IMPACT+

A few days before this recording, I realized something strange. I knew OpenAI had launched advertising inside ChatGPT. I'd seen the headlines. But when I actually thought about it, I couldn't remember ever seeing one of these ads myself. Not one. That question turned into this whole conversation. If OpenAI ads are such a big deal, why hadn't I seen a single one?

Every time Stephanie and I wrap up an event, we're texting each other before we've even left the building. "Save that for next time." "We have to change this." After Chicago, those texts added up to something bigger than a few tweaks. A lot has changed in how AI recommends businesses in just the last six months. We've learned more from our AI visibility research. Our coaches are seeing different things work with clients. And we realized that getting recommended by AI is only half the story.

Getting your first few hundred reviews is mostly about doing good work and asking. Getting your next few thousand, faster, across dozens of markets at once, is a completely different problem, and it's one most companies never actually solve. They just keep doing the same single ask and hoping volume takes care of itself.

What if your next 50 pieces of content have already been created, just not written down yet? That's essentially what Ruan Marinho, founder of Develomark and SplashDash, showed me in this episode. One of his pest control clients gets about 150 calls every month. Customers ask about bats in their attics, pricing, service areas, specific pest problems, and dozens of other questions. Ruan realized that those conversations aren't just sales and service calls.

Five minutes. That's genuinely how long it takes to switch on a tool that tells you whether AI is recommending your business or not. I didn't expect that when I first heard it, but if you're on HubSpot's Marketing Pro, it's been sitting in your account this whole time. You could go buy a standalone AI visibility tool for about fifty bucks a month, and it works fine, but it knows nothing about your business.

Written by   |  Edited by Last updated on August 26, 2026 Leading vs. Lagging Indicators: Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated 8:46 Some of the most important work a sales or business development team does will not show up on a revenue report for months. A new channel, a partnership, a longer and more considered deal, all of it can be moving in exactly the right direction while looking, from the outside, like nothing is happening at all.

Nine months ago, Tori Salman was barely using AI. Today, she's built a system that can take a blog topic from idea to keyword research to SME interview scheduling to a first draft, while she still makes the decisions along the way. And here's the surprising part: Tori wasn't hired to be an AI expert. She was already working inside the business, running operations and wearing a dozen other hats. Robin Martin simply recognized that she was the kind of person who would figure it out.

Sales leaders have been saying the same line for years: if it's not in the CRM, it doesn't exist. Brian McVicker told me that's exactly why the mandate never works. His point stuck with me. Ask a rep to do data entry,  and you've handed them work with a zero percent closing rate and a zero-dollar payoff. Instead of treating the CRM like a compliance tool, Brian believes it should make salespeople more effective and efficient.

Reddit shows up in more than 40% of AI answers, making it one of the most influential sources shaping what people see when they ask AI for information. So why isn't Reddit part of more marketing plans? The answer isn't as simple as creating an account and sharing your best content. Reddit has its own rules, moderators, and culture, and if you show up looking like you're there to promote your business, you'll probably get called out or banned.

If you're using AI to write your content, build your website, or cut your videos, it can make your marketing faster. But it can't make bad marketing good. That's something I've been thinking about a lot as AI tools continue to evolve. Every week, there's a new feature, platform, or capability that promises to make our marketing easier. But as Vin Gaeta and I talked about in this episode, there's a problem with jumping straight into those tools: AI can't know what good looks like if you don't.