Hey there!
I’m back in the swing after a week of vacation and then a week of recovering from said vacation. (I got to meet the actual Gravedigger!)
Got a mixed bag of catch-up thoughts and ideas for you in this email:
— How (I think) we’re getting leads via ChatGPT.
— Why I’m worried that Sora is going to bring the slop machine to B2B.
— Why we included an actual sponsor ad in this email. (It’s a test!)
It’s all good stuff, personally typed by yours truly. Thanks for reading.
Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss
PS: As a reminder, you’ve received this email either most likely because you completed a form on revboss.com or (less likely) because we’ve interacted on LinkedIn. The unsub URL is in the footer if you don’t want to hear from me / us anymore.
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The RevBoss Show is back with Episode #5 this Friday, October 24th at 12pm EST. All the details are here.
My guest is Allen Mask — he’s a partner at global private equity company West Cap and has one of the most impressive resumes you’ll ever see — Google, Airbnb, Sonos, NYT, Goldman Sachs. (And he’s a Tar Heel, obviously.)
The ChatGPT Lead Engine
Like any good seller, I start my calls with “How did you find us?” Increasingly, the answer is ChatGPT…which is GREAT because:
Our organic search traffic has tanked, just like everyone else’s. Impressions are way up but clicks way down because people are reading AI summaries or talking to chatbots.
We’ve put forth very little effort* to get leads from ChatGPT…which means a little effort might actually go a long way here. (*I’ve spilled the beans in Good Stuff at the bottom of this email.)
I think that the traction we’re getting is actually a function of our legacy SEO juice — all of those pages got slurped up by the LLM bots and we’re just showing up in a chat thread instead of a SERP. I’m pretty sure that this is the case because the LLM traffic aligns pretty heavily with our pages that previously drove a heavy organic search traffic.
And I’m not mad about it.
This is extremely anecdotal, but I think that ChatGPT leads are a little bit more qualified and ready to buy than leads from other non-referral channels:
They’ve chatted with a robot about RevBoss before they talk to us, so they have a lot more context than someone who clicked an ad or responded to a cold email.
In many cases, the prospects have told me that they entered a very specific problem / prompt and the bot recommended us. Can’t really ask for a better hand-off than that.
Maybe people trust the bot’s recommendation / taste over a SERP or ad because…I don’t know? Because it feels like you’re talking to a person instead of getting hoodwinked into a click?
It’s worth noting that all of this is going to go intergalactic turbo 5000 once OpenAI (and everyone else) launches a chat-context-based ad platform.
The Infinite B2B Slop Machine
Sora 2 is pretty amazing. If you’ve opened Instagram or TikTok, you’ve seen all the weird, funny stuff.
If that’s not enough for you, here’s me clowning on Sora at a prestigious business school in a sweatsuit…and here is my attempt at an Old Yeller / Sling Blade mashup.
(Please send me your videos — the weirder the better!)
Sora 2 is also an ominous signal that we’re about to get 100x the B2B marketing slop in our inboxes and feeds.
SaaS Superhero Jason Lemkin posted an obviously AI ad for one of his vibe-coded apps on LinkedIn. He’s about as respected and as bleeding edge as you can get, so I wasn’t surprised at all to see it in my feed…but it still looks and feels very weird.
Yes — these tools will get better and the video content will increasingly be indistinguishable from IRL video. But I think that we all have a finely tuned sense of reality and thus most buyers will always be able to discern what is AI and what isn’t.
Plus, in addition to whatever message you’re conveying with your video, you’re also conveying to your audience that you spent 30 seconds hacking out a prompt to create it. And maybe that’s fine.
Or maybe proof of time, care, and effort is the better message to send.
My take:
Play with these tools — they’re really fun!
Lean into the limited shelf life of a single post and fire away with your best, weirdest ideas. (See: my post on LI delivering a lecture in sweatpants and socks + Birkenstocks.)
Recognize that in addition to the actual content you’re sending, you’re also conveying a subtext. It can be “this video took 20 seconds and 400 gallons of water to create!” OR “I spent a lot of time on this and it’s actually me.”
You’re About To See An Ad
Our newsletter client list is growing and we’re managing a sizable audience of subscribers…and Beehiiv emails me all the time about including an ad in my email.
And here we are.
To be clear, I’m not interested in generating sponsor revenue through this publication, at least not for now. I’ll donate the (presumably embarrassingly small) ad revenue and include a receipt in a future email.
But I am deeply interested in learning how ad partnerships across newsletters — even inside of our client base — can drive subscriber growth, site traffic, and sales leads.
Have you advertised in newsletters before? If so, was the spend worthwhile?
Do sponsor ads like this one detract from the vibe or personality of a creator-driven newsletter like this one?
Let me know what you think…or better yet, vote (or not) with your click.
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Good Stuff:
*The one thing that we’re doing that I think has had a positive impact on our ChatGPT visibility — which I am a little bit ashamed to admit — is this:
We pay SEObotAI $100 per month to write a very detailed blog post on revboss.com once a day.
The content is fine — definitely good, not great — but it is dense, well-organized, and written for a bot to consume. And I think it’s actually having a positive impact in that it tells the bots how to think and what to say about us.
Later this week I’m talking to some guys building a bot-to-bot sales and marketing app. I’ll report back!
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sunn O))) put out a new EP — it’s the perfect accompaniment to a fog machine and some spooky decorations on your front porch on Halloween. Blast it through your Sonos to weird out the trick-or-treaters! (Was that too specific? 🙂)
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Know some good stuff? Reply and tell me about it.