um, people who are writing back and saying, you know, I thought that it was going to, this was included, XYZ, anybody who is trying to move the contract after paying and trying to get something else from you, this still applies to you.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: In order to combat the AI slop, I've come up with four things that I think will really help service-based businesses hold their ground, make sure that they are getting the right feedback from their client and not losing time or money.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, talk to your lawyer and see if there's a way to put this in your contract, whatever that looks like for you.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure that you bring it up on your onboarding call, set expectations early.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is the easiest win, and almost nobody does it.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can add a simple line about your feedback and your brief process.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then on your onboarding call, you set the tone and you say, hey, here's how we collect input.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then you also can guide them through this process.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can say, Here's what we've seen.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: You would never do this, but I know life can get busy, and I've seen this horror story play out before where somebody throws it into Chat GBT, they request a revision that they don't really want, and they end up having to pay for an additional round of revision.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we hate charging people more.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: You are not being rigid or mean, you are being a leader and setting clear boundaries.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: You're actually looking out for their best interest.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And clients relax when you run the process because it means they don't have to.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: All right, number two, and this is the least fun.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Hold firm to your contract.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you promise two rounds of revision, they get two rounds of revisions.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: If a client sends you a wall of AI-generated feedback, that counts as a round.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I want you to really hear me on this.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: AI slap is not a free pass.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: The moment you start absorbing unlimited rounds because the feedback came from a robot and not from them, you've trained your client to keep dumping.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: And now you have two clients.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: You've got their trained AI bot and you've got them, your client.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Running your business this way will be expensive and kill your bottom line.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, number three, use forms to capture feedback and make it as easy as humanly possible.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: This one is sneaky good.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: When you give a client a blank box and say, send me your thoughts, that is when you get the giant AI blur because the blank box is intimidating and they fill it with whatever the machine spits out.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: But if you can give them a structured form with a specific question or multiple questions, you control the inputs.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of what do you think?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Ask, what did you think of the font treatments?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: How do you like the way that we did the illustrations?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to change any images specifically?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: You make it so easy and so specific that there's nothing left for AI to do.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Structure beats slop every single time.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, last one, number four.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is the one I really want to leave you with.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Reassert your expertise.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: When AI Slop comes in, do not just quietly execute it and present your client.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't help anybody.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Get on a quick call or send a loom and say, hey, I read through everything you sent.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what I would actually recommend instead, and here's why.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: You hired me for my judgment, not just for my hands.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: I actually think that that sentence said kindly changes the entire relationship.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because here's the truth: your client did not hire you to be a vending machine for a robot's wish list.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: They hired you for your skill set, for your creativity, and to help them execute on a vision.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's an added bonus to this one, and that is if you do get on a call with them and you're like, hey, I saw that you sent over this feedback.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: I want to push back on it a little bit.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I am so open to your thoughts.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know your brand so well.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I did just want to clarify some of this because this is not what we originally talked about.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: They might backpedal on some of this and you might be able to call it out and catch it early.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: The name of the game in service-based businesses is trust.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: The more you can build trust with your client, the better.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: You're not trying to be like, hey, don't use AI because everybody has leaned on it at some point to get through a day that was unexpectedly crazy and busy.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's trying it out in all different ways and trying, you know, it's the black box of marketing in the last couple of years.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: I heard somebody say the other day that since January, we've discovered more about AI, more in AI has been built than in the last decade combined.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: I forget what the actual time was, but it was a crazy amount of time.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you start to get upset about this, bring it to your clients and say, hey, I just wanted to review this feedback together.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Again, coming back to my first point, the more you can make this a conversation instead of an awkward email back and forth, the better.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this brings us to a really great wrap-up point.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Jasmine, to bring it all the way back.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: AI is in your sales process now and it's in your client relationships now, and that's not going away.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: But you don't have to let it run the show.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Close the silence on your proposals with that follow-up call, make it as conversational as possible, set the standard in your contract and in your onboarding, hold your revision boundaries, hold your contract boundaries, structure your feedback in a way so that slop has nowhere to live and never be afraid to be the expert who says, I actually have a better idea for you.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's how much I care about your brand.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you want help building any of this into your actual sales process, into your proposal call, into the onboarding, the boundaries.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is exactly the kind of thing I work on with my clients, just like Jasmine.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: You can book a call with me at susyconsoli.com and we can go through this together.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, sell well.