What we talked about
David Asarnow is an entrepreneur and growth strategist focused on helping businesses build predictable revenue. He explains how he improves results by tightening positioning, clarifying the offer, fixing funnel breakdowns, and strengthening sales follow up so leads do not get wasted. David shares why he prefers to under promise and over deliver, and how many teams confuse activity with progress when the message is unclear and nurturing is missing.
Show notes
David Asarnow built a $45 million business division from scratch in five years, started a franchise company that grew to eight figures, and has two Two Comma Club X awards on his wall, marketing funnels each verified to have generated over $10 million. The through-line of his career is a single observation: good businesses with good people are constantly generating leads they then quietly destroy.
What we covered
- The most common sales and marketing failure is confusing activity with progress. Companies spend heavily to drive leads, but without a clear message, consistent follow-up, and a lead nurturing system to educate prospects over time, those leads disappear after the first conversation and are never recovered, and most teams have no idea it’s happening because there is no feedback signal.
- When auditing a business, David looks at offer and positioning first: does a stranger understand in ten seconds who this is for and what problem it solves? He then traces the funnel step by step, ad click rate, landing page opt-in rate, appointment show rate, and looks at whether anyone is actually reviewing and coaching sales calls, which most companies skip entirely.
- David described a single script change he made while speaking for Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes at Business Breakthroughs International: instead of using generic case studies, he swapped in stories from entrepreneurs he actually knew who matched the audience in the room. That one shift increased enrollment into their programs by 63.4% within 30 days and prompted the company’s president to ask what he was doing differently.
- The 1-3-1 framework from Dan Martel: never bring a complaint without also bringing three proposed solutions and a recommendation on which one to use. David argued that if companies adopted this norm, they would eliminate most internal blame loops between sales and marketing.
- On AI, David has spent three years building agents that simulate empathy, asking questions, detecting when something a prospect says is concerning, and responding in ways most people cannot tell are automated. His main critique of how people use AI is that they treat it like a first-grader using it: no direction, no guardrails, no audience context, no defined outcome, and then they wonder why the output doesn’t convert.
- Revenue predictability comes from measuring everything, testing one variable at a time, headline, first message, follow-up sequence, and communicating across sales and marketing as one team with shared goals rather than separate departments pointing fingers at each other.
About David
David Asarnow is the founder of Business Nitrogen, a growth strategy firm that has helped build marketing funnels generating over $10 million each. He spent years coaching and training thousands of entrepreneurs alongside Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes at Business Breakthroughs International.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidasarnow
- Website: https://businessnitrogen.com
Episode 133 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-vetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we are joined by David Asarnow. David is an entrepreneur and growth strategist who helps teams turn marketing and sales into simple systems that drive revenue. He’s also known for teaching practical ways to use AI
to speed up execution and improve results. And he speaks publicly about leadership, mindset and business growth. David, welcome to the show.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (00:38) Thanks for having me.
Federico Ramallo (00:40) I’m honored to have you here today. It’s an amazing day to do an episode together and I’m looking forward to have a great conversation.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (00:48) Me as well. We’ve had a few conversations offline beforehand, so I am excited to do whatever I can to serve your audience.
Federico Ramallo (00:53) Yes.
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So for people meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a little bit more about what do you do?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (01:07) Yeah, I mean, basically I help businesses get more predictable revenue. And what that means is, you know, if you look at what I’ve done over the years, it’s tighten their message, fix their funnel, improve sales follow-up. And today we use AI to help teams move forward faster without losing quality.
Federico Ramallo (01:27) Right, right. It’s an interesting activity because there are so many people over promising and never delivering, right? ⁓ So when I’ve been reading and knowing you more, I find refreshing. What you’re doing, I find it refreshing.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (01:38) Hehehehe
By the way, you’re right about that. And I’d much rather under promise and over deliver. here’s the challenge in today’s day and time.
because so many people are using AI and not using it properly, they may write something that sounds really good, but it doesn’t convert and people don’t understand why. And it’s because they don’t understand the connection mechanisms and how to actually integrate building relationship and conversation flow like you would in marketing.
Federico Ramallo (02:17) Right, right. For me, it’s been a hard thing to learn because I’m more about stuff, right? I’m a software engineer. So, know, one plus one equals two, right? But here on, we’re talking about people and one plus one equals 11, right? And the math doesn’t work, it only 22, right? But it’s a different type of knowledge, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (02:35) Or 22
Federico Ramallo (02:46) different type of understanding.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (02:48) It totally is.
Federico Ramallo (02:52) So for people that are hearing the podcast, can you tell us a little bit more about the award that you have on your wall behind you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (02:59) Oh, the awards behind me? Yeah.
You know, one of the things I guess that is starting in about 2016, one of the software companies that we work with started offering an award. The first award they had was called the Two Comma Club Award. So if you did a marketing funnel that generated over a million dollars in revenue, US dollars,
you could apply for award. You had to give the entire funnel flow, show the shopping cart checkout to verify proof that it generated the revenue. And then they offered a two comma club X award, which was times 10. X in Latin is 10. So that means marketing funnels that did over $10 million. And the two awards that I have behind me, the two awards behind me were for marketing funnels that did over $10 million.
Federico Ramallo (03:49) That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And, you know, that award is real proof of the results that you can drive.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (03:58) Well, I mean, if you look at anything, mean, when companies hire you or they go to work to work with you, they want results. you know, relationships are amazing and I’ve become friends with many of my clients and yet they want results. And so that’s the number one thing we need to focus in on.
Federico Ramallo (04:17) Right, right, yeah. I think relationships are important, but you can be drinking buddies and have a great friendship, right? But that doesn’t mean that you can bring results, right? You need both, what I’m trying to say, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (04:29) Well, that’s true. mean,
you need to make sure that everyone on your team is focused on the same goal, that marketing is speaking with sales, sales is speaking with marketing, operations communicating with sales and marketing. So that way you have a cohesive unit that’s working together.
Federico Ramallo (04:44) Interesting. So what problem did you see that pushed you into growth and revenue work?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (04:49) You know, it’s it what I saw a lot of problems. I grew up in corporate America first. So before. I had an opportunity in my 20s to build a new division for a 50 year old family owned business that did 68 million in revenue. And I grew a business to 45 million business division, the 45 million in five years. I then started a franchise company that we grew to eight figures in five years and.
After that, I got an opportunity to speak, coach and train with Tony Robinson Chet Holmes at Business Breakthroughs International, where I literally got an opportunity to train thousands of entrepreneurs. And what I started seeing and throughout all of this, I kept seeing good businesses with good people doing a lot.
but they weren’t getting consistent results. So leads would come in and then they would get wasted. They don’t follow up on them. And sales would blame marketing. Marketing would blame sales. If sales isn’t closing the leads, not getting good quality leads. If sales isn’t closing the leads, marketing saying, I’m getting you good leads. And nobody had a simple system for turning attention into book calls and converting those. So I got obsessed with fixing it and that’s how Business Nitrogen was born. And we’ve been doing it
for 15 years.
Federico Ramallo (06:04) Wow, that’s amazing. And what does growth mean to you beyond just more lids?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (06:10) Well, it’s not leads, it’s revenue, it’s the strength of the company. The company needs to get stronger, not just bigger, because mean, heck, companies can implode upon themselves if they don’t get, you know, build the cells, the operations. They need a better conversion, better delivery, better retention. And the other thing is, you need to make sure you have the right team that can execute.
that can execute without creating chaos. Sometimes growth can create chaos and chaos slows down the growth. So it’s really getting very intentional on how you’re building, growing and scaling a company. How you run your weekly leadership meetings. How you empower the team to be able to get everyone in the team collaborating together. So that way the business grows and you build strength while you’re growing.
It’s like building a business operating system that encompasses sales marketing operations altogether.
Federico Ramallo (07:08) Right, right. Sometimes I see revenue as oxygen for a-
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (07:14) You know, it’s funny you say that. Before we were business nitrogen, which is about acceleration.
We were business oxygen. In fact, I still own the domain business oxygen.net, but business oxygen.com was an accounting company out of Australia. And one of my clients said to me, Dave, you need a.com. And by the way, this was back in 2010. He said, you need a.com, not a.net. And so I said, you know, we can be business helium. We can float your business higher. And we all laughed. And then I looked up on GoDaddy and business nitrogen was available. So.
That’s how our name came about.
Federico Ramallo (07:50) Right, right. Interesting. That’s an interesting story. The. By the way, I mean, for for for the audience, this was not rehearsed. you know, came up naturally.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (07:54) You
No, wasn’t rehearsed. You brought up oxygen in it and made me think,
well, my real original… By the way, you can put in business oxygen, David Asarnow, and you’ll probably still see a lot of things from that back then.
Federico Ramallo (08:14) Right, right. For me, the reason I say oxygen is because it gives you this breathing room to make mistakes, to improve the operation. I if you have revenue coming in, then you can be inefficient. can waste money by making mistakes, but keep moving forward until you kind of…
figure out how to optimize it, right? Even if you kind of break even in an operation, but if you have more revenue coming in, you have an express to work and do better next time, right? So it becomes this, you know, a breathing room and, you know, give you the life of the company, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (08:54) It is, which is why I selected it as my original company name.
Federico Ramallo (08:59) But it was taken. ⁓ no, it was taken.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (09:01) .com was taken. .net was available.
I was okay with it, but one of my clients was like, you need a .com. So they, actually strategize together in their conference room. that’s anyway, it’s a funny story.
Federico Ramallo (09:08) You
Right.
Now, why nitrogen and not hydrogen?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (09:21) Nitrogen sounds like nitrous oxide. It’s an accelerator. It makes things go faster. And that’s really how we came up with the name.
Federico Ramallo (09:30) Right, right. Because I was thinking nitrogen is more of a neutral element, right? But NOx, it’s more explosive. Yeah, I like that idea. So, you know, we’re kind of talking about this, but what are the common mistakes you see companies make in marketing and sales?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (09:39) Yeah.
I think in sales and marketing, well, not I think, I know, in sales and marketing, a lot of times people confuse activity with progress. There’s a lot of people doing a lot of things. They’re driving leads, they’re getting people, they’re using ads, they’re running content, they’re using tools, they’re using outreach. However, if the message is not clear, if it’s fuzzy, if the follow-up is not consistent and it’s not strategic,
People can fix the message, but not have a speed of follow-up, speed of communication. You’re not gonna see the results that you need to drive sales. I see it all the time with clients I work with, where they’re spending a lot of money to drive leads, to drive traffic, and yet, some of the basic foundational things that they could do in order to get…
people pre-framed, pre-qualified, educated, leaning forward before the conversation even happens, doesn’t happen. And then they have the conversation. And if someone doesn’t move forward, the lead is gone, gone forever. They don’t have an effective lead nurturing system in place to educate and inform to get the person ready to raise their hand and lean forward when they’re ready.
Federico Ramallo (11:05) Right, right. And the thing is, those are silent killers because the lead is gone and there’s no feedback, there is no input saying why the team made the mistakes they made.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (11:20) And they have no idea. And the problem is they may not even know. They may not even know the mistakes that they’re making. And they just say, this doesn’t work or this lead source doesn’t work. And then the other problem is many don’t have end to end attribution. So when someone eventually moves forward, they don’t know which ad drove them forward, where that person came from. And if you’re not tracking everything from the beginning to the end, you don’t have a complete full picture.
on what’s actually working for your business.
Federico Ramallo (11:52) Right. And you’re making decisions blindly.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (11:54) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (11:56) You could be killing the ad that is actually working and converting and you wouldn’t know about it.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (12:02) Exactly. And then you don’t know what to optimize. OK, great. You found the ad that’s working. Maybe you want to update the headline now.
Federico Ramallo (12:08) So when you audit a business, what are the first things you look at?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (12:14) Well, first we need to look at the offer and the positioning. So is there a message to market match? Does the offer match who they’re looking to attract? Can you understand who it is, who their ideal customer is and is it matching that in 10 seconds? Next, we want to look at the funnel. Okay, great. Someone clicked on the lead.
clicked on the ad. If you’re getting a really good click through rate and then they come to a landing page and then they’re not opting in or they’re not buying, you have to look where the breakdown is there. Literally looking at everything step by step from the ad to the lead to the appointment. And then here’s another area that most entrepreneurs hate building sales teams. They hate coaching sales teams, managing them. So they don’t optimize the sales process.
I know many companies are spending tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. They’re getting leads, but they’re not managing and optimizing the sales team. In fact, many of them just let the salespeople do things what they want. They’re not recording the calls or the conversations. And nowadays you can actually use artificial intelligence to review the sales calls and say what the person did well, what they could optimize. So there’s so many ways you can improve today.
Federico Ramallo (13:33) Right, right. If you’re not measuring it, you’re not finding ways to improve it.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (13:40) Correct.
Federico Ramallo (13:40) So how do you decide who the ideal customer really is?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (13:47) I’d look at a few things and ask yourself this question. Who do you know that you know that you know that you can serve? And who that you could serve better than anyone else? Who you can serve easier than any? Who’s the easiest to serve? And frankly, who’s most profitable for your business? And once you have that narrowed down to who knows that they have a problem or they problem aware. And if they’re problem aware,
but they’re not aware of you as a solution that gives you an opportunity to position yourself and your company different than everyone else out there and position yourself. I like to say is a blue ocean, a blue ocean opportunity where you’re not competing against everyone else.
Federico Ramallo (14:30) How can you tell if the sample is representative enough? I mean, you mentioned you have somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody that you can clearly say this is already a client. How can you say from that small sample it’s going to be more or less statistically representative?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (14:44) Yeah.
Well, why do you say small sample? It could be a large sample. if you have a, I’ll look at it this way. If your company, you have a product, good or service, why do you exist? Who are you there to serve? And do you do a good, who do you serve them? What kind of feedback do you get from your clients? And if you’re not doing a good job serving them, work on serving them better, but who can you serve? And so make sure that
The message that you have lets them know, hey, they’ve got a problem. If they have a problem and they haven’t been able to solve that problem, you exist solely to solve that problem for them and give them that opportunity to raise their hand. And then if you do all the right things in the sales and marketing side, you’ll earn the right to at least have that conversation. And then once you earn that right to have that conversation, then it’s incumbent upon your sales team to A,
ask really good questions, get them to lean forward, get them to enroll. And through an online system, if let’s say, let’s say you have an online e-commerce company, you have to, it’s incumbent then upon you to make sure that you then are doing everything you can to educate, inform, and let them know that you can serve their need and give them an opportunity to buy so that way you can serve them.
Federico Ramallo (16:13) Right, right. So it becomes about the timing, understanding their needs, and then with that position yourself so you, as you said, the right to have that conversation, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (16:28) Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (16:30) I am kind of going a little bit of tangent here, but I remember when my time at Microsoft, I was on the technical pre-sales team. ⁓ so I was in a beautiful position because I was on the sales team, but I was not in charge of the pipeline. So I was kind of above and beyond the pipeline.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (16:39) Yes.
⁓ huh.
Federico Ramallo (16:54) But I was involved in that process, right? Because I was doing demos and things like that for the enterprise level, right? And being the technical guy for the sales team, right? So I was working with all the sales people. And I learned a lot about they would do this probabilistic, know, waiting on the opportunities, right? And see the whole pipeline.
and how many millions of dollars were on the line. And on enterprise, it’s a long, long sales cycle. So we would have these meetings where they would update each lead, each opportunity. I learned a lot. Everything I learned about sales, I learned from those meetings.
You know, it was like a concert. You could see, you know, the struggles and, you know, how they were able to close a deal and they had this big bell, you know, when they close a big deal, they will sing the bell, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was it was beautiful, right? I mean, it gives that, you know, energy that the, you know, the sales team would need to to kind of, you know, move forward, right? ⁓ It was it was so fun. It was.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (17:48) Did they really?
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (18:05) right after the create Microsoft craziness, you know, the, so when I joined, they start going corporate. So it became, I wouldn’t say boring, but you know, more, you know, you know, more corporate serious company rather than, know, Steve Ballmer just dancing on, the, on the, you know, on the scenario, right.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (18:25) That would have been fun to see back then.
Federico Ramallo (18:28) Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean, the company meeting that happened before I joined, they lost two people, right? They literally lost them on the fields. couldn’t find them until the next morning they showed up, So that was fun, right? But then, know, next year when I was there, it was more of a moderates meeting and whatnot, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (18:33) Mm-hmm.
Well, they grew up
as a company and they modified, Shift modified and adjusted as they grew.
Federico Ramallo (18:58) Right, right, yeah. So what does a healthy funnel look like to you?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (19:05) Well, if you look at a marketing funnel, what’s healthy is frankly the right people raise their hand. You have a system in place, live in person or artificial intelligence to have that clear conversation and where the person who’s communicating with you knows what that next step that they should take and you’re telling them what they should do. You eliminate as much confusion as possible in that process.
And you don’t have old dead lead just sitting there in a CRM. And then you put constant and continuous attention, that follow-up that I mentioned, and in order to get the person to go from raising their hand to becoming a client. Now you can do that through, as I mentioned earlier, you can do that in one-on-one sales, you can do that in a group environment, you can do that in a seminar environment, and you can do that in an e-commerce environment. They shift a little bit.
depending upon what type of business you have. But it’s all about awareness, communication, desire to, you know, attention, interest, desired action. And that old ADA principle, you’ve got to get their attention to get their interest and then get their desire. So that way they take action.
Federico Ramallo (20:19) Interesting, And having the clarity of the next steps, being able to see the, know, pushing the client towards the next steps and the next stage with the clarity to be able to close this opportunity.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (20:30) Yeah.
Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (20:37) So how do you make marketing and sales work as one team?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (20:45) I mean, you don’t like having multiple teams? just kidding. That’s age old question because marketing, you know, it’s funny because I was the company that I built the $45 million division for. They had a VP of sales and marketing. So one person was overall, so you couldn’t point fingers. I think part of it is marketing drives sales and sales confirms what marketing is doing right. So you have to work as one team.
Federico Ramallo (20:47) You
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (21:11) So how do you do it? Communication. You have shared feedback. Marketing owns the lead quality and conversion to appointment and sales owns the lead to implementation and closing the deal. But here’s where most people miss. They don’t get together and communicate. So up in the ivory tower, marketing is driving leads, but
If someone’s not closing, they don’t wanna hear from sales, they just wanna blame sales and sales wants to blame marketing. So you gotta remove the blame and you have to get together and collaborate. It’s one of my favorite words is collaborate. You all work for the same, if you have a company, everyone on the team and if you have outside partners, agencies, et cetera, it’s one team, one vision, one goal. And you’ve gotta communicate that together, create a.
a scoreboard and communicate so that way you can say, how do we improve? What do we need to improve? And, you know, start noticing who on your team is raising their hands and offering advice. The other thing that we talk about so many times is don’t complain about something and saying, I’m getting bad leads. Or looking at marketing, look at sales is, Hey, I’ve listened to and reviewed some of your calls that I think you could do a better job. So.
I’d say eliminate the finger pointing and come together with a process that I heard, it’s funny, I heard a young lady from Venezuela who worked for an American company that was in a conference that I was at and they had, what’s the best thing that works in your company? And she won a thousand dollar poker chip in Las Vegas for this. But I do think it originally came from Dan Martel. And the idea is one, one. One, state the problem that you’re having.
then state three ideas that you think will solve the problem. So if you have a problem, don’t just go say no complaining unless you have a solution to the problem. And then the one, so it’s a one problem, three solutions. And then finally, which is the solution that you recommend us using and why you recommend us using it? If companies implemented the 131, they would create one people wouldn’t be complaining and B,
they would get ideas and that would drive ideas to the organizations and create more conversations.
Federico Ramallo (23:26) Right, right. Wow, that’s amazing. I mean,
I, you know, with that, that same idea, I got involved into a book adaptation to Spanish because, I mean, I was not complaining, but I, you know, I told the author of the book, well, you should, you you should consider, you know, writing the book in Spanish because, you know, there’s a big audience, you know, I have experience with, know, Latin America audience, you have Spain, it’s the second biggest language.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (23:39) Mm-hmm. ⁓
Federico Ramallo (23:59) spoken in the world, you you have Chinese but, you know, but in on the Western hemisphere, right, Western culture. And basically he said,
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (24:07) Yeah,
it’s the most important, the most important language for us to know. Or communicate in or be able to sell in because it’s such a large portion of the even the US it’s like 20 something percent of the population.
Federico Ramallo (24:12) Right, yeah.
Right, right. It’s huge. Yeah. So I kind of, you know, described the nuances of the different variations of Spanish that there are. And he said, that sounds great. You should do you should write the adaptation of my book. Right. And, you know, again, it’s the same thing you’re talking about is, you know, if somebody complains, they should be able to take that into actionable things, right. Rather than just complaining. Right. Yeah.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (24:46) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (24:47) And I, what you were describing reminds me of another story. I’m full of stories today. So, you know, the sales and marketing gets lost in a light in an island. Right. And then, you know, marketing goes into the woods and says, I’m going to find some some food. Right. And then come back running. Right. And there is a wild pig, you know, chasing.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (25:05) You
Federico Ramallo (25:10) marketing, right? And says to sales, now you kill it, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (25:15) Hehehehehe
Federico Ramallo (25:17) I got you late, I got you late, I’m bringing food, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (25:18) It almost sounds like… I found food, now I’m gonna
go get it.
Federico Ramallo (25:27) Yeah, now it’s your job to close it, Yeah, close the deal. Here it comes, right? Which shows that if you don’t have this good coordination between these teams, then you can have great leads. But if there’s no coordination, you’re going to lose them. And finger blaming them, why that happened.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (25:30) Yes. Close the deal. Give us dinner.
Correct.
Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (25:54) So what are the habits that you’ve seen work best to improve revenue predictability?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (26:01) It’s measuring. If you don’t measure, you can’t improve. So the only way you’re gonna be able to create revenue predictability is by, is knowing what you want and measuring against it and then continually reviewing what can you do to improve it. And literally every week, split testing one change. I’ll give you an example. I have a client, maybe they’re doing a VSL or a webinar.
And we’ve got, we know what predictable results we’re getting. We’ll pick one or two things that we’re going to optimize and split test and see what the, is there a lift or is it to stay the same? If there wasn’t a lift, move it back and then test something new. it’s, to get predictability, it’s knowing what you’re doing and measuring everything and then communicating about it.
Federico Ramallo (26:55) Amazing. So where does AI help the most right now?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (27:02) Well, AI can help in a lot of different areas. I’m speaking a lot on AI for entrepreneurial based businesses and how to leverage AI systems.
There’s little workflows that you can put in building. There’s automations that you can do. But there’s two things that you should look at is to create some speed and consistency. It can help you respond faster. It can help you follow up more consistently. It can help you create content, internal tools that would normally take an entire team and you can have artificial intelligence do a lot of it.
and you can have it clone people’s brains as much as you possibly can to create repeatable scripts, templates, and workflows. And now you can have AI take all of that and communicate with your clients via chat or even voice. I mean, one of things we’re building out for a lot of people are AI appointment booking systems. Everyone wants a lead.
but how do you turn that lead into an appointment? And the challenge with so many times with salespeople is they’ll follow up with a lead three, four five times, but if they’re manually following up, all of a sudden all these leads that…
that haven’t been communicated with are gonna be lost. So you integrate machine learning or automation combined with artificial intelligence. you put an open-ended hook out in your follow-up. And then AI can turn that into a conversation that can drive it to a call via human or through artificial intelligence. Use email automation.
to drive all of that. So that’s what we’re doing a lot with people, but also then just teaching them how can you use artificial intelligence to have a better conversation? How do you have it understand your brain? How do you have it understand you? How do you clone yourself? Where are the blind spots that you have in your corporation? What are the…
74 roles that you wish that you had. And if you had someone, you could use them and then you can turn it into an AI project and chat GPT. You can turn it into an actual autonomous agent using Gemini or many other systems out there. There’s so much that you can do. It’s only limit is your imagination of the problems you want to solve in your business and taking the time to sit down and think through or have someone help you think through all the ways that you can.
can improve.
Federico Ramallo (29:23) Wow, that’s very interesting. mean, way that I understand how AI helps on this is because it can look for patterns that we cannot.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (29:36) Well, people see patterns. I mean, people see patterns pretty well. I mean, think about this. If you see a red sign on the side of the road, what do you need to do? Stop. If you see a yellow triangle, what do you need to do?
Federico Ramallo (29:36) And then from there you can.
to stop. Yeah.
I think that’s warning, right? That’s… Yeah. Yield. Yeah.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (29:52) Warning, warning, yield. So if we see a railroad sign,
we know, stop, and listen. People understand patterns. And that’s why we have a lot of people’s intuition. You know, if you’re married, you’re with someone, you know how they’re going to act or how they’re going to respond to something, right?
Federico Ramallo (30:12) Right. We intuitively learned those patterns.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (30:13) So we as humans, intuitively we
do. So, people who are analytical can really look at patterns and recognition and marketing and think about what a data analyst does. They look at trends and numbers and predict patterns based upon it. So we can understand patterns in human communication. AI is not at the place yet that it can do that.
but it can look at numbers, trends, and data, give us information that helps us achieve more.
Federico Ramallo (30:45) Right, right. Yeah, what I was trying to say is that the AI can find patterns faster than we can and can find patterns that sometimes we miss, right? Right, right. And it’s more, you know, we do it intuitively, but the agents can do it more, you know, predictably, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (30:55) In data, definitely in data.
And we have to make sure when we’re building agents that we structure it the right way to minimize hallucinations as as we possibly can.
Federico Ramallo (31:16) yeah, that has been a big issue.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (31:20) They like you
to like them and they say a lot of things and don’t really challenge you. So you’ve got to build it the right way.
Federico Ramallo (31:28) Right, right. The way that I see it is that the Asians want to please and, you know, and whatever you say, they’re going to say yes to everything, right? ⁓ Which could lead to bad outcomes, right? Yeah. And that’s why I’m thinking that it is becoming more and more important for us humans to guide
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (31:32) Okay.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (31:50) the AI agents with our experience because they don’t have that criteria. We do.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (31:58) Correct.
Federico Ramallo (32:01) So how do you build these patterns to build a relationship and how do you turn those relationships into revenue further down the road?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (32:11) Say that again.
Federico Ramallo (32:12) Yeah, so how do you, what patterns do you build with the AI agents to build relationships first and then turn those relationships into revenue?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (32:18) with AI.
You know, that’s interesting and it’s, it’s, challenging. And I’ve spent about three years digging into this and I’ve gotten AI agents that, know, one of the things people tell me as well, AI is great, but it doesn’t have empathy. Well, I’ve built AI that it appears to have empathy. It can ask questions and if it hears something that is concerning or challenging, it can empathize with people. So,
And now I’m going down in the direction. don’t know what your question was. I just started going.
Federico Ramallo (32:50) You
Well, we were talking about patterns, Using AI, build patterns with AI so we can build relationship and then that relationship can be turned into opportunities and revenue, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (33:06) Yes, but you asked the question that I started going down down a rabbit hole and I don’t remember what that was.
Federico Ramallo (33:09) Yeah
I don’t remember the question. think… But I find it interesting what you’re talking about that you can make agents to simulate empathy. I think that’s very clever.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (33:17) It’s okay. It’s okay.
Yes.
So prompt engineering is fun. mean, it’s like getting in human psychology of how people think and how to me, it’s almost like a game. How do I get the agent to communicate as good as or better? And one of the things that so many of my clients say is the agent’s actually answering the chat better than a human can. The agent can have a conversation. And the scary thing is most people can’t even tell that it’s fake.
But we do tell them to say that it’s, I’m an AI agent, but most people don’t hear it. You can have it have real good conversations and answer questions at a depth that most humans aren’t going to remember in a typical call center.
Federico Ramallo (34:11) Right. And you can provide a much flat level of quality on the conversations than us human can do.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (34:20) and consistent. Once you train it, it’s going to be very consistent. It doesn’t have a bad day. It doesn’t call in sick. It doesn’t take maternity leave. No, no, you know, it doesn’t get angry. You can train it to perform consistently every single day.
Federico Ramallo (34:22) Consistently.
Right, right. This reminds me of another story. Sorry, I keep bringing stories up, but I hope you like the story. But there’s a new supermarket in town, right? And I go there, beautiful place. They give sampling of ham and whatnot, right? I’m a sucker for those type of things, so I go there. Beautiful place, right?
They went overboard, the place looks beautiful, it’s new, brand new, Again, know, those patterns, you kind of get used to where things are in your supermarket, right? And then you go to a new one and you spend, I spent more time than I wanted to on finding stuff, right? ⁓ So, you know, but anyway, beautiful place, they kind of, okay.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (35:19) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (35:24) I was bought in to start shopping there. Love it. Then the my wife wants to want us to reduce our plastic consumption. So she’s she asked me not to use bags, plastic bags for when I buy vegetables. So, you know, I bring the vegetables loose. Right. And the cashier, you know, just look at me with with, you know,
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (35:40) You
Federico Ramallo (35:50) with disdain is like, you you make me work harder. You know, it’s why don’t you be a why can you be a normal person and put put it in the box? Right. He said, you know, he said it out of frustration, right, because he was trying to put them together, right into a pile and we were running out. Right. But that little thing just kind of, you know, and I got angry at that. They didn’t say anything to the guy, but
But that little act destroyed the whole experience that this supermarket put, right? ⁓
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (36:26) And you may not
go back again because of that.
Federico Ramallo (36:30) Yeah, and I keep remember that story. Eventually I went back again, sure, I’m going less frequent because of that situation, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (36:38) next time just
fill up a whole shopping cart with with individual vegetables bring it up to that guy again just to piss him off.
Federico Ramallo (36:46) Right, right. And I was thinking, why am I, you know, why am I having such a bad experience with this place? Right. Why why I don’t like it anymore. Right. And and I start connecting it was for that little comment of that little guy, you know, and, know, and it’s all those little things that make us, you know, make the decision of buy or not buy right on that particular business or that particular place.
And I think the same thing happens on all the experiences we have with a new business, right? Through the messaging, the chat and the website. And then if we call, what happens, right? Do they pick up the call quickly or, you know, it takes longer to connect, right? And I think that’s something that we as founders, entrepreneurs,
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (37:11) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (37:36) we usually neglect because we’re so focused on the operation that we don’t go back and see our own experience. What experience are we providing to the potential clients?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (37:47) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (37:48) So what is one bad way people have been using AI that you’ve seen backfires?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (37:55) I think the biggest challenge most people have with AI is they’re using it at a nursery school or preschool, kindergarten level, first grade, and they’ll just take, know, hey, write me this email or copy and paste. And they don’t give it directions. They don’t give it guardrails. They don’t tell it exactly what the outcome that they want to achieve. And they don’t ask for feedback.
on how they can perform and they don’t give the detail of the audience. They’ll just say, just write this for me. And then it sounds good because it’s written with AI, it’s grammatically correct. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges people make, or the biggest mistakes people make.
Federico Ramallo (38:38) Talking about patterns, I start recognizing patterns where people use AI generated content, right? Not only blah, blah, blah, but also blah, blah, blah, right? And now that I mentioned that, you’re probably going to remember a lot of times, a lot of messages that you see using that. yeah. Or the smell, you you smell it’s AI generated, you know, it’s…
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (38:45) Mm-hmm.
I see it too. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (39:05) feel synthetic. You don’t know, maybe you don’t know why, but you feel it. It’s very interesting.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (39:08) Yeah, it’s patterns
because they use certain words consistently and and certain punctuation and you start to recognize it.
Federico Ramallo (39:18) Right, grammatically correct, but it doesn’t resonate with people.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (39:23) Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (39:26) So if a company reached out to you and says, I want to add AI, what is the first use case you recommend starting with?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (39:34) I don’t have a specific use case. I’ll ask them what’s the biggest challenge problem you’re having? What’s the biggest bottleneck that you wish to solve? And of those bottlenecks, what’s going to either make your company the most money or save you the most money? And then from there, we can dig into that because we do it at Custom AI Solutions as well.
Federico Ramallo (39:56) interesting, interesting. So it’s based on their problems and their challenges rather than a generic solution for every.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (40:05) Yeah, mean, yes, it’s really based upon what are their bottlenecks, problems, and challenges.
Federico Ramallo (40:11) Do you also help your clients with workflow automation?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (40:16) Well, we do marketing workflow automation, sales workflow automation. I don’t do a lot in the operation side of things.
Federico Ramallo (40:25) Right, right. So you’re going back to my joke. You’re running with a wild hog behind you.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (40:35) I’m
running with the wild, so what we’ll do, we’ll go find the wild hog and then we’ll stab it and then put it on the fire and cook it for him. How’s that?
Federico Ramallo (40:41) Right.
That’s even better, yes.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (40:46) You
Federico Ramallo (40:48) So what is the story from your career where small change created a big result?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (40:56) man. I think there’s a lot of small changes that create big results. And from one little mindset shift to going out there and doing a talk or a keynote, changing a headline.
changing the first message, putting an automation sequence in place, nurturing leads for a long period of time, having a big, courageous goal and putting it out there and just making things happen. I wish that I could say there was just one. I’ll give you an example. When I was a speaker with Tony Robinson, Chet Holmes, I didn’t get paid unless I actually sold coaching or consulting or their programs.
And so I’d be speaking to entrepreneurs all the time and we’re solving problems. And this one little change in the script that I had an idea made that I was able to within 30 days increase their enrollment rate in the programs by 63.4%. And then grow it from there. And then from there.
Federico Ramallo (41:59) Wow.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (42:03) Everyone started ask the president of divisions ask, what are you doing differently than everyone else? And I changed the script. That was literally a, like a, a standard talk and presentation. And instead of just following that and using all their case studies, I would use case studies because I’ve already worked with at the time hundreds and then thousands of entrepreneurs. I would use stories.
from people that I actually knew that would relate to the people in the room. So instead of just talking something in generality of solving a marketing or business problem, based upon now knowing who’s in the room, I would give them case studies using this kind of information, this strategy, and someone that they could relate to using it. And that one little shift increased the enrollment rate into their programs. And also people wanted me to coach them.
Federico Ramallo (42:57) Right, right. It’s a combination of personality that they like you, but also that what you’re saying resonates with them.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (43:06) Yeah, so there’s always little distinctions in shifts you can make.
Federico Ramallo (43:10) Right. And the thing that you mentioned is that you were, well, the way that I interpret it is you were talking to them without exposing them, right? Because you were talking about somebody else that they can relate, right? ⁓
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (43:26) Yeah. And
then you’re having a conversation with them versus talking to them. And the funny thing is the entire company’s enrollment rate went up once I shared what I was doing. And then we started meeting every week to go through each of the strategies and how I was presenting it versus others.
Federico Ramallo (43:44) Right. Right. Yeah. What I’m trying to convey is that if you show up and saying, what you are doing is wrong and here’s why, that creates friction and rejection, right? Because it touches their ego, right? It’s too close to their hearts, right? But if you talk about a third person that it’s very similar to them, right? You can talk about them through the example, right?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (43:54) Yes.
You talk to their
unconscious mind without them even knowing it.
Federico Ramallo (44:14) Right. Right. Right. And I think that that’s a that’s a much resonates more with people because you’re not talking about, you know, something that it’s, you know, a generic example. You’re talking about something that can resonate with them, that they can feel represented with with the example. Right. But still being being safe for their their ego. Right. I mean, we all have our own egos that that, you know, whether we like it or not.
You know, if somebody give us feedback, it’s hard to hear feedback, right? It’s not easy, right? So, interesting.
So, can you tell us a little bit more about what is the role of the mindset play when a result of not showing up?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (44:57) I think mindset is everything. That’s the number one thing you need to work on your mindset, your belief system, how you communicate and talk with yourself. That when I speak with with entrepreneurs, it’s not just taking action. It’s focusing in on, yeah, you deserve, you deserve great results. You deserve. The other thing is, you know, think about this. mean, one of the most powerful books ever written was thinking grow rich. Why?
It’s about mindset. It’s about belief system. It’s about who you surround yourself with. If you aren’t getting the results that you want, what could you do differently? Who are you surrounding yourself with that you can up level your thinking, your beliefs, and then have a group of people that you can ask for support? mean, the mind is the most powerful thing in the world. And so if you’re not getting results, read good books, listen to good podcasts, listen to meditations about
belief and confidence and all of a sudden you’ll start acting and operating differently.
Federico Ramallo (45:57) Right, right. It’s the mindset becomes it’s a first step toward greatness, right? Because, you know, then you can work towards improving yourself, taking feedback as we were talking about before, doing better. And then the results are going to come.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (46:06) Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (46:17) David, I truly appreciate you being here today. We’re running out of time. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (46:24) Just whatever it is, if you want to achieve it, go do it. If your marketing is not working the way that you want, look at how can you serve your customer better than anyone else, find out the problems and communicate it. And I’ve got some free resources on my site, businessnitrogen.ai. You can go check them out.
and businessnitrogen.com gives you a little bit more on marketing and sales, believe in yourself and take massive action.
Federico Ramallo (46:54) Amazing, amazing. I hope we inspire the audience to take more action. And I believe that your story, your insights are going to give them a lot to do. Yeah.
David Asarnow BusinessNitrogen (47:02) Okay.
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Federico Ramallo (47:10) Thank you, David.