Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
There is a page on my website that sat on my to-do list for over a year. I knew that the current page wasn’t good enough, that I needed to update it, but I still couldn’t make myself start it. And this was from one of my top offers, by the way. Then this year, something shifted, and I have actually created more in the last few months than I did in the— probably the whole year beforehand. My brain hasn’t magically changed. I’ve still got executive dysfunction, I promise you. But what has changed is that I stopped having to ration my ideas. They stopped feeling so big and overwhelming, and I have got Claude to thank for so much of that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:42]:
Welcome to the Soulful Sales Show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. So today I want to talk about how I have been acting on my ideas and creating so much in the last few months and what has made that possible. And the honest answer is AI, specifically Claude, although probably not in the way you’re expecting. Now, I have always had more ideas than I could ever take action on, and I’m sure a lot of you listening to this will relate. And there have always been a lot of offers I’ve never made a lot of upgrades in my business. I’ve never gotten around to, and quite honestly, a lot of that has been down to overwhelm and not knowing where to start and everything taking me so long. And in the last few months, things have shifted in such an incredible way that I can’t quite believe, and I am so grateful for.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:51]:
I have always struggled with that kind of analysis paralysis. That executive function, you know, small things seeming really, really big. And I know a lot of you struggle with that as well. And often the getting started is the hardest bit. So what I would find is that I would always have this— I don’t get me wrong, I’ve always created a lot, and a lot of it is down to this mindset of imperfect experimentation. However, I never created exactly what I wanted to, and I never was able to test as many ideas as I wanted to because everything would just take me so It would take me so long to create a sales page, for example. A sales page was always a big deal in my mind, so even just getting started on it was a huge hurdle that I had to get across to launch any kind of new offer. I always say to people, start with an imperfect Google Doc, and I definitely followed my own advice there for a lot of my offers.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:47]:
But yeah, massive, massive hurdle creating a pretty PDF or a pretty Google Doc or something like that. A lot of this stuff just never happened because of that overwhelm, paralysis, executive dysfunction. And there’s a lot of good ideas that I could have implemented, but I didn’t because it was all too much. And I don’t want to say here that I should have implemented all those ideas in the past. I definitely have limited capacity. I definitely have those brain— what do we want to call them— challenges that stop me from implementing it all. However, something has really, really shifted for me over the last few months, and let me just give you a few you examples of some of the things that I have created this year that past me never would have fitted in amongst all the other things I was already doing. So one thing that I have really elevated this year is the number and the type of freebies that I have been testing.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:46]:
I have been putting out way more freebies. I have been testing them in different ways, so some of them with Facebook ads, some of them with, you know, when I’m speaking at a summit or part of a bundle or sponsoring people’s emails, and it has been really, really beneficial that I’ve been able to get more of them out there because I’m getting so much data back about what is actually working and what my people are interested in and the messaging that is directly speaking to them. So let me give you an example. One freebie I created, I designed it as an interactive tool with AI, built in an afternoon, built off of concepts and content that I already had in my brain or in other places pulled together by AI with no code. That freebie has brought in over 500 subscribers. What it replaced was an old PDF workbook that would have cost me much more time and energy to create and probably would have been less engaging for the people who would just download it and then never open it up again. So that is one example, and thanks to the way that I have trained my AI and used my AI, I was able to create that as an interactive tool that gives people a quick win as soon as they open it. Another thing that I have been able to create this year— so I have always done a couple of big sales a year where I do like a daily deal.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:15]:
It’s always a lot of work to set up, but I do think it’s worth running these sales one or 2 times a year. What I didn’t plan on was doing an 8-day sale in— when was it— late April. I decided to run it very, very last minute, and I, and I spoke about this in one of my previous episodes in detail, so you can go and listen to that episode if you want the full details about that sale. But basically, I was working on changing over a lot of my custom GPTs that I had made in ChatGPT over to Claude Skills, and I thought, you know what, why not run a sale to keep me accountable to actually creating them, and then to see if other people— like, it’s a, it’s a way to freshen them up, and then sell these things again and create and sell some new ones as well. This was honestly built in hours. It was very, very low cost, and it brought in $5K. And I think that that sale was the point in this year when I realized— so I’d already been doing a lot more with AI and specifically Claude earlier in the year, but that was the point when I realized this is directly making me money. By removing the barriers that used to be in place that stopped me acting on these ideas so quickly.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:27]:
And this is also helping me to test different types of offers, different types of topics, different types of freebies like I talked about, and get that data back really, really quickly. Seriously, it was such an incredible kind of mental shift for me realizing that one. Most recently, I have just put out, uh, the information at the time of recording yesterday. I sent out an email inviting anyone on my email list to sign up to a free workshop. I— this free workshop has gotten 200 people signed up to it in less than 24 hours, all, uh, organically. Plus I have set up Facebook ads in addition to that, but organically over 200 people, which is just blows me away because it’s literally the first time I’ve talked about it, which is just incredible. But I think the reason it’s doing so well is all the things that came before it to help me test the different angles. So I was able to create a bunch of different Facebook ads with different marketing angles for my AI membership, the Aligned AI Lab, to see which specific angle attracted the most people.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:42]:
And very surprisingly, it landed on a really, really clear winner. And by the way, the Aligned Brand AI Lab is where I teach the strategies behind the interactive tools, the pages, the fully training your AI on your brand properly and to sell properly. That’s at ruthpoundwhite.com/lab. So yeah, I tested all of the different angles, found the winning angle for that. I took that clear winner to AI and brainstormed how I could— I already had a workshop that I was going to run, and I brainstormed how I could tweak the workshop I was going to run to fit the messaging of the clear winner of the Facebook ads. So what happened is instead of just running the workshop that I had the idea for as is, which I could have done, is I was able to put ads out there and I was able to test loads of different angles and loads of different images because I’m using AI to help me create the images for the Facebook ads and to come up with different angles that I wouldn’t have even thought of myself. Then I got the data back from Facebook and Meta to see which of the angles people are responding to the most, which they are engaging with the most, which there is most demand for. And then I brought that data back into the workshop that I was already planning and tweaked the topic.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:52]:
And now I have over 200 people signed up in less than 24 hours organically, which I think is a really, really great sign that this cycle of putting things out there, getting the data back, and then feeding that data into the messaging of what I’m putting out there next is really, really working. So that is the loop. Test the angles cheaply, find out what people actually respond to, then build the real thing around that instead instead of around your assumptions. And for sure, like, I could have done this stuff, and I was working in this way with some of my offers, particularly my summits, pre-AI, but there was no way I could have done it so quickly. Facebook ads is always such a huge, huge thing on my mental to-do list, kind of like the sales pages I mentioned earlier. So thanks to AI, really, really helpful information, and it’s feeding back and then getting me better results when I put the thing out there next. And then of course I have also been alongside putting out more freebies and offers I’ve done. I’ve turned more of my offers into tripwires, connected them to my freebies so that I have more related tripwires for all of my freebies.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:01]:
It has helped me upgrade many of my offer pages. There’s still a lot of pages that I want to upgrade, but I’m getting there. My brand new membership launch would never have come about without the experimentation and creativity that was happening thanks to the work I was doing in Claude and that 8-day sale I mentioned, I can attribute over $15,000 in income directly to the work that AI has been helping me to do. And I think beyond the shiny numbers and all of the things I’ve created, the thing that made the most difference to me is handing that mental load over to Claude. And this is something I’ve really been working on for the last year. I have been really, really, you know, building my team and working with my team to hand over a lot more of the mental load, for them to help me make decisions, for them to remind me of things. But adding Claude, trained on my brain and business, into the mix has been the extra element I needed to make it all come together, and for me to really feel like when I open up my computer, I know what I’m working on, so I’m not spinning my wheels. And I get on with it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:11]:
And I don’t say that lightly because I know how easy it is, especially as a neurodivergent person, to listen to someone say that they’re just getting on with things and they’re being productive and they’re creating all this stuff. And it’s very, very easy to then think, well, it’s fine for you, my brain doesn’t work like that. I will say my brain doesn’t work like that either. I, I rely on those periods of hyperfocus and excitement to get me through the many periods of inaction, procrastination, complete overwhelm. That has been a huge barrier for me. I’m not saying that my brain is magically different, but I am saying that I have set up systems that have removed so many of those barriers that help me just get on with things and test things quickly. And then when you are able to test it quickly, when you are able to put it out there quickly and get the feedback in terms of sales or signups or even just having the thing out there, you get the dopamine back. And that for me is really, really key.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:14]:
And I’ve found that I’ve stopped having to ration my ideas. I mean, that’s not true. I still have more ideas than I could act on, but I feel like it’s not just about being more productive, it’s about allowing myself to just throw loads of stuff out there, see what happens, and get that data back. And that for me has reignited this spark that I did not feel for quite a long time in my business because I was so bogged down in all of the big things that were needed— or seemingly big, they’re not always big, but my brain makes them big— that have been on my to-do list for ages and ages. Like for example, updating my membership sales page was on my to-do list probably for over a year. It such a big weight and I knew it wasn’t good enough. And thanks to this work I’ve been doing, I’ve finally been able to do that. I’ve finally been able to create more tripwire offers, all of this stuff.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:06]:
So I, I know that some of this might sound like it’s kind of like, I’m so much more productive with AI and I’m creating more, more, more. And in some ways it is. And I don’t think that that’s a permanent thing. I think this is a season of creativity and testing. I think the bigger message I want to make clear here is that this is about removing the barriers, letting AI carry the load of the stuff that feels too big for you, so that then you have the capacity to be the creative behind your business again. If you want to do all the content writing and connection in your business, you get to do that because the AI is holding the other stuff that feels too big and too overwhelming. And I will say also that more is definitely not better. There are always periods in my time where I’m doing more and testing more, and then there are times when I’m pruning it back, reining it in, closing things down.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:01]:
I do think a willingness to test and close things down when they’re not working is actually very important as well. Um, and the other important thing that I need to say is that everything I’m putting out there is feeding into everything else. So when I’ve been creating all these different freebies, firstly, a lot of them are just upgraded versions of freebies that I’ve already created, just bringing them up to date with the help of AI, like auditing them or changing the format of them and turning them into interactive tools instead. And I’m making sure that the freebies are directly tying into either promoting my Soulful Sales Society membership or promoting my Aligned AI Lab, every single one. So I am being discerning about what I’m creating from that perspective. But yeah, I’m not saying you should be out there creating more, more, more, but when you have a membership or when you have living offers or when you have, you know, a program that you feel like needs updating or it needs a bit, a little bit of a push to get more people in, creating a few smaller elements for it or upgrading some of the tools and things like that is a very, very good way to see which specific angles are getting people in. And I keep saying this, but I’m really, really excited. Now don’t get me wrong, I have, I have concerns and fears and worries about AI, like I know a lot of you do as well, but I am very, very excited for the support that it can offer to low-capacity, neurodivergent, low-on-time business owners like myself and like many of you who listen to this show.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:29]:
The key thing to remember is that this isn’t about getting the perfect prompt as much as some, you know, clickbait titles will make you think it’s all about, you know, the one perfect prompt or becoming a prompt engineer, all of that stuff. It’s actually about starting from setting up your AI that knows your business, your brand, your audience, your offers, your brain, the way that you sell. If you don’t take the time to do all of that and train your AI properly, which I know that I talk about all of the time, then none of this is going to work for you in the way that you want. It’s also very, very important to remember that you are the visionary behind your business. I do not hand over all of the thinking and all of the decisions and the heart of the messaging to my AI. I use AI as a brainstorming partner and I use it to do the grunt work of like creating the pages and stuff, but I definitely bring my values, my voice, my strategy, and my ideas so that it is still very me. And I will say also, I am so not a tech expert, and this is the whole point of it. I’m a business expert, so I bring that expertise to my AI, and then AI handles the tech.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:39]:
Okay, so if this sounds like something that you want to set up, or you’re already kind of doing it but you want to get it more in at that point where you can actually act on those ideas, put things out there quickly, test them, get those automations set up, or even hand over the bigger picture thinking— not the visionary thinking, but the day-to-day to-do list and executive function over to AI, then I have a free workshop coming up to help you with all of that. So I’m going to be teaching the Claude Marketing Roadmap for Heart-Led Online Offer Creators. It’s happening on Monday the 27th of July at 4 PM UK time, which is 11 AM Eastern time. You can read more at ruthpoundwhite.com/freeclass. That’s all one word. There will be a replay for anyone who can’t make it. It’s a 48-hour only replay. I’m going to share with you the setup behind everything that has made all of this stuff possible.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:17:36]:
4 upgrades that make Claude really, really helpful for you, you and your unique brain. And I will share how I have applied them to my business. Plus there’ll be a Q&A and you can ask questions if you’re there live. And yeah, come and steal my Claude setup that is designed to work even when I am not. And that is the key. That is the real key. I’ve done so much of this stuff even on lower energy. So come to ruthpoundwhite.com/freeclass if you want more of that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:09]:
It’s happening on Monday with a 48-hour replay. And I really want to invite you, before I wrap up this episode, to think about all that stuff that is in your head, all of the mental load that you are carrying, and just be honest with yourself about what might be different if you could hand over some of that, and if you could just put those ideas out there more easily and test what is working. Maybe some of the reasons why you’re not doing them is that the work feels too big, too paralysing, too overwhelming, like it has for me. And if that is the case, then I definitely want to help you, and I see you on that free class because this is what it’s all about. Um, so yeah, free workshop Monday 27th of July, ruthpoundwork.com/free-workshop. Free class, and I can’t wait to see you there and to share the setup that has made this possible. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:12]:
And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community at ruthpoundwhite.com/community, or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/membership. And keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.