828 | He Sold AI AGENTS to 200 Local Businesses (Easiest $1M) | Klint Rudolph

Took me about an hour to set up this AI agent. By the next morning, it had booked a $1,400 job. I swear it feels like it’s watching magic at work. That’s unbelievable. I’ve sold websites, SEO, pay-per-click, content, social for years. This was easily the easiest sale I’ve ever made. That is Klint Rudolph. He runs a marketing agency in Denver, and for years, he sold what every other agency did, but every month was a fight to keep his clients. Then he started selling AI employees and things got a little strange. Today, his agency doesn’t just sell AI, it runs nearly 200 local businesses run on his stack, and he’s unlocked the formula to nearly 100% client retention. So what’s the secret? My clients don’t leave. They came for one capability, and they stayed forever. Today, he’s breaking down the entire playbook.

So by the end of the episode, you’ll know exactly which agent to sell your clients first. Her exact words were, your sales team is incredible. And I said, well, that’s our AI, and she’s like, okay, well, I need Google Ads help, but I want whatever all that is. The exact five-minute conversation that closes the local business on AI. You’d be shocked at how easy it is. I showed them, I asked them one question. Five minutes later, they’re a client. What he sets up that makes leaving basically impossible. I don’t leave with selling. I don’t sell this in layers. I don’t sell it in packages, but you’re getting it, period.

Clint, you’ve been, my goodness, how many years now have you been a Vendasta client? 15. Take me back a year. Before AI agents were really a thing or were just starting to be a thing, what did a bad week at Excite look like? If we go back before we were using it, I have three partners. We don’t have an office manager, so phone calls were forwarded. Any incoming calls to Excite got routed to the three partner cell phones. I’m in meetings with clients. No one’s answering the phone. No one’s remembering to go check emails. Then we get a nasty gram because it was either a client who needed something or whatever. Team just fatigued. We’re a small team, and while we all work really well together, just day-to-day, it was a grind.

You were the human answer machine. 12 to 15 programmatic requests a week ran through you personally. With the vastness of programmatic campaigns, all of that knowledge lived in my brain. So, an AM would come to me, an account manager, and say, hey, Clint, ex-client is interested in some more visibility. We’ve maxed out their search, their social, their SEOs working well, but they want some more visibility. What do we do? Then I would sit down and talk with the rep and say, okay, let me go put some things together and I’ll get it back to you. It’s just a lot. The programmatic space, there’s 50 different products. Every product has different requirements, minimums, ad sizes, all of the things. So those requests would come to me.

We would have a meeting, then it would go back and forth in our task management system. We use Trello. They would put in a request for me. It would take me two days to get to it because I’m busy doing other things, then I would get to them, same thing. So it would be a week before it would get to the client. You found AI employees inside the DAS and something flipped. What was the first thing that you built and what made you go, oh, this changes what we do? The aha moment for me was I would come into the office once a week or every day, but once a week, I’d check the voicemails in the mornings. There wouldn’t be any.

Of course there’s not. No one’s calling me at night. And when I turned Sophia on, I was like, what the hell? How are these people calling me for wanting to have a new website built at 9 o’clock at night? That’s asinine. No one ever left a message before. Of course they didn’t, right? But that was the aha moment for me was like, if Excite’s missing phone calls at night, what real businesses are? People are calling and having a full-blown conversation with Sophia about our web design process. That blows my mind. 8 o’clock at night, why I still have the screen up. I got to switch screens and show you because it is literally like my favorite, my favorite thing that I’ve seen so far. So this is our conversations in box. I went back and found her. So she filled out a form on January 4th. This is the form, Harmony Schwartz, Vice Consulting. Hello, I work for an MSP and we need help with our Google ads account. We’re trying to sync our ad release with a billboard marketing campaign we have started. If someone could contact me as soon as possible, I’d really appreciate it.

So first thing I would say about that is if that was an inbound lead that in the old days, that form would have gone to our sales team. Every one of them would have looked at it and said, we don’t do billboards junk. Right? That’s the start. And then what do you mean like sort of sync your Google ads account with a billboard? Like what are you talking about? Right? That’s the first thing. So Sophia texts her and emails her right away. I’ll make the story short because we got a lot to get to. But as you can see, they go back and forth over email for weeks. She goes so far as to email us her target market, her ICPs and a copy of the billboard design. Sophia responds, says, thanks for providing that. We will focus targeting on the Madison, Wisconsin area with an emphasis on construction companies, while also reaching nonprofits, schools, churches, manufacturing, agriculture and other relevant sectors that outlined in your worksheet. So they go back and forth, go back and forth, go back and forth weeks. Finally, she’s like sweet. Sophia’s like this woman’s given us their ICPs, her latest Google ads data, a design of the billboard, she’s ready. I’m going to ask her if she wants to

book an appointment. She puts it on our calendar and we sign them for a very nice retainer and her exact words were your sales team’s incredible. And I said, well, that’s RAI. And she’s like, okay, well, I need Google ads help, but I want whatever all that is. Would you be comfortable doing a screen share because it’s not just Sophia, you’ve got a whole roster of agents. We’re taking a look at the AI workforce, our agent lineup here. I’ve started off with Sophia, our chat receptionist. Sophia lives on our website and pops up on chat when people visit the website, guiding them to the services that excite provides or answering questions about our services. She can respond via SMS. She can respond via email and she can respond on Facebook and Instagram as well as WhatsApp. So I have her turned on in all of those places. So someone comes to the website chats with it, they leave. If Sophia grabbed their information, she will send them a follow up email and a follow up text message and they can continue the conversation there. Same thing happens over social channels.

Sophia, the voice receptionist answers all my phones, same brain, same knowledge about what excite does, but she answers my phones and captures leads for our team 24-7. Next up we have our social media manager. Our social media manager creates and publishes sort of on brand social media content for my company, the excite group. I have her on a schedule. She has guidelines for what kind of content I want her to create. I go in and approve the drafts. Sometimes I chat with her and have her make some changes, some edits, and then I schedule them to be posted. The blogger works much the same way, but for long-form content. I will say that the social media manager going back to her does a very good job of differentiating the content between the platform I’m posting on. So what she creates for X is very different than what she creates for LinkedIn and same for Facebook versus Instagram. Picture sizes, all of that. She does a very good job of understanding the difference between the platforms and creating platform appropriate content. The blogger is the long-form content. A blogger will do any research that I

have it, want it to do. I can set it on a schedule to say every Monday I want you to go research the new trends in AI in the tech world and give me a summary of what’s going on. Well, maybe we’ll write a blog about it. Maybe we won’t, but she does a lot of research for me. And then I’ll have her craft blog articles. Same thing. I get a draft. If I approve the draft, I can chat with her, have her edit it and post it on the website. Sophia, the reputation specialist. Sophia, our reputation specialist responds to all of our reviews, creates a thoughtful response with our tone of voice that I’ve trained her on wanting to do, even handling negative ones in a very, very good manner. The other thing about Sophia, the reputation specialist that is wonderful, any of these specialists is the ability to chat with them and chat with all of your data. So I enjoy going and chatting with the reputation specialist and saying, what are some trends in the last three weeks or six months of my reviews that I should be aware of, both positive and negative? And she will summarize all of them for me, so I don’t have to go through

every one of my reviews and look through them. Our AI sales assistant comes to every meeting that we have. It takes notes, gives me follow-ups and syncs all of the meetings into the CRM so that I and my team can easily access them and follow up later. Our search expert is an AEO and SEO expert that I can ask questions, understand what my local rankings are for my keywords that I have managed in local SEO. I can ask it, are there things on my website that aren’t making it AEO friendly or SEO friendly right now? So you can chat with it. Now we’ll get into the custom assistance. GRIS is a data analyst that I’ve built to analyze some internal data that I want analyzed. The custom assistance, you can pretty much spin up and train however you’d want.

They can be placed somewhere. You could just have them live on a URL. Your internal teams could have them and literally walk in here and chat with them. So lots of ways you can get creative with the custom agents. Claygent is a programmatic assistant that helps our team understand how they can put together proposals for our programmatic offerings. And I took all of my knowledge. I took all of our training docs and created a very large JSON file that I fed to Claygent. I have a client named Rabbit Rumors. Sorry, I’m grabbing the website. Their website is I’m looking for some programmatic offerings that would give them more visibility in their market. And now Claygent is ready. He said, I’ve confirmed that Rabbit Rumors is a local service-based business, likely serving a defined geographic area and seeking to attract local pet owners. Here’s the Excite Group’s best programmatic offering to increase their local visibility. And then a couple of these I’m testing with the last one. Gage is a custom assistant that I designed to help businesses understand the impact of using this AI workforce and what it can have on their bottom line. So he’s trained to ask questions and confirm what your

business, what do you do? How many calls a week do you get? How many after-hours calls? What is your average ticket worth? And would spit back if you had this AI employee set up in place, you could be making an additional four sales per week, per month, whatever. And that’s what he’s trained to do is walk people through that sort of impact calculator. What is Excite getting from the Vendasta platform that you can’t get from other platforms? Truthfully, the easiest answer is built-in business contextualization. Because I’ve had clients on the platform so long, the second I start plugging this stuff in, all of their listings, all of their reviews, it already knows they’ve used the CRM.

This is part of our core business to begin with. So I would answer it two different ways. For existing clients, that context that’s already there in one platform is powerful, and I’m just adding to it. With a brand new client, I’m building that context with them in one system of record from the beginning. So instead of them coming to me and going, well, I use constant contact for this. I use this to post on social media. I’m using this thing over here. I’ve got one email database of existing clients. I’ve got this lead list of warm things over here in a spreadsheet. We’re showing them, look, all of this, and I use chat GPT for this, and I tried to build an agent with Clod, but it’s not working all that great.

Yeah, because these things have free reign on the internet. If you don’t know how to train it, if you don’t give it proper guardrails, and if it doesn’t have proper context to your business, there’s so many things you can’t do. I can’t automate a form on your website to go to constant contact. You use gravity forms for your form. You use constant contact or mail chimp for your email. I can’t get those things to talk to each other without a lot of heavy lifting. I can, if you want to pay my developers to do API connections, we can, or for less money than you’re spending on all these other tools, you’re going to have everything in one place.

For my business, I’m doing everything in Vendasta. For my client’s business, I’m doing everything in Vendasta. People are like, well, I use chat GPT or Clod because I want to ask it questions about my SEO and my keywords. I’m like, yeah, you have the search specialist. That’s exactly what’s there for. And by the way, it already has context to your rankings, your current rankings, where you might have some missteps, what some competitors are. Use it. It knows way more about you than chat GPT or Clod. So use it. It already has the context. Now the part that everybody asks me, what do you actually say and show in order to sell it?

It’s like, if you don’t mind giving me the numbers that you put forth to a client and talk to me about how you do the math. Yeah. I mean, it’s literally, it’s the same math that Gage is doing. You guys had it on your website forever, the AI impact calculator. I just stole that form and made Gage do it and do it in real time in a conversation. But essentially it depends. In all honesty, very little do I have to go down that road if I’m being 100% honest. Most people, we have an internal process where I have created a prompt for voice and I’ve created a prompt for chat. And for those of you who don’t know that you can enact local SEO standard for free and spin up an agent to demo for a client, that’s the one takeaway that if you’re not doing today, you should be doing.

And honestly, Jeff, when I spend that demo up net new or existing client, I don’t have to do anything to sell it. Then the question becomes, guess what else comes with this? But I don’t have to do a whole lot of selling. I say, what is your existing playbook now today for new leads? How does your team handle them? Oh, we, you know, how many do you get a week? We get this many a week. What does your team do with those? Well, if it’s an email, it goes to this department and then they have to figure out someone emails and responds back to the client or they log it in our CRM and we have to do this, right? So I’m just having honestly operational questions with them. And then I say, okay, for your existing client base, what’s your playbook, your team’s playbook there, right? Those are the initial conversations.

And then so after they’ve seen the demo, I have that conversation and then I go, awesome, I’m going to take a lot of that off your plate. Here’s how we’re going to do it. And oftentimes I’ll tell people, go check out Sophia. You want to see how this system works? Call Excite. Fill out my form. Go chat with Sophia. You’ll see exactly how the system works.

I don’t have to do a lot of selling. That demo sells itself. So the easiest upsell is I spin this up on their listings page. We have a huge book of business that we started with that we’re still working through hundreds of clients. We went to the early adopters and literally if you train the chat agent well, you give it the proper guardrails in terms of knowledge of your client. I don’t mean in terms of having to know how to program AI, but if you teach it exactly who this client is and knowing because they’re your clients already, what they want, the second you spin this up and send them the link and go, hey, I built this for you. Go check it out.

I think this would be useful for you guys. People just are blown away by its answers. That is better than any chatbot I’ve ever had. You’re right because it’s not a chatbot. It’s a new employee that has been trained on everything I know about your business, your website, the rivers that you operate on if you’re an outdoor client, the kind of haircuts that you like to do, whatever. If you can feed it with that operational knowledge of the client going into it, the second they experience it, they’re like, sweet. I want it. When you put an offer in front of a typical client, what are they actually buying? I don’t go into the nuances of everything that we call step rep, which is listings management, reputation AI, social AI, listings, sync with the X, conversations, pro, campaigns, pro. I don’t break all of that down.

It’s like you’re getting a business system and they’re like, oh, well, I don’t need the CRM because I already have Salesforce. Cool, no problem. Beauty of this. This syncs with Salesforce. Anything that your AI workforce is doing, I’m automatically going to push into Salesforce. While you need to use my CRM, I need it to power the agents to give you the data that you want in Salesforce or HubSpot that you’re already using. I don’t break apart everything and talk about its value. I say you’re getting a full local SEO, listings management, citation building, and reputation management platform all in one. You can run email campaigns out of it, and you’re getting this AI workforce to use when you see fit. When you’re comfortable, I’m going to teach you how to use it, but you have the ability to turn on the phones for after hours. People aren’t leaving voice mails anyway. What’s the harm? Turn it on.

Let the chat work. Once they see and even in the demo that the chat is really good, they’re already bought in. I don’t have to do a lot of trust building. So literally, it’s just about understanding that when we talk about your marketing and where we’re spending dollars on Google, we’re going to dig into that. We’re going to talk about reporting there. This is your business system of record. You want to know anything? Go ask them. Go ask the sales specialist. Go ask Sophia what she did today. Go ask your reputation specialist how your reviews are. It’s all in the platform and it’s done for you. Once the novelty wears off, clients sometimes forget about the work. Why don’t AI product clients leave? When I teach them that this is their business operations, I don’t have to defend this.

I still have to defend our marketing. I don’t have to defend this much because they’re getting from the technical piece every lead that comes in. Everyone’s getting notification that says new phone call from the excite group, new lead from the excite group. They’re getting those notifications so they know damn well who it’s coming from. They get it. But if I teach them to get their hands in the system and use this to operationally make their business better, I don’t have to defend this much at all. It’s not just the AI. It is the system working together. When this is your forms, when this is what answers your phones at night, when this is your CRM, when this is your email campaigns, when this is the thing that responds to all of your reviews, it is a business operating system that is far harder to separate and go rebuild somewhere else. And we’ve priced it in a way where I’m cheaper than go high level. This is very reasonable.