EP135: Using AI in RFP Proposals—featuring Stephanie Nivinskus
Can you leverage AI to write RFP proposals for your business?
Since ChatGPT came on the scene last November, people have divided into two camps: Some folks are afraid of the technology, and others think it’s a magic bullet that will write all their copy with minimal effort on their part.
But Stephanie Nivinskus contends that when it comes to AI, we should be careful but not scared.
So, what’s the best way for small business owners use tools like ChatGPT to write better proposal responses? Are there other AI apps that we should know about?
Stephanie is the CEO and Certified AI Marketing Consultant behind SizzleForce Marketing, a firm that combines the power of AI and human intelligence to help growing, mission-driven companies execute digital marketing solutions.
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, Stephanie explains what’s wrong with dropping an RFP question in ChatGPT and simply copy-pasting the answer.
We discuss how to train ChatGPT on your company’s differentiators before it helps you write content and why you still need a human editor to work together with the bot.
Listen in for Stephanie’s insight on the privacy and copyright issues associated with artificial intelligence and learn how to choose the best AI tools for your business goals!
Key Takeaways
What inspired Stephanie’s decision to go all-in on AI in her marketing business
Why using ChatGPT to write effective copy is not as simple as asking the bot a question
What it means to ‘train the bot’ and why it’s so important
What’s wrong with dropping an RFP question in ChatGPT and copy-pasting the answer
How to train ChatGPT on your company’s differentiators before it helps you write RFP content
Why you still need a human editor in conjunction with AI writing tools
Why Stephanie recommends Hemingway for writing to a specific grade level
How AI can help you build credibility through consistent content and competitive research
The biggest mistakes people make when it comes to using AI
How to choose the best AI tools for your business goals
What privacy and copyright issues we should be concerned about when it comes to AI
Stephanie’s favorite AI tools for writing and image creation
Connect with Stephanie
Resources
RFP Success Show EP135 Transcription
(00:00):
You are listening to The RFP Success Show with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20%, 30%, and even 50% and meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:24):
Hello everybody. Welcome to the R F P Success Show, where we share strategies and information to help you win more business through RFPs. I am your host, Lisa Rehurek, founder and CEO of the R F P Success Company, and I would like to introduce you to our guest for today's episode, Stephanie Nivinskus. Stephanie, did I get that right?
Stephanie Nivinskus (00:44):
You did. I'm so proud of you!
Lisa Rehurek (00:47):
Yay. She's CEO and certified AI Marketing Consultants at Sizzle Force Marketing. That was a mouthful. Sizzle Force Marketing. I love it. The reason that I wanted to have Stephanie on as my guest is because as we all know, AI is hot, hot, hot right now. I had the pleasure of meeting her at a conference a couple of weeks ago and I was super intrigued by what she had to say about AI and so we're talking AI, we're talking proposals. This is exciting. Stephanie, welcome to the show.
Stephanie Nivinskus (01:21):
Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
Lisa Rehurek (01:24):
Yeah, this is going to be good because we haven't really done a full episode yet on AI, and I think that it's a question in everybody's minds that are responding to RFPs where they're like, how can we use AI? So we're going to dig in, but before we do that, Stephanie, tell us a little bit about yourself, your company, Sizzle Force Marketing, and maybe a little bit how you got into this focus on AI.
Stephanie Nivinskus (01:48):
Yeah, well, I've been in marketing my entire career. I started in 1995, so I'm getting old. That's the summary there. It's been 28 years since I started, and yeah, I kind of always knew that I wanted to do something like this and actually studied journalism, planned to be a reporter, and in the middle of school had a really terrible professor and changed the course of my whole life because I ended up getting a job at the newspaper back when people used to read them. Do you remember those days? A long time.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Stephanie
Stephanie Nivinskus (02:28):
At the time, free internet at the time. It was a very cool job and I got a job working in the advertising department, writing copy for the ads and found out that I loved it. And 28 years later here I am still in marketing, still writing, still developing strategies to market companies. And so the story goes, I started my company in 2009.
(02:58):
We've gone through a lot of iterations. I think a lot of small businesses do, You know, evolutions of like, okay, this is our focus. Oh, okay, well actually we're better at this. And so we've had some of that happen along the way. Fast forward to last November when chat GPT came on the scene, and that was a game changer in my industry, because even though we had used AI to some extent until then, there's an app called the Hemmingway app and it helps you clarify the way that you write things. It's all AI, but nobody talked about that unless you were a copywriter. The rest of the world didn't maybe book writers, but that was about it. When chat GPT came on the scene and then the media dug in, it became a tool for everyone, and all of a sudden everyone thought that they were a copywriter overnight. And I'm like, yo, you can't do that. Fast forward to a few months later, we made a decision as a company to go all in on AI everything because it was very clear that this is the now and this is something that everyone is going to be using themselves. And so I went on a mission to figure out how can I become the master of this emerging technology capitalizing on 28 years of professional experience doing this and merging the two together to get explosive results. And here we are.
Lisa Rehurek (04:48):
Well, I love it. At the conference, I got to hear Stephanie up on stage doing there's a quick little pitch thing at this event. We get to get up and do a 32nd pitch, and she got up and did that. And so what I loved about that is just it was very clear to me what you did and what's interesting in the marketing space is that's a lot of times hard to distinguish yourself because there's so many pieces of the marketing puzzle. So I love that so much. And when you and I talked the other day, one of the things that you talked about was training the bot. So I want to really dive in on that. The first question I want to ask you though is when people are working with AI, can they just go into Chat GPT and ask a question and pretty much get what they're looking for? I mean, is it that simple or is there more to it? And of course that's a leading question because based on your training the bot, I know there's more to it, but I want you to talk about that. I think that's what everybody's doing right now. Lemme just go drop this into Chat GPT and I'll get a result, and life is good, but there's more to it than that, right?
Stephanie Nivinskus (05:54):
Yeah. So the short answer to the question, can you just do that? Is it that simple? It can be. However, the results that you get, I'm going to say will be mediocre at best. Now, if you're not a writer, if writing has always been challenging for you, especially when it comes to writing marketing assets, you might go into Chat GPT and get something that I would say is mediocre, and you might be like, oh my gosh, this is amazing, right?
(06:29):
And that would make sense. That is a normal way that things could work. However, in order to actually create content and copy that moves people toward your desired goal, for example, clicking buy now, clicking to schedule an appointment or whatever action you want people to take as a result of seeing whatever content you're putting out there, that is not nearly as simple as it appears to be, and you can get mediocre stuff from Chat GPT without training it, but it's probably not going to convert for you nearly as well as it would if you trained the bot.
Lisa Rehurek (07:19):
So what does training the bot mean? We're kind of touching on it, but can you go a little bit deeper and what does that even mean? Training the bots?
Stephanie Nivinskus (07:26):
Yeah. So I like to think of, and this applies to pretty much every AI tool, but let's talk about chat GPT specifically. With Chat GPT, ou could think of it as a robot, which it actually is. A robot that knows absolutely nothing about you, and it knows absolutely nothing about your customers and it knows nothing about your products or services. So, you're asking it to write something to promote all of these things, but it doesn't know anything. So it's going to give you very generic stuff, unless you train it. So when you train it, I like to train my bots the same way I train my human copywriters. So I have an agency, I've hired copywriters for years to work at my agency, and we do something in the agency world called the Creative Brief. Creative Brief is something that is completed before any assignment is started, it's step one, okay?
(08:30):
And it talks about what is the goal of this asset that we're creating? Who is the audience that's going to be looking at it? What medium are we going to be using? What is the call to action that we want them to take at the end. What tone do we want this to be in? Are we going to be friendly and conversational? Are we going to be really buttoned up? All of those things. When you take those elements of a creative brief and you give it to Chat GPT, it has a level of understanding about your request that it can dial in Ten million times better.
Lisa Rehurek (09:11):
Wow.
Stephanie Nivinskus (09:12):
And you get the difference in your results are literally like jaw dropping. You'll be like, oh my word. I can't believe I just got that. And it'll happen in seconds. That happens.
Lisa Rehurek (09:26):
That's amazing. Well, and our audience is very much made up. This is an R F P show, so our audience is listening for, let's think about AI from a proposal perspective. How can I use it to respond to RFPs? And one of the questions that we've gotten before from people is like, can't we just take the question that the RFP is asking and drop it into chat G P T and have it give us a result? What would you say to that if somebody asked you that? Can we just do that? Will that be good enough to submit that answer?
Stephanie Nivinskus (10:01):
Well, do you want to win the RFP or do you just want to submit the R F P? I'm sorry to be bold and in your face, but I mean, that's really the truth. If you copy and paste what you get, you're going to sound like everybody else that's going for the same RFP and you won't win it.
Lisa Rehurek (10:20):
Yeah. So resonate with that. We tell our people all the time, stop blending in, stop being boring. So we can do that. And then it sounds like the training of the bot could help that if you trained it to understand your company's differentiators, to understand your company's value proposition. Is that part of what you do when you're training the bot?
Stephanie Nivinskus (10:46):
Absolutely. Yep. We're going to cover everything from, like you said, the unique value proposition, the differentiators, the tone, the style, the cadence. We're going to do a deep dive in the products and services that you sell. We're going to talk about everything that makes them special. We're going to be talking about you as the CEO and what makes you different, what makes you capable. If I were training a bot specifically to do RFPs, I would have a very specific way that I trained it. It's not train the bot one way, and it applies to every project you want. Okay? So you wouldn't train the bot for an R F P and then the next day say, Hey, write me a script for a TikTok.
Lisa Rehurek (11:37):
Okay, that makes sense.
Stephanie Nivinskus (11:39):
It's not going to do, you're going to get compromised quality. You need to give it one very specific initiative, and then you need to train according to that. So depending on what the RFP is asking you for, you have to step back and look at the questions and be like, okay, well, if I were going to answer these questions, what would be some really important things that I need to dial in and I need to cover? Whatever those things are, those are the things you need to train the bot in so that then it can produce the results you need.
Lisa Rehurek (12:14):
I love that. So it sounds like a decent amount of work, maybe upfront, but then it can really help an ongoing basis. And we have clients that use AI and then we come in and we then take that data, that writing that they've done, and we make it much more personalized and we do the things that we need to do to make it a winning proposal, but it's a great place to start. General AI is kind of really good for that, giving you something instead of nothing where you're looking.
Stephanie Nivinskus (12:46):
Exactly. And I'm a firm, firm, firm believer that AI left to work autonomously is dangerous and irresponsible,
(12:58):
And so people like you are still so needed because AI's capabilities are limited. It can do a lot, but it cannot replace what a human editor brings to the table. It simply cannot do that at this point, and I have spent thousands of hours on this at this point, so I can tell you this is coming from a very educated perspective. This isn't just a subjective opinion. This is after spending thousands and thousands of hours testing things and seeing what creates the best quality, you have to, if you use AI, it's great starting point and you can get some pretty good stuff, pretty good stuff. When you want to go after a huge RFP and you're like, I got to land this baby, this is a game changer for my company. You absolutely need Lisa and team on the other side of what AI has created for you. You need both.
Lisa Rehurek (14:02):
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for saying that. That's our belief as well, and that isn't coming from ego of like, oh my gosh, we don't want to be without a job. I mean, we really want to help people understand how to use it better, but there's still a place for the human piece of it. One of the things too that we talk to our clients about all the time is write more simply. So write to a sixth grade reading level, and it seems too, AI might be good for some of that. Write your answer and then drop it into Chat GPT and ask it to simplify it and turn it into a sixth grade reading level. Can that be done?
Stephanie Nivinskus (14:41):
It can. I'll tell you, Chat GPT will not do that as well as an app called Hemingway. Okay. Hemmingway like Ernest, I think it's Hemmingway, do a PPP or Hemmingwayapp.com. It's actually, they have a free version of it and you can assign it a grade level, and it will literally do an analysis of the grade level of how it reads, and it will suggest how to make it more readable at a lower reading level and not because the people reading it are dumb, not that they're dumb, it's that our brains are busy and cluttered and everyone is in a rush trying to do too much in too little time. So we need to make things simple for people.
Lisa Rehurek (15:29):
Yeah, it is funny. I train a lot on that sixth grade reading level, and initially people are always a little caught off guard. Well, I don't want them to feel stupid. And I'm like, trust me, they're not going to feel stupid. You're going to see it completely differently. Most magazines and public information is written to that level, so super funny.
Stephanie Nivinskus (15:52):
Yeah, general rule of thumb, actually, what I have been told is to write, and this is going to make you kind of go like, what? Really? But to write at a fifth grade reading level.
Lisa Rehurek (16:02):
Interesting.
Stephanie Nivinskus (16:04):
Because when you write at a fifth grade reading level, people really don't have to think very hard about what you're trying to say. They just get it a lot about our school system, but that's another topic.
Lisa Rehurek (16:19):
It's true. It ensures that the evaluators can understand it when they're reading three or four or 20 or 30 other responses and they're having to evaluate them. The easier you can make it for them, the better. So I love that. I have not played with Hemmingway, but I'm going to check that out for sure.
Stephanie Nivinskus (16:35):
And you don't need the paid version of that one. I mean, it's great if you intend to use it a lot, but the free one's great. I love hemmingway, and I've been using that one for, oh gosh, five, six years. Yeah, it's great.
Lisa Rehurek (16:46):
Well, this has been great. I want to talk a little bit about just marketing in general, because when you and I had our conversation, we were talking about building credibility and building relationships and social posts and all of that. How can AI be a part of that credibility building piece?
Stephanie Nivinskus (17:09):
I think AI is great at building credibility. Oh, gosh. There's a lot of ways to slice and dice that. One way it can help you build credibility is just by making sure you have consistent content going out and that you're not having a good week where you get all of your posts out there and then you have two busy weeks and you go missing in action, and then you come back for two days and then you go missing in action again, which is a common flight amongst entrepreneurs. We're all juggling 15,000 hats at the same time. So one thing that it can do, credibility is built on consistency. That's one of the core elements of credibility. Another way of establishing credibility using AI is by doing some competitive research and figuring out how you're different. AI can really help you speed up the competitive intelligence game.
Lisa Rehurek (18:07):
I love that so much because that's, even for us, it's a pain in the butt to figure out that competitive piece.
Stephanie Nivinskus (18:15):
So it can really help you when you, again, it comes down to how you train the bot, but if you train the bot with the right prompts, it can help you identify some differentiators that you probably didn't even realize you had. Right? I mean, I can tell you when we do competitive intelligence reporting for a lot of our private clients and when we do it, I don't think there has ever been even one time where I didn't come to the table and say, oh, well, such and such is a differentiator for you. How do you feel about that? And the CEO of the company will be like, really? We thought everyone was doing that, or is that really a differentiator? We didn't even realize that was a differentiator. I'm like, that is money. That is money on the table. So yeah, it can really help with building your credibility that way too.
Lisa Rehurek (19:14):
That is fantastic. I just taking a note over here, like, Ooh, I want to play around with that from the competitive standpoint as well. What's one of the biggest mistakes you see people making when it comes to AI?
Stephanie Nivinskus (19:29):
I think the biggest mistake is getting in there and expecting it to give you amazing results when you don't give it amazing stuff to work with. And that all comes back to training the bot, right? So there's a saying, garbage and garbage out. Everyone and their brother over the past nine months has been selling a thousand Chat GPT prompts for seven bucks.
Lisa Rehurek (19:56):
True!
Stephanie Nivinskus (19:57):
Okay. They're garbage. 99% of them are garbage. Every once in a while, you find a good one in there, but most of them are really, really worthless. Keep your seven bucks and go buy yourself a burrito. Okay? That's a better way to spend your money, I'll tell you that, you have to have your expectations in the right place. You feed it the right data, it will give you the right stuff. You feed it weak data, it will give you weak results. So that's one thing. Again, it all comes back to training the bot. You bot it, it's trained, and now you have an AI employee working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, never asking for a raise, never calling in sick, or any of that other stuff that we deal with when we work with humans. So yeah, that is one big pitfall.
(20:57):
I think another big pitfall is becoming an AI hoarder. This is an interesting thing, because there's new AIs popping up every single day, and some people are terrified of it and they don't do any of it. Some people dabble and some people buy every single thing. They see. You quickly become an AI hoarder, and then it's like time to write some content or generate content in some other media form. And you don't have one tool you use. You have 17 to choose from, choose, and then you get stuck using 17 different tools at different times, and you never really become good at using one of them. You just are always using everything as a beginner.
Lisa Rehurek (21:48):
And when you're talking about training the bot, it's not universal. It doesn't cover all of those. It's like you've got to train the Chat GPT bot. You've got to train the Hemmingway bot. So if you've got 17, you've got to train all 17 of them. Am I understanding that correct?
Stephanie Nivinskus (22:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Hemmingway is a little bit different. It's just a little bit different in the way that it works, but I could compare it to mid Journey. Okay. That's another pretty popular one that a lot of people are talking about these days for image creation, learning how to train a bot on Chat GPT, and learning how to train a bot on Mid Journey is night and day, totally different language, different platform, different process, different all the way around. So then that leaves business owners with some choices to make, right? They can either decide, well, I really want to know this stuff, and so I'm going to put in the sweat equity and figure out how to use all these things. Or they can have somebody on their staff do it. They can dish it off and say, Hey, guess what your job is today? You get to learn all this stuff. Or they can hire out and have somebody else who's an expert in AI marketing tools do it for them, someone who already knows how to maximize it and get the best results. But it's like anything else, we have to make choices on what's more important our time or our money. Right?
Lisa Rehurek (23:16):
Right. And it feels too like that when you were talking about that initial assessment that you guys, I can't remember what you called it, but a questionnaire that you're asking all these questions might be when you understand your goals and objectives or for you, your client's goals and objectives, then it makes it easier to choose which platform you should be focused on instead of just willy-nilly picking. Would that be a correct statement?
Stephanie Nivinskus (23:46):
Yeah, absolutely. Because there's so many different, let's talk about writing. Okay, AI writing tools. There are more than I can count at this point available on the market, and every day somebody's like, oh, what do you think of such and such? And I'm like, haven't heard of that one. And this is all I do all day every day. That's how many there are. And there are certain ones that are really awesome at doing optimized content. If you are a company that is putting out blogs and you rely on showing up at the top of a Google search, you're going to want to use this AI tool. But if that's not how you get your business, I can say my husband owns an architecture firm.
(24:42):
He does commercial architecture. People don't Google to find him, right? It's not how it works for him to attract new business. So he doesn't care about that. He cares about other things that he needs to do. He cares about what he's going to be posting on LinkedIn. So now could you use the optimized blogging tool to write LinkedIn posts? You could, but they wouldn't be as good. There's a different tool that's better at that. And so I don't want to encourage hoarding at all, but I do want to encourage the deliberate, or I should say, intentional selection of tools based on your goals. And a lot of times when we're going through the bot training process with a client, we'll ask them questions and they'll be like, I've never thought about that before. And so you kind of get a two for one out of it in the fact that it also helps you even understand your own brand better.
Lisa Rehurek (25:48):
Yep. I can totally see that.
Stephanie Nivinskus (25:50):
Yeah.
Lisa Rehurek (25:51):
Okay. So what should we be concerned about when it comes to AI? Some of our corporate clients have said to me, our company has said no using AI because then our proprietary information will be out there. What are some of those things that we smaller businesses should be a little bit more concerned about?
Stephanie Nivinskus (26:12):
Okay. Well, let me preface this answer by saying I'm not a lawyer, so talk to your lawyer, but I will say, based on my opinion from one business owner to another, I would not use the name of your company when doing AI prompting. I would be more generic. Instead of saying ABC company, I would say, I have a company in the retail shoe space, something like that. Instead of calling it a ABC shoes or whatever. Okay. Also, I think it's really important to understand there are certain AIs that are training based on your data, and there are others that are not. Okay. Chat GPT has made it very clear, not that anybody ever reads the terms of services, but they have made it very clear that they are training their models based on your input and your information is not private.
(27:21):
There is another AI company called Anthropic. They have a product called Claude, and Claude does not train its learning model based on your data. So for some people that are real concerned about that, Claude might be a better fit for you than Chat GPT or Jasper, or one of the other billion options you have. But then you also have to consider what's the end goal and is this tool really good at the end goal? So there's a lot to weigh. I think it's really, really important for everyone to consult an attorney if they're going to be using this stuff because there risk, some risk involved. This is emerging technology, and none of us really know what will happen. At what point will the government get involved and say, well, you can't do this or you can do this. Right? At what point will copyright be considered infringed upon if you're using it versus it won't be right? There's a lot of question marks, so keep your eyes open, be careful, but don't be scared. Okay. I just want to say that again. So that can really sink in. Be careful, but don't be scared. Right? Cautiously optimistic. That's the way I like to look at everything when it comes to emerging technology. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Lisa Rehurek (28:50):
Yeah, you actually said something on our pre-call, take reasonable precautions, but don't live in fear.
Stephanie Nivinskus (28:58):
There you go. Wow, I'm smart.
Lisa Rehurek (29:00):
It was good, Stephanie. I wrote that down, because I love that quote so much. Take the precautions, but don't be scared of it. And when it first came out, I remember I was feeling scared about it. I was like, oh my gosh, we got that going to take our business away from us. That's kind of the first initial reaction, but I'm not in the short term, maybe someday, but in the short term, and we just continue to evolve with it. So no more fear. But I know that there's that initial feeling of like, oh my gosh, what's this going to do? And I talk to a lot of people and they're just scared in general of AI. And so I love that quote. So much takeaway.
Stephanie Nivinskus (29:36):
I think a lot of people have seen too many versions of the Terminator, and I think Hollywood has done a good job of scaring us. Hollywood has done a great job of scaring us. And so what I like to say, because there's this whole camp that's like, I would never use AI, I prefer humans, and it's kind of like a flag that they proudly wave. And then there's the people on the opposing side that are like, this is the world we live in. Get with it. I do believe this is the world we live in now. Just when the internet became a thing, just like when social media became a thing, just like when driving a car became a thing, instead of pulling a buggy with a horse, the world changes and we need to adapt with it being reasonable with the fact that things are changing and we've got to be agile. We have to practice agility through all of this.
Lisa Rehurek (30:41):
I agree. I agree. And when you said just when we started to drive cars, well soon enough it'll be just when we stop driving cars because they bore us, right?
Stephanie Nivinskus (31:52):
Yeah. One other thing that came to my mind when you were talking is I think that people often will stay away from things out fear and miss the boats. And that's equally dangerous. That's equally dangerous to all of this. As far as it replacing humans. I don't believe it's going to replace most humans. I believe it's going to call humans to a higher level of intelligence. I think it's going, you know, I'm a writer. If anyone was going to get replaced, it probably would've been me, but I just pivoted and learned how to use the tool better than 95% of the population, and I'm still gainfully employed.
Lisa Rehurek (31:44):
And you'll be for a long time, and
Stephanie Nivinskus (31:46):
You'll be too.
Lisa Rehurek (31:48):
Yeah, absolutely. So we've talked about some of the tools. We've talked about Jasper and we've talked about Hemmingway. Any other tools that are your favorites that would be good to share with our audience?
Stephanie Nivinskus (31:59):
Let me think. Okay. I dig Claude. That's one that I mentioned too. Grammarly is a must in my world, and I think in anybody that's doing an RFP, if you're not using Grammarly, you're making a big mistake.
Lisa Rehurek (32:14):
And that's one's been around for...
Stephanie Nivinskus (32:17):
Forever!
Lisa Rehurek (32:18):
Or prevalent in the everyday user space then.
Stephanie Nivinskus (32:21):
Yeah. Yeah. That's been around for a long time, and we didn't call it AI, it's just a tool, but now we're like, oh, I've actually been using for a long time and I didn't even know it, and we weren't scared until someone called it AI, and then all of a sudden we got scared. Yes. Right. Isn't that funny how that works if you really break it down? That's the truth. I love Mid Journey. Okay. We actually are going through a rebrand, a slow rebrand, because we do all of our client work and we take forever doing our own stuff, but we're in the process of going through a rebrand right now, and almost all of the imagery that we're using is generated through Mid Journey.
Lisa Rehurek (33:08):
Interesting.
Stephanie Nivinskus (33:09):
It's beautiful and it's unique. You go to so many websites and you see the same stock photos everywhere, and we all know it's fake and it doesn't resonate with us. So I love using Mid Journey for image creation, but again, there's a learning curve with it. Be careful if you start using it, look at the details, because you'll often get, if you try and get an image of a human being, it'll be a human being who has three arms.
Lisa Rehurek (33:44):
I just did that the other day, actually somebody else's, yes. They had three legs and we were like, wait, what's happening here?
Stephanie Nivinskus (33:50):
Yeah. Yeah. We did one not too long ago, and it had a woman walking down a path. It looked like she was in a park with a dog, and on one leg she had shorts, and on the other leg she had jeans with a boot.
Lisa Rehurek (34:04):
Oh, hilarious.
Stephanie Nivinskus (34:08):
What is that? So look at the details that the hands are usually a dead giveaway. A lot of times teeth are a dead giveaway. Look at the teeth because they'll have two teeth or they'll have a front tooth that is absurdly large, and then a whole bunch of little tiny kitten teeth. So look at the details.
Lisa Rehurek (34:35):
And when you do that in mid journey and they give you something, would that be unique to you, or could that show up on somebody else's branding?
Stephanie Nivinskus (34:44):
I don't think it's going to show up on somebody else's stuff because the prompts the way that, well, the way we're writing the prompts anyways, they are so detailed and so specific that for anybody else to come up with that exact same prompt is, I mean, sure there's a chance, but what one in a billion, far less than somebody buying the same stock photo, or especially using free stock photography, which is what so many people do, they're like, well, why would I buy it if I can get it for free? I get it. Well, the reason is you're going to look like everyone else.
Lisa Rehurek (35:26):
Good stuff. Stephanie, this has been so great. Do you have any last minute before we wrap this up? Any last thoughts around any key tips, strategies, anything like that that you want to share with the audience around AI?
Stephanie Nivinskus (35:40):
I think have fun with it. Have some fun with it, and test things. Remember, I don't know if you remember Lisa, but I remember when I first started using the internet, I was afraid to click things. I'm like, am I going to break it? Am I going to blow it up? Oh my gosh, is it going to set off a nuclear war? What is this? Right. That's not going to happen. So I encourage you, click around, play with things, and have some fun with it. When I first started learning this, I was doing it with personal stuff as opposed to professional stuff, silly stuff. I'd be sitting here with my daughter and I would say, Ella, what do we want a picture of? And she'd be like a cat pulling a purple umbrella in a rainstorm with a green tree in the background. And we'd enter that and we would see what we got and we'd be like, oh, that's funny, or that's weird. And then we'd be like, well, let's try and do it a little differently. And it was fun. It was creative fun, but it was learning at the same time, and then we transitioned those learnings into business and here.
Lisa Rehurek (36:58):
Oh, so fun. I love, I actually really, that's such great advice because again, I think when we're coming into this with fear, that's what shows up, right? We're holding onto that fear and at the end of the day, just go have some fun with it and start learning it that way instead of feeling the anxiety of the fear with it. So thank you for that. Now you have, I don't know if it's a course or something that you do with your folks, with your clients. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how people can learn about that?
Stephanie Nivinskus (37:32):
Yeah, for sure. We do have a course, so if somebody really wants to learn how to build a funnel from start to finish, we do have a course on that. We also have something called, it's a strategy and execution session, and this is actually where I encourage most people who are wanting higher level stuff to start. We sit with you virtually on Zoom, so we do it with people all over the world for approximately two hours. All of our AI strategists have been certified, which means they've gone through extensive training and had to pass a whole bunch of really hard tests to get that little certification next to their name. We can't just buy it a key task that you want. So you could say, Stephanie, I want a bot to write all of my social media. Awesome, we got you. We're going to spend about an hour training the bot, and then we're going to spend the second hour generating results and refining the training so that at the end of the session, you have a bot that can create a full editorial calendar and plan out everything you're going to post for the next three months, six months, year, three years, however long you want.
(39:01):
Okay. It will be able to write for different platforms using the unique intricacies that are needed for each platform. It'll be able to write in different formats. It can write text posts, it can write, it can create carousels, it can create scripts for videos. It can do all of those things. It can suggest imagery. If you want to have a picture attached to it, it can suggest video clips. If you're going to take your phone and film something, it'll script it all out for you. And then it will also do hashtag research, and it can also tell you what days to post, what things to get the best results and so on and so forth. That's just for social media, but there's a million other things. So think about something that, what's your thorn, what's your marketing thorn in your side, the thing that you know have to do but you hate doing it, and if a bot could take it off of your to-do list, you'd be the happiest little unicorn unicorn. That's what this session is for. That's amazing.
Lisa Rehurek (40:03):
I know we're going to be looking into doing that with you, so you'll be hearing from us and how do they learn more about that?
Stephanie Nivinskus (40:10):
Yeah, you go to our website, it's sizzleforce.com/ai-assistant, so sizzle like bacon. Force, like may the force be with you, sizzleforce.com/ai-assistant.
Lisa Rehurek (40:31):
And we'll have that in the show notes, everybody. We'll have that. And also other ways to connect with Stephanie through, I'm guessing you're on LinkedIn. We can connect.
Stephanie Nivinskus (40:39):
Yeah. Yeah, you can find me pretty much everywhere. LinkedIn is a great place.
Lisa Rehurek (40:43):
Yeah. Alright, so everybody take it. Look for that in the show notes. So in case you didn't get that down, it'll be there. Stephanie, thank you so much for being here. This has been a pleasure. I feel like I could talk to you for two more hours. I have a gazillion more questions, but maybe we'll have you back again to talk more, but this has been very, very helpful, so thank you for being here.
Stephanie Nivinskus (41:03):
Thank you so much.
Lisa Rehurek (41:05):
Absolutely. Alright everybody, if you haven't already done and you love our show, we appreciate those five star ratings. Again, if you're enjoying the podcast, get out there and give us those ratings. Appreciate it. On behalf of Stephanie and myself, we want to thank you for listening and being part of the R F P Success Show today.
Outro (41:22):
This has been another episode of The RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@rfpsuccess.com. No matter your business size, industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, The RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10%, 20%, and even 50%. Learn more at therfpsuccesscompany.com.