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In this episode, we'll take a look at how to run from your SMB pain. Okay, welcome, everybody. So AI requires months and years of training before results are seen. Where do we heard this before? Right? Well, we saw some material not long ago, of course, and we've all experienced this on Amazon, right? Where they're spending well over $20 billion annually on you know, research and development, things like that. What they do is they collect data to give product recommendations for AI, right, and we've been on Amazon, we see a product. And of course, out of that then comes this other set of related products that might be interesting, right or might be related to what we bought. That takes a long time for them to gather that. And as an SMB, of course, we certainly can't take that long, or certainly even spend at that level to get those kinds of AI results. In fact, when you look at it, some people feel that it takes six months just to learn how to do data science. Now that's just to learn it, that's not to actually become an expert, and be proficient at it. That doesn't even include building an AI model. And then finally, eventually getting some business results. Another group, they say that it takes their teams 30 days just to get their AI models deployed and functional. As an SMB owner, you don't have time for that. And another set of group said, it takes six months just to build their AI models and deploy them six months, can you imagine as an SMB owner taking six months to do that? Now, I found out looking at some other stats in over 60% of the RL artificial intelligence projects. They don't even get past the initial proof of concept and data preparation stages. So you know, pay, you're just trying to figure out is this even feasible? over 60% doting get through those phases, that's, that's huge. So look, take, take the pain out of your SMB and don't even do those steps, right? Put that into the hands as someone else Unless, of course, you got you got money to burn, right and you got time to waste. I guess if you do, that's the way to go. But as an SMB owner, it makes, you know, doesn't really make sense to build out all of those teams and to take months, eventually, to get something to help your business grow. I was looking at a case study recently, where a group came back and they had used some AI. And they said, Look, the time and the effort that it took for them to find $3 million in additional sales leads, it was only a matter of a few days. That's huge. So by the time they got their data, a little bit of cleansing, and then ran it through this advanced AI platform, hey, came down to just just in a few days, they found $3 million in additional sales leads. Now the point is, that obviously is a very short time with a huge turn right a huge, huge result for this medium sized business. Nevertheless, it is indicative of the other side of the spectrum, which is you're not spending the months, lots of months, your eye to get these teams set up to go try to find some sort of business value. So to reduce the time that it takes to get value from AI for your SMB. There's three steps that I'm going to go through here writing three steps to reduce the time that it takes. Step number one, list the areas of your business that you're trying to move away from pain, it might be in the marketing part of your business might be around sales, or the supply chain. But the key here is you got to get specific with this because as we know as a human race, we tend to move away from pain faster than we move towards other emotions. Alright, so that's step one. list out the areas of your business that you're feeling the pain. Step two for each of those areas might be in the sales area. Identify with Current processes are, are the activities that you do around that right where the pain is actually occurring. All right, so that's, that's step two, step three, for each of those processes, identify which ones you're willing to make a change on. Alright? That actually becomes incredibly, incredibly important that third step. And the reason why is, I've seen time and time again, where some AI insight comes into an organization, it sits on a shelf, right, there's an unwillingness to actually make the change or to adopt. Right now, I want to walk through an example of these three steps. So let's go back to step number one, list the areas of your business where you're trying to move away from pain. So let's say that the pain in this example, let's say that the pain was, I don't know what changes to make in my business, because I don't know what my business numbers mean. Alright, so let's say that the business numbers in this case are some sales numbers. Right? That's step one. Alright. So we've got we got some pain identified step two, for each of those now. So let's let's identify what the current business processes are, that we do. So let's say we have two processes. Process number one is with our sales team, we do a monthly sales planning and forecasting process. All right. So that would be one area around the sales that I need to know what those business numbers mean, that would affect that. And let's say process number two is with the business team. So that might be the CEO, the President, etc. That's a quarterly budget review, let's say the of those two processes. Alright, let's now go to Step three. And step three is critical, because this is where you now identify, which ones of those processes are you willing to change, when you might have some pressure, right, there might be someone in the organization that says, I'm not willing to change our quarterly budget review process, I'm not going to take some, some insights from that. So let's scratch out that one, let's just say not changeable, the CEO, the President, whoever, just saying not willing to do it. But let's say in that first process and sales team, they're interested in, hey, if you had some additional insights, we might make some changes then, in our monthly sales planning and forecasting process. Alright, so now we've got this setup. It's first we identify the pain, the pain is, we don't really know what our business numbers mean. And then the second step, hey, we not we know what some processes are, that relate to this pain once in the sales area. And then third, we picked the sales team, monthly planning forecast process, right, you got to have those three. Notice we haven't talked about data we haven't talked about, go get your data, go get it cleaned up, ready to go? No, as an SMB, you focus on the business part. And on where are we willing to make changes? Given that we get some insights? All right, that that's the critical piece. Now, let's say then that some AI gets applied, you don't go apply it, you have someone go apply the AI. And what comes back is some insights about sales effectiveness. Okay. And I'm going to give you a couple in this example, insight. Number one, the AI comes back and says, you know, sales on Mondays and Tuesdays are less effective in the southwest of the United States for two products. Okay, so the AI looked at the numbers and figure that out. It's like, okay, that's an interesting insight. Insight number two, sales staff member a will call the staff member, a sales staff member a has a higher closing rate for product x in the central us for a specific demographic, right. So it might be for people of a certain age range or whatever. But let's say it's for a specific demographic. Okay, so the AI has found those two insights. Now, this is where the AI gets interesting. The AI then produces something called a smart step. Smart step is forward looking, right? It's predictive, it's okay. Now, therefore, what should we do moving forward, and the AI comes back and says, you know, to increase sales, there's an 80% plus probability to have staff member a sell product x to a target demographic, in the southwest us on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Right? So the question is, let's say that we have that prediction coming back from AI to grow sales, do these things highly profitable, or, you know, high probability to go do that? But question, the real question is, what changes will the business be willing to make to adopt this smart step? Again, we said hey, we got to process our monthly planning forecast. Would we be willing to make some adjustments to apply that so Given that the sales team was willing to make those process adjustments and the, you know, the quarterly planning and budgeting process team wasn't. So given the sales teams willing to do that, then what you do is you put in place the strategy to apply that AI smart step, right? In other words, we will make the adjustments, we're going to get staff member a to actually go off and do that work and focus on that particular area. It's critical to do that, because really to be successful with AI, yeah, you need the data. But as an SMB, don't, don't go focus on the data piece focused on what problem? Where's the pain? What am I willing to change, and then let me go put that change in place. So to sort of be successful with AI, three things. One, the AI insight, you need to have that obviously, otherwise, this is all moot. So you need the AI insight that augments your intelligence, right? This isn't about saying, the AI is taking over your brain, it's more it's bringing insights and uncovering things that we don't often know, we don't know. So, a we need that. So that's number one. And then two, we got to have the willingness and the ability to make adjustments to your business, right to apply the insight to some either existing process, or maybe it's creating a new one, but two, you got to have that. And then three, this is critical, you gotta track the impact of the changes. So how did things? You know, how did things come out? At the end? What was the results of that? So the scenario I just walked through, actually comes from some customer examples. You know, I liked some of the big company timelines, where it's multi month, you know, six months or whatever, right? This can actually be done a lot more quickly for an SMB, and one of the advantages of an SMB have been a small to medium business owner. It's It's the ability to pivot on the insights more quickly than the large companies can do this. Now, if you think about it, can you imagine the rate and the pace of growth that can happen with an SMB that applies AI smart steps, again, and again, and again, again, you We can't go do all of it in one step as a small company, but you pick one or two of those smart steps, per each time you apply the AI, as the organization has the mindset to make those adjustments to track it and move on, you intentionally have the potential of putting a dent in the rate and the pace of change that big companies are doing, in fact, going even faster, quite frankly. So the takeaway is like, hey, as an SMB owner, I can access AI insights quickly without major time and cost event investments right and feel and experience the results of that. So come join me on Thursday for a web class on how to take advantages of AI as an SMB, go to https://ClickAI.com/BreakTheTrap Looking forward to seeing you there. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. 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