Bryan McAnulty [00:00:00]:

Is AI going to replace marketers or make the smart ones even more valuable?

Heather Baker [00:00:03]:

Both. Better for the smart, intelligent, strategic person. Noisier for everybody else, which is to the benefit of the smart, intelligent, strategic person.

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:12]:

Today we're interviewing Heather Baker, founder of the B2B lead generation consultancy The AI Edit. Heather has helped hundreds of businesses generate millions of leads, built and sold her first agency, and scaled her second agency to eight figures. Today, Heather is helping businesses use AI to reach and connect with potential buyers in a smart and thoughtful way.

Heather Baker [00:00:31]:

Before you touch any AI tool, you've got to understand where its limitations are because then you won't make the obvious mistakes. The temptation is to outsource your thinking to AI.

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:44]:

Heather has an MBA from London Business School, a Master's in Psychology, and she is a certified brain coach. She has been nominated for 20 awards and won 14 of them, including Ethical AI Leader of the Year in 2025.

Heather Baker [00:00:57]:

What is the one thing that you can do that the people around you can't? What's your unique perspective? Because no one can replicate that. No one can take that away from you.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:08]:

Welcome to The Creator's Adventure, where we interview creators from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business. Hey everyone, I'm Bryan McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:23]:

Hey, Heather, welcome to the show.

Heather Baker [00:01:25]:

Thanks for having me, Bryan.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:27]:

Yep. Excited to talk with you today. My first question for you would be, what is the biggest thing that either you did or are doing that has helped you to achieve the freedom to do what you enjoy?

Heather Baker [00:01:38]:

Oh, that's a great question. I built a business, sold it, and then started again. And I would say having done it and gone through the process has been unbelievably liberating for me, because the second time around, I don't care about all the things that I cared about the first time around that were for my ego and not for anything else.

Heather Baker [00:02:11]:

So I don't care how many staff I have. I don't care how big my offices are. This is it. The whole office. I don't need a business card. I don't need a big, fancy, shiny anything. I am doing this business entirely the way I want to do it. And that is the most liberating thing that I've ever experienced.

Bryan McAnulty [00:02:39]:

That's awesome. Well, what helped get it to that point? Was it because the first business had pressure to sell it either from yourself or investors? What made that change?

Heather Baker [00:02:51]:

Yeah, I think it was. I was very young when I started my first business, and it was at the start of the global recession. We launched in 2008, and I felt like I needed to prove myself. I needed to build something big. It needed to look good from the outside. In fact, I would say there were periods at the start of that business where how it looked from the outside mattered more to me than how it was performing on the inside.

Heather Baker [00:03:23]:

And because of that, I made a lot of mistakes. I invested in things that I didn't need to invest in, that didn't add much value, and I learned from those mistakes. I also did a lot of things right, and I learned from that as well. But I think going into it with that attitude of, “I want to be a famous entrepreneur,” rather than a successful entrepreneur.

Heather Baker [00:03:50]:

Most successful entrepreneurs are not actually famous, but I cared so much about my image that I behaved in a way that supported my image.

Heather Baker [00:04:03]:

It wasn't detrimental to the business, but I made some expensive mistakes. And one of those—it wasn't a mistake—but I always thought that to have a successful business, you must sell it. If you can't sell your business, you haven't built a successful business.

Heather Baker [00:04:30]:

I'm very glad that I went through that process, and I'm very glad that I sold my business, and I'm very glad that I got to the other side of that process because I learned a huge amount.

Heather Baker [00:04:42]:

But now I realize that being able to sell your business is really only one measure of success. There are loads of other measures of success, like: are you able to have the life that you want while running your business?

Heather Baker [00:05:00]:

And certainly in the first five or six years of my first business, I was not able to have the life that I wanted while running my business. I was stressed like I've never been before. I ended up with an autoimmune disease. I was working all hours. I had no social life. It wasn't conducive to a long-term, sustainable, happy life.

Heather Baker [00:05:29]:

Was it conducive to maximizing the potential of that business? I'm not even sure if it was, because when you're so stressed and exhausted, you miss opportunities. You're doing more work, but you're not working smartly.

Heather Baker [00:05:46]:

And so I kind of thought you had to sell your business to be successful, to show that you were successful. I now realize that the ideal place to be is where you can sell your business, and you choose whether to.

Heather Baker [00:06:00]:

So you've built something that is successful enough that somebody else sees value in it, but where you're not so stressed out by it that you're thinking, “I don't know how many more years I can do this. I might have to sell this just to get my life back.” I think that was the big turning point.

Heather Baker [00:06:20]:

But don't get me wrong. Selling my business was a great experience. I'm very glad I did it. But this business may or may not be to sell. Doesn't matter. It's about enjoying it right now, every single day, and making sure I can still be a mom.

Bryan McAnulty [00:06:36]:

Real quick, Bryan here. You know me as the host for this podcast, but what you might not know is I'm also the founder of Heights Platform. It's an all-in-one platform that over 10,000 creators have used to build their online courses, communities, and digital product businesses.

Bryan McAnulty [00:06:55]:

We recently added some awesome updates to Heights AI to help you turn your idea into a viable business. Heights AI can build entire product offers, review your content, and even coach you on how to grow. You can try it for free for 30 days. Links in the description. Now back to the podcast.

Bryan McAnulty [00:07:17]:

So I want to talk about how AI is changing lead generation. You're an expert in lead generation, and when people hear lead generation, I think they generally think of cold outreach. So how would you personally define lead generation in a smarter or more modern way?

Heather Baker [00:07:25]:

Yeah. So I think cold outreach is a tiny part of lead generation. To me, lead generation is about strategy. It's about building a sustainable, strategic lead gen engine.

Heather Baker [00:07:38]:

And the ideal situation you want to be in is the situation where you don't need to do a huge amount of cold outreach, because you have positioned your business so beautifully, you've designed your offer so enticingly, and you've set up your marketing, inbound, and lead gen strategy so that it's just naturally landing in front of your prospects.

Heather Baker [00:08:09]:

And because your offer is so great and your positioning is so powerful, your prospects see it and think, “Oh, I think I need that. Let me get in touch.” And the leads just come naturally to you.

Heather Baker [00:08:23]:

That is the best position to be in. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes a prolonged, sustained strategy, strategy design, and then consistent activity that builds over time and is handled intelligently.

Heather Baker [00:08:40]:

That's the best position you want to be in. Cold outreach can be a part of that, but usually cold outreach is because all of that stuff isn't working, and we've got to find a quick way of pulling people into our orbit.

Heather Baker [00:08:54]:

And so then you get into all of these overly persuasive, aggressive tactics of, “We need to send a sequence where we can hit these people 23 times over the next 16 days, and hopefully enough of them will notice that we'll get a call.”

Heather Baker [00:09:16]:

But on that call, we're going to have to do a really hard sell because these people are a little bit unsure of what we're selling and unsure of who we are. They're not really that convinced. So it's going to have to be a hard sell. Half the time, they're not even going to show up on the call.

Heather Baker [00:09:33]:

So not much has changed because of AI. Sustainable lead gen has always been strategic, multi-channel, intelligent, builds on itself, and compounds over time.

Heather Baker [00:09:48]:

I would say AI has made the strategy design harder because so many people are popping up with these outbound lead gen agencies saying, “Oh, we'll generate you 10,000 leads a month and we'll charge you $700.”

Heather Baker [00:10:05]:

Trust me, if that worked, I would be hiring those people. Ten thousand a month for $700? Of course I'd be doing that. That would be absolutely amazing.

Heather Baker [00:10:17]:

But it doesn't work, because for them a lead is a name, an email address, maybe a phone number for you to pressure into doing business with you. That's just a stressful, high-friction way of living your life. Nobody wants to live their life like that.

Heather Baker [00:10:32]:

So I think AI has made it harder in the sense that there's this constant promise. I think a lot of people are so excited because we've all kind of almost been tricked into thinking there's an AI button somewhere, and if I push it, the leads will just flow right in.

Heather Baker [00:10:55]:

And there is no AI button. The leads do not flow in. It takes work, and it takes more work now than it used to.

Heather Baker [00:11:05]:

But the amazing thing is, so many people are falling for this AI button myth that if you are just one of the 1% in your industry—and it really is 1% or even less than 1%—if you are just in that tiny minority who can commit to this, do it strategically, do it intelligently, follow a process, and just stick with it, you will be so much more successful in the long run.

Heather Baker [00:11:28]:

Listen to feedback. Gather feedback. Respond to feedback. Improve.

Heather Baker [00:11:37]:

You won't be more successful tomorrow because it doesn't work in a day or two. It takes a few weeks or months to get off the ground, but in the long term you'll be successful and you'll be resilient.

Heather Baker [00:11:55]:

Because when LinkedIn's algorithm changes and suddenly LinkedIn was the only place you got all your leads, and now LinkedIn is banning the software you're using, it doesn't matter because that's only a small part of your lead gen strategy.

Heather Baker [00:12:12]:

Your brand is strong. You can recalibrate. You can redirect your resources to a different channel, or you can roll with the punches and deal with whatever LinkedIn has thrown at you and improve.

Heather Baker [00:12:27]:

And your brand is strong, so you will improve quickly. Your accounts are not going to be banned because you haven't been doing anything unethical. LinkedIn isn't annoyed with you. So it's changed in a bad way and in a good way.

Bryan McAnulty [00:12:42]:

Yeah, it's interesting. So while everybody else is spending all their time looking for what software has that magic AI button, if you use your time and attention on what can actually work, then you can get ahead.

Heather Baker [00:12:57]:

Absolutely. And it really is possible.

Bryan McAnulty [00:13:00]:

So what would you say has changed the most about lead generation now that we have these AI tools? If everybody can use these AI tools, what's most different in how somebody has to approach things if they agree to say, “I want to go through this the right way”?

Heather Baker [00:13:17]:

So there's two things that I would say have represented the biggest change.

Heather Baker [00:13:24]:

The first is that you now have the LLM as your audience. Twenty or thirty years ago, your audience was humans. Then ten or fifteen years ago, your audience was humans and algorithms—Google's algorithm, YouTube, Facebook, whatever.

Heather Baker [00:13:50]:

Now you have three audiences. You've got your humans, you've got your algorithms, and you've got your LLMs. So you need to speak to all three of those audiences in the language that they understand.

Heather Baker [00:14:04]:

And if you do that, you will benefit from leads via all of those channels. I'm talking here about AI visibility as well as SEO and all the other stuff that you do.

Heather Baker [00:14:15]:

So that's one of the big changes. There's a new channel. And yes, it's daunting because you don't know how to maximize this channel or how to generate leads from this channel.

Heather Baker [00:14:28]:

But daunting is a good thing because if you don't know, trust me, your competitors don't know. There's an opportunity. There's a window. We've got an arbitrage opportunity to go in and seize the value.

Heather Baker [00:14:37]:

So I think that is a really exciting change. But it does represent more work and more learning and more having to be on top of things.

Heather Baker [00:14:48]:

The second big change is that AI has made it possible—not easy, but possible—for one person or a small team to do what used to be completely out of reach of a small business.

Heather Baker [00:15:03]:

If you wanted to run an integrated lead gen strategy even in 2022, just producing the content would have taken a full-time job for at least one person, depending on how big your organization is.

Heather Baker [00:15:29]:

And then you've got all the other bits that need to go into that, and you might have needed agencies or people to support with that.

Heather Baker [00:15:39]:

Now, the content can't be done quickly in the sense that you can't just type into Claude, “Write me a blog post about lead gen,” and then copy and paste that because you're just going to get slapped.

Heather Baker [00:15:53]:

But if you are strategic, if you know what you want to say and how you want to say it, if you're confident in your subject, you can work with an AI to produce content at a scale that just was not available to you three or four years ago.

Heather Baker [00:16:10]:

So that is also a huge opportunity for small businesses and creators. An absolutely massive opportunity. And that is all because of AI.

Bryan McAnulty [00:16:19]:

Yeah, I completely agree. And in that sense, I think I've seen a lot of people where they're maybe cautious about how they can actually approach this.

Bryan McAnulty [00:16:31]:

Because on one hand you see people who are just generating slop, and it's like, “Oh look, you can use AI,” and it's just the same junk that anybody else could make. So there's no value there.

Bryan McAnulty [00:16:43]:

And so I always tell people it's your unique experience and your unique knowledge. That's what makes the content like you. And AI can still help you with that.

Bryan McAnulty [00:16:56]:

One concrete example is: imagine you go through trying to write a blog post with AI, and it's helping you get these ideas out and put the ideas from your head more clearly into actual words.

Bryan McAnulty [00:17:06]:

But then even if you end up typing most of that thing yourself, you can still go to the AI and say, “What are ten other things that people would be wondering about if they read this article?”

Bryan McAnulty [00:17:17]:

Instead of sitting there brainstorming for an hour about adjacent topics, AI can just let you know, “Well, you could do this, this, this, this,” and it might even come up with things that you would have never come up with because you weren't thinking that way.

Bryan McAnulty [00:17:33]:

So you can go so much faster that way.

Bryan McAnulty [00:17:40]:

You mentioned that now we have this new audience of LLMs that are looking at our content. I'm curious, how does the content that we create have to change in order to attract or work for LLMs, not only the algorithms?

Heather Baker [00:18:11]:

Yeah, I think LLMs are quite good at finding signals that indicate whether you know what you're talking about, which is a good thing, even though it might feel in the short term like a bad thing.

Heather Baker [00:18:20]:

Five years ago, all you needed to do was find the keyword that people were searching for and then write a reasonably good post that incorporated that keyword.

Heather Baker [00:18:31]:

You could actually just go onto Google, search the keyword, look at who was ranking for that keyword, and come up with three ways to make your post better, and then you would stand a decent chance of ranking for that keyword.

Heather Baker [00:19:06]:

And you could do that even if you were not an expert on the stuff. You could blag it because it mattered so much how you fitted the keyword in.

Heather Baker [00:19:16]:

Now it's much harder to blag, which is rubbish if you're a blagger. But if you're not a blagger and you're an expert, this is a real opportunity.

Heather Baker [00:19:30]:

Because if you know your subject, it becomes much easier to show that you know your subject, and the LLMs are trying to satisfy their users by providing content from experts.

Heather Baker [00:19:42]:

So that's what they want. They want to find: Does this person know what they're talking about, or do they just pretend they know what they're talking about?

Heather Baker [00:19:58]:

And so now you've got to show your expertise in so many different ways.

Heather Baker [00:20:05]:

Firstly, you've got to stop blagging. If you are talking about lead gen, you need to be doing lead gen every single day. You need to understand how lead gen works. You need to be interested in it.

Heather Baker [00:20:22]:

So when you see an article in the newspaper about it, it's the first thing you read. You need to be quite into it. And that's how you become an expert.

Heather Baker [00:20:35]:

And you might not feel like an expert. A lot of people, particularly women, never feel like an expert, even if they are objectively expert at something.

Heather Baker [00:20:49]:

If you've been doing that job and working in that job for a couple of years—three, four, or five years—you are definitely an expert in that thing. You know more about that thing than almost everybody else.

Heather Baker [00:21:06]:

You might not know more than your boss, but you know more than everybody else. So only talking about things that you are genuinely knowledgeable about is the first thing, because if you try and blag it, you're just going to seem like slop.

Heather Baker [00:21:20]:

And then the second thing is bragging. Get really cringeworthy in how much you big yourself up. It really is like these LLMs fall for this stuff.

Heather Baker [00:21:34]:

If you look on my website, you will see the most glowing biography of me. It lists every qualification I have ever earned, every award I've ever earned, and the sort of thing that you would never—unless you were annoying—you would never drop into regular conversation.

Heather Baker [00:21:57]:

You've got to get used to doing that. You've got to get used to talking about your qualifications. That degree you got? Put those letters after your name.

Heather Baker [00:22:08]:

Talk repeatedly about your years or decades of experience, about the number of customers you've served, the number of companies, the number of words you've written if you're a writer. Talk about it because those things matter.

Heather Baker [00:22:31]:

They really, really matter. Not to humans, but definitely to large language models.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:43]:

Yeah, that's a great point. I think I have to start doing that more actually, because it completely makes sense.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:51]:

In conversation, most of us definitely would not just start mouthing off about, “Oh, I have all these awards,” or “I had all these number of views,” or whatever kind of thing you want to brag about.

Bryan McAnulty [00:23:02]:

But the LLMs, they're looking for some kind of indication that you are credible as a source.

Bryan McAnulty [00:23:10]:

So I guess they'll try to verify some things, but if you can stack all these things of why you're credible, then the LLM is more likely to say, “You know what? I'm going to take Heather Baker as a source here, and I want to tell people about what she wrote about.”

Heather Baker [00:23:26]:

Yeah, absolutely. And I have a perfect example of that. I won an award once, and it was one of those awards where I think I only won it because they wanted me to buy a table at their whatever they were.

Heather Baker [00:23:39]:

I didn't even enter it. I just received the nomination. But it's on my CV now.

Heather Baker [00:23:50]:

Well, Claude brings this up in every conversation about how brilliant I am because of that award. That to me is very like—I would never even mention it to anybody.

Heather Baker [00:24:01]:

But to Claude, this is a real indication that I know my stuff on this one particular subject, and it's just like, “Please stop putting that in my bio, Claude. No, I don't want it there. It's embarrassing.”

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:07]:

That's funny. I think another way I would frame how to look at this, if you are trying to think for yourself, “What is this content that I should create?” is that the LLMs are really looking for what is the new knowledge, what are the things that people are talking about now.

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:31]:

If you're going to write the same thing that the AI already has in its training data, then it's not looking for that. That's where it's just going to give the answer to the user.

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:40]:

But if you can talk about what's going on now and why is it different or how do things work right now, that's where the content that AI needs comes in because it has no idea. So it has to go and search to find that and then give that to somebody.

Heather Baker [00:24:48]:

That is such a good point actually, because if an LLM can just find it in its training data, then it doesn't need you.

Heather Baker [00:24:57]:

You don't need to write this blog post because that is literally the definition of slop. It's just a summary of all the boring stuff that's in the LLM's training data.

Heather Baker [00:25:14]:

So I think that's a really good point. Current information and keeping things current, for sure.

Bryan McAnulty [00:25:14]:

Yeah, it's interesting how quickly it seems to have shifted because if you went back ten years ago, you could say, “Okay, we're all writing these blog posts because we're trying to get all this information onto the internet, so if somebody is looking for that piece, maybe they'll find us.”

Bryan McAnulty [00:25:33]:

But now it's like, well, all the information is there now. It's not even arguable at this point because now AI has all of it and can get it for you in some way.

Bryan McAnulty [00:25:46]:

But the new things are the things where it wants to see things.

Bryan McAnulty [00:25:53]:

And I think also if you are selling some kind of product that you know your customer is going to be comparing to somebody else, I've found that customers have found us because they don't go to our website and read it and learn all about it.

Bryan McAnulty [00:26:01]:

They ask AI and they say, “Hey, these are the things that are important to me and this is what I'm looking for.” Then they do deep research or just ask it and figure out what it gets back from that.

Bryan McAnulty [00:26:20]:

The interesting thing is customers seem to trust AI because they trust that it put in the work to do that.

Bryan McAnulty [00:26:29]:

But then it's your job as a writer or producing content on your website to try to describe all the reasons why you might work for these different use cases, or for these different kinds of people that are looking for the kind of solution that you provide.

Heather Baker [00:26:42]:

Yeah. And that trusting AI thing is frustrating because obviously AI hallucinates quite a lot more than most people think.

Heather Baker [00:26:57]:

But also it's very similar to SEO in the sense that if you're searching for a personal trainer near you, you are going to get the personal trainer who's done the best SEO.

Heather Baker [00:27:12]:

That is not necessarily the personal trainer who is best for you. And so it's almost like a slightly unfair situation, but it's going to be the same with AI.

Heather Baker [00:27:28]:

AI visibility: the companies that are being recommended are the ones that are working on their AI visibility. They are not necessarily the best at what they do. They're just the most visible.

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:42]:

Yeah, I agree. So if a creative entrepreneur wants to start using AI and they want to get more leads, what would you say is the first thing that they should maybe work on, either when they start using AI or maybe even before they touch any kind of AI tool?

Heather Baker [00:27:59]:

I think before you touch any AI tool, you've got to understand where its limitations are, because then you won't make the obvious mistakes.

Heather Baker [00:28:09]:

You know: hallucination, prompt injection, slop, those sorts of things. You've got to understand what it's good at and what it's not so good at, where it can be helpful and where it's not helpful at all.

Heather Baker [00:28:27]:

And I think the temptation is to outsource your thinking to AI. And you never want to do that because even if it's not dangerous in the sense that it's hallucinated, it's just a waste of time.

Heather Baker [00:28:42]:

You're going to really gravitate away from what makes you special and what makes you unique.

Heather Baker [00:29:01]:

So I would say, whether that's before you start using AI or even if you've been using AI forever, you've got to understand how it works.

Heather Baker [00:29:10]:

Large language models are rewarded for fluency, not accuracy. You've got to understand how they work, how they compare to traditional software, what the risks are, and what the ethical issues are as well.

Heather Baker [00:29:21]:

I'm a big advocate for consent. Data consent. If you're filming somebody, if you're recording a conversation, I think that you need proper informed consent in advance.

Heather Baker [00:29:34]:

And you need to know where your data is going as well. If you're a creative and you're having a little brainstorm with Claude or ChatGPT and you've got this brilliant idea, make sure you're not feeding it into the training data.

Heather Baker [00:29:44]:

Make sure that you have set your data controls so that you're not giving away your IP, because your IP is what makes you special. So you need to be careful about that.

Heather Baker [00:30:06]:

In terms of generating leads, I think the most important thing that anybody can do is work on their positioning.

Heather Baker [00:30:15]:

By that I mean work on deciding and then articulating what it is that you offer that makes you a better choice than everybody else.

Heather Baker [00:30:32]:

That exercise is painful because you've got to work out how to do it, how to position yourself, the questions to ask, the process to go through.

Heather Baker [00:30:43]:

It can be done in an afternoon, but it's more of a weeks-long process because you have to come back to it repeatedly. You have to run it past people to get their feedback.

Heather Baker [00:30:54]:

But I think if you want to generate leads, the best thing you can do is make it so that people want what you've got, so you don't have to do any persuading.

Heather Baker [00:31:04]:

Your life is so much easier if you're selling something that people want.

Heather Baker [00:31:15]:

In all of my experience generating literally millions of leads for clients, where things go wrong and where the client gets upset is when the leads aren't coming in and the client is like, “The lead gen is rubbish. The lead gen's not working.”

Heather Baker [00:31:28]:

But it's like, well, actually what you're selling just isn't appealing. And I can shove that in front of as many people as I can possibly imagine, but they just don't want it.

Heather Baker [00:31:46]:

So I think that is a really important place to start: positioning and offer.

Heather Baker [00:31:53]:

And the other benefit of that is that then you can charge more because you're not in this race to the bottom selling something commoditized, and you'll just move so much faster.

Heather Baker [00:32:06]:

So that's definitely where I would start. I would spend weeks on it.

Heather Baker [00:32:12]:

Everything else, you can even mess up other bits later in the process, and you can recover quite easily from those. But the positioning—you miss that, you've got to come back and redo it, and you can't get away with bad positioning.

Bryan McAnulty [00:32:07]:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I do think it gets overlooked how important that is.

Bryan McAnulty [00:32:17]:

Because if you imagine that, I'm sure so many of the people watching or listening to this have an actual incredible thing that you could deliver for a client or a customer. And then the problem is: how do they know that?

Bryan McAnulty [00:32:28]:

Right? If you had the opportunity to force them to be in a room with you for half an hour and you could talk to them about it, I think they would eventually understand.

Bryan McAnulty [00:32:39]:

But can they understand when they're on your web page for ten seconds? And that's the problem, because you need to make sure that they do understand so they fill out the form or buy the thing or whatever they have to do.

Bryan McAnulty [00:32:56]:

So that way you can move to the next step with them. And then, exactly as you said, if you get them to that point, now the next step can be unclear or whatever, but they know what they want.

Bryan McAnulty [00:33:09]:

They know that you have it, so you can clean up any confusions after that. But if they're confused in the beginning and they don't think that you have what they want, then they're going to leave before you get the lead.

Heather Baker [00:33:09]:

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's such a waste.

Bryan McAnulty [00:33:13]:

Yeah. So if somebody is going to build this kind of intelligent AI-assisted lead generation system, what would that look like for a small business or a solo creator?

Heather Baker [00:33:25]:

So firstly, it's a lot of work, and you need to know that upfront because there are no shortcuts.

Heather Baker [00:33:34]:

Which is frustrating for you, but also great because if there are no shortcuts for you, there are no shortcuts for your competitors. So you have an opportunity to create some distance between you and your competitors.

Heather Baker [00:33:57]:

If you've got your positioning and your offer defined and it's very appealing and just needs to get in front of the right people, you then move to your story bank.

Heather Baker [00:34:07]:

So you create a database of stories that will captivate, capture people's imagination, and get their eyes on you and your product.

Heather Baker [00:34:20]:

Those stories need to be relevant to what you're doing and what you're selling, and they need to be honest. There are loads of ways to do that.

Heather Baker [00:34:29]:

I typically do that with a two- or three-hour workshop, and you're looking at things that are special to you.

Heather Baker [00:34:38]:

Your strong opinions, the things you get so annoyed about, the case study of that time you helped that person do that thing. You're looking at your unique data.

Heather Baker [00:34:54]:

Lots of small businesses say, “Well, we don't have unique data.” But you do. You can pull it from your Google Analytics. You can ask everyone you encounter the same question until you've got 100 answers, and then you've got a piece of data.

Heather Baker [00:35:18]:

I did a story on my Substack a couple of weeks ago where I looked at the job listings on Anthropic's website and counted how many were enterprise roles and how many were for small business roles.

Heather Baker [00:35:30]:

Zero for small business roles, something like 40 for enterprise roles. And that's a story that's looking at a piece of data in an interesting way.

Heather Baker [00:35:46]:

So you build your story bank, and there are a couple of little tests that you need to run. Do I have the right to tell the story, and is the story going to benefit my business? So that you stay focused.

Heather Baker [00:36:02]:

And then once you've got your story bank, you start looking at your distribution channels. How are you going to get the story out to your target audience, your different people?

Heather Baker [00:36:14]:

And that could be anything. It's normally a massive combination of things.

Heather Baker [00:36:28]:

Is that through your AI engines? Are you going to go for SEO, Google Search, PR, all the social media channels, email marketing, speaking, podcasting, events, etcetera? The possibilities are very many, and you choose your channels and you prioritize them.

Heather Baker [00:36:52]:

I'm a big believer in trying almost every channel and just giving them a proper go and getting feedback because you never know.

Heather Baker [00:37:03]:

It used to be, well, if it's about business, it's on LinkedIn. And if it's about design and food, it's on Instagram. It's not like that anymore because Meta has so much data.

Heather Baker [00:37:18]:

Meta knows if you're a drilling engineer who happens to be interested in baking. Meta knows that and Meta can target people on a very granular level.

Heather Baker [00:37:18]:

So then you've got your channels and you roll your channels out one at a time.

Heather Baker [00:37:26]:

You only ever roll out one channel at a time because you are a small business, you're a solo creator. You do not have time to be rolling out LinkedIn, PR, search, YouTube, Reddit, events, speakers, and podcasts at the same time.

Heather Baker [00:37:38]:

So you focus on one channel. You give it a good two or three weeks at least, possibly a month.

Heather Baker [00:37:47]:

You get it set up, you learn how it works, you set up all your automations, you get it into a bit of a rhythm, and then you move to the next channel.

Heather Baker [00:38:06]:

If you do it that way, they compound over time because each channel reinforces every other channel.

Heather Baker [00:38:14]:

You start doing PR, you've got great LinkedIn content, you've got links back to your website, you've got a very high-authority citation for an AI chatbot.

Heather Baker [00:38:27]:

So you roll out your channels one at a time, and they each reinforce each other. Your brand builds, and that's how your lead gen engine starts to really hum into action.

Heather Baker [00:38:38]:

And then once you've got your first three, four, or five channels up and running, that's when you start running experiments every month.

Heather Baker [00:38:49]:

It's an experiment: the hypothesis, test the hypothesis, get the feedback, and decide what to do off the back of that.

Heather Baker [00:39:00]:

Once you're doing that, you've got your engine. It's running. But it gets better and better and better and more resilient every single month.

Heather Baker [00:39:13]:

That's the approach you take. I've probably spent three or four minutes explaining it. It's much more in-depth and complicated, but it really is possible for any business as long as you have done your positioning and other work and you're not trying to sell something that people don't want.

Heather Baker [00:39:32]:

If you've done all of that, then it is possible to create a sustainable, solid lead gen engine, which is amazing. It's the best thing a business can have.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:49]:

Yeah, absolutely. All right, that was great. That was helpful. Now I want to go into a quick lightning round.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:58]:

These next few questions, I'm looking for like a ten-second answer, just a quick take on each one. So first: is AI making lead generation better or just noisier?

Heather Baker [00:39:10]:

Both. Better for the smart, intelligent, strategic person. Noisier for everybody else, which is to the benefit of the smart, intelligent, strategic person.

Bryan McAnulty [00:39:21]:

What's a popular AI marketing tactic that you think is overrated?

Heather Baker [00:39:27]:

Outbound emails. Just stop already. It doesn't work.

Heather Baker [00:39:33]:

And when you send those sequences on LinkedIn, I open my LinkedIn and I see five messages from you, spaced beautifully over the course of seven days, and they're all in a row.

Heather Baker [00:39:45]:

It's so obvious and so annoying. Stop it.

Bryan McAnulty [00:39:49]:

Can AI actually help you build trust with buyers, or do you feel that it does the opposite?

Heather Baker [00:39:57]:

The human has to do it. AI can help the human do it, but I don't believe in fake trust, fake authenticity. You can fake it for so long, but no longer. It's not sustainable.

Bryan McAnulty [00:40:17]:

What would you never let AI do in your sales process?

Heather Baker [00:40:24]:

I'd never let AI contact anybody automatically. Ever.

Heather Baker [00:40:31]:

Everything I send is sent by a human. I would never do mass AI automated personalization at scale.

Heather Baker [00:40:42]:

It doesn't work. It's an oxymoron, which is annoying in itself, and it's extremely inauthentic.

Bryan McAnulty [00:40:51]:

All right. And then on the show, I'd like to have every guest ask a question to the audience. So if you could ask our audience anything, whether something you're curious about or something you want to get people thinking about, what would that be?

Heather Baker [00:41:03]:

Yeah. So I think the question I would ask any small business owner is: What is the thing, the one thing that you can do that the people around you, the people in your vicinity, can't?

Heather Baker [00:41:17]:

What can you do well? What do you understand? What do you know about?

Heather Baker [00:41:25]:

And often that comes from a combination of two things. With me, I've got 20 years of lead gen experience, and then I spent the last two years working on AI, and I was able to combine those.

Heather Baker [00:41:42]:

That is unusual. So what can you do? What's your unique perspective?

Heather Baker [00:41:50]:

Because no one can replicate that. No one can take that away from you. So spend some time thinking: what is that for you?

Bryan McAnulty [00:41:56]:

Yeah, that's great. And Heather, thanks so much for coming on the show. Before we get going, where else can people find you online?

Heather Baker [00:42:02]:

Thanks very much. It's been really great being on the show, Bryan.

Heather Baker [00:42:08]:

The best two places to find me are The Humans in the Loop, which is my YouTube channel and my Substack. I write about everything to do with AI and business.

Heather Baker [00:42:20]:

And you can find out how to work with me on my website, The AI Edit, where I teach you how to roll out the AI Edit Method so that you can generate loads of leads and be very happy.

Bryan McAnulty [00:42:32]:

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Heather Baker [00:42:34]:

Great.