I landed my first AI Concierge clients by accident.
I didn't have some fancy funnel or ad strategy and the clients didn't come from content. I was telling people I already knew what I was up to, and a few of them leaned in and asked if I could do it for them.
The "talk about what you do to people you already know" strategy works extremely well, regardless of what you're selling.
One of our community members shared proof of this on our call last week when he walked us through how he landed two fractional Chief AI Officer retainers. One at $6,000 a month. One at $7,500 a month.
Same as me, he didn't have any sort of funnel or intricate sales framework he used to close these bigger deals. He had never heard the term "fractional CAIO" until a client used it on him.
Here's why it worked, and how you can copy his strategy this week.
This operator is a general contractor by trade. He's 100% non-technical. By his own description, he can't read a line of code.
Eight months ago he started using Claude to rebuild the software his construction company runs on. Project management, CRM, accounting. By the end he had replaced $50,000 to $60,000 worth of software and had a live demo of AI inside a real business.
Deal one:
A friend who runs a commercial construction company invited him onto a call with his team just to talk about AI. He didn't come with an agenda because his friend just wanted him to show his team what he'd built.
Afterward the friend came back with an offer: be my fractional Chief AI Officer for $6,000 a month. The client named the role and the price.
Deal two:
A past client mentioned on a podcast that he was about to start building with AI. The operator called and asked if they'd be interested in hiring him to build for them instead of them having to learn these skills from scratch.
He came back with a $4,000 project scope and the client said forget the project, give me a monthly number. He said $7,500. Done.
The lesson here is that a multi-thousand-dollar monthly retainer is a warm traffic offer.
Pitching AI Concierge to someone who came in off a Facebook ad is a hard sell. It's much easier to pitch this service to someone who already knows, likes, and trusts you. Both clients bought because of his existing reputation and proof.
There's no reason to go cold until you've exhausted your warm. Most people never exhaust their warm.
Here's how you can replicate this strategy:
Step 1: Build the proof inside your own business first.
Pick one workflow you run every week and rebuild it with AI. It needs to be real, yours, and something you can screen share in five minutes.
Step 2: Tell your warm network what you're doing.
Past clients, vendors, friends who own businesses. Not a pitch. A call to share what you've been building. The people who lean in are your prospects. Start with the last three people who paid you for anything.
Step 3: Let them dip a toe.
If they're not ready for a retainer, sell an AI Assessment first. Someone who paid you $1,000 for an assessment is far more likely to take the next step than someone you asked for $6,000 a month on the first call.
Step 4: Structure the retainer around outcomes, not hours.
His agreements are one 1-hour call per week plus a quarterly full-day deep dive. No hourly commitment. They agree on what gets built, he gives a timeline, they pay on the first of the month, and he works.
Step 5: Kill the risk with a month-one guarantee.
Steal this: "Let me do it for you for a month. If you're not happy, I return every dollar and you keep everything I built. We part ways as friends."
He passed the test with both clients. If a prospect wants more defined terms, ask four questions:
- What do you need to see to feel comfortable?
- What should the process look like?
- What do you want our interaction to look like?
- What deliverables would make this exciting for you?
Build the offer from their answers.
From 2 clients retainers he's pulling in $13,500 a month (profit), from personal proof plus two phone calls to people who already trusted him.
- Corey
A few notes/tweets/cool things sourced from the AI community.
1)
Brb adding this page to my website immediately.
2)
The coolest Jev use case I've seen.
3)
Meta is entering the enterprise AI space.
Thanks for reading the Corey's Notes newsletter. I'd appreciate it if you sent it to a friend that might find it interesting.
Be sure to check out t he Build With AI podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. If you're a non-technical entrepreneur who wants to learn how to integrate AI into your business, you'll love it.
Be back next week.
-Corey
