Recommended by AI: The New Rules of Lead Generation Reviewed | James Dooley Interviews Paul Truscott

James Dooley (0:00)

Recommended by AI, The New Rules of Lead Generation Book Review. Today, I'm joined with Paul Truscott, one of the co-authors of the book.

And Paul, can you just explain a little bit about what we're talking about, about the new rules of lead generation and why business owners should be looking at LLMs to also drive them new inquiries and not just thinking of traditional 10 blue links within Google?

Paul Truscott (0:30)

100%. Okay, so at the moment, right, it depends on the industry, but people were probably thinking, look, things like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, is going to be a very small number of the leads that I might receive. And probably that's true, but it's a growing number, right?

So if we wind back to the mid-90s, people ignored the Internet because it was small, and they said, oh, yes, not really anything to worry about. Well, that panned out to be slightly a wrong prediction for those people, right? And earlier doctors were the ones who really saw significant growth in their businesses. And this is going to be the same, right? So get in there early, get your business cited, and also by doing that, you are building a moat for your business that makes it more difficult for competitors, the late comers to the game, to dislodge you from being the recommended business in your niche. But also the major thing about this, as you know yourself, James, is the quality of the leads coming to you. Because currently 88 percent of people, now this is hard to believe, but it's true, 88 percent of people believe the recommendation given to them by an AI.

It's scary.

James Dooley (1:58)

It's absolutely frightening. When we're looking at our conversion rates and we look at it from a cold web lead on Google versus a lead that's come free from ChatGBT or from a large language model, it's similar if not better than a word of mouth recommendation. Now, word of mouth recommendation is a friend has basically come along and said, they are brilliant, go and use them. And it's normally just as long as you meet the budget, the job is yours. And they are treating it like a friend or a family member has said, use them, which is scary because you've always restricted by word of mouth on the volume of leads of what you can be generating. Yet with AI, it can become your 24-7 sales engine that's getting you an increase in leads.

Paul Truscott (2:46)

And I think what's driving this, James, is that when people go to these LLMs and they put in simple factual searches, the information comes back and you know it to be true, okay? And then you get presented recommendations in the same format. And so you will naturally jump to the conclusion, oh, well, that's true, too, then. Like if I put in Best Lead Generation Company in the UK and it comes back with a specific result, I'm probably just going to believe that and not do any further research. Now, it may be true. It may be an accurate result, but it may not be.

So, you know, but the point is at the moment that people are responding to that and they're picking up the phone with their wallet already open, ready to book you. And that's the important thing. So, this can't be ignored. Well, I'd say to anyone, ignore it at your peril, because at the end of the day, it's going to grow. But even right now, just because of the quality of the customers that are coming to your door, like I say, they've got their wallets open. And another thing, you've written a fantastic book, you know, on decision engine optimization. Don't want to delve too much into that, but that is part and parcel of this, that people are now, even if they find out the initial information from a different online source. So let's say they do look at traditional 10 Blue Links or Google My Business Listings or such like. They're then taking the top ones from there and feeding those into an AI and saying which is the best option out of these three.

So you can't get away from the fact that people are using and believing the recommendation however it comes about. So you can't ignore this anymore. I think we've reached the point where you mustn't ignore it.

James Dooley (4:42)

I completely agree. So it's not just top of the funnel discovery. It's also bottom of the funnel. So with regards to the authors of the book named Recommended by AI, The New Rules of Lead Generation.

The authors are AI James Dooley, Luke Baston, who is a brilliant franchise SEO, Scott Calland, who's doing a lot of UK lead generation, Abigail Dooley, who is taking businesses to the next level via high quality lead generation within the UK as well. Paul Truscott, yourself an absolute legend when it comes to local SEO, Google Business Profiles and generating leads for local businesses. Vaibhav Sharder, who's doing a lot of auto blogging strategies with regards to AI, which is helping businesses generate more leads. Adrian Ponce Del Rosario, who is a Filipino agency, doing quite a lot in the US market for lead generation. Peter Jones, an absolute legend when it comes to vibe coding new websites, taking business on to the next level via lead generation strategies.