What happens when you send twice the traffic to a business that answers half its enquiries? You get twice the unanswered enquiries. Mitchell Wilson, founder of the small business coaching practice Coachbirds, works with tradies and local service owners across Australia and New Zealand, and when he came on Unscripted Small Business he put marketing third in line, behind the sales process and the systems that keep it running.
That’s an uncomfortable order for anyone who sells SEO. I asked him about speed to lead, shared AI playbooks and fads like listicles, and his answers kept landing in the same place: if the process behind the lead is broken, more leads make it worse.
Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Castos.
Your client’s sales funnel may be a sieve, and traffic won’t plug it
Mitchell’s framework is three words: “Well, our framework that we look at really consists of sales, systems, and strategy.” Sales comes first because that’s where most owners think the problem is. They’re usually wrong about which part of sales.
“A lot of people think they just need more leads where their sales funnel just could be looking like a sieve.”
So he fixes the sales process before anything else, “and make sure it is a process that the same result happens time and time again.” Then, in his words, “we can work on the marketing side of thing and likes of the SEO or whatever it may be” to drive traffic to it.
If you run marketing for a small business, or you’re the agency they hired, that order should change your first month. Before you build a content plan, find out what happens to a lead after the form fill. Zeke Camusio’s expected value per lead formula is a good way to put a number on it, because a leaky process shows up as a low value per lead long before it shows up in rankings.
Speed to lead is a systems problem you can see from the outside
I brought up a point Alex Zweydoff made on Unscripted SEO about replying to clients quickly. His agency, ClearLead Digital, does property management digital marketing.
Jake Melendy of Ignitvio put numbers on it. He mystery-shopped service businesses in competitive metros, and in his study over half never responded at all. Of the ones that did, only 2% followed up more than once.
Mitchell didn’t argue with the problem. He argued with the usual fix:
“I don’t actually think that’s an AI job. I think that’s sort of more of a systems job.”
Automate the parts that help, he said, but keep “some form of human interaction there somewhere.” The goal is to “have those systems in place so we can get to those customers and not drop the ball.” For a marketer, that’s the case for auditing response time before you report on lead volume. We made the same argument in speed-to-lead: the SEO fix that is not SEO.
Give the whole team the same context, and the permission to use it
I told Mitchell about something I call crab theory. Inside one company, different people adopt AI separately and end up building the same thing in different ways. Daniel Hebert of Oleno, which keeps shared marketing context for AI tools like positioning, product facts and brand guidance in one place, argues you need a shared AI playbook so everyone works from the same brief.
Mitchell said that’s a second-stage problem. The first-stage one is more common in the businesses he coaches:
“The bigger problem that I’ve actually seen in businesses is it may be the owner or the higher ups that are actually got access in using the AI, but the rest of the team hasn’t actually been given that access and that authority to actually use it.”
So check both. Who on the marketing team has access, and does everyone with access start from the same positioning? Mitchell expects the answer to become a job: “I actually think there will be an AI manager.” Ross Hudgens‘s Siege Media already has a director of automations doing that work. And as Dr. Gleb Tsipursky found, how you roll it out matters as much as the tool.
If you want a small, concrete way to start, our SOP on building a Claude skill that does your pre-work turns one person’s good prompt into something the whole team can run. Brett Schklar‘s line applies here: AI is not out there to take your job, it’s there to take your tasks.
Shiny objects and doubling down are two different habits
SEO has a tactic of the month. Jeremy Moser of uSERP, an AI search service, flagged listicles as the current one: getting your brand listed in them works in Google and in LLMs, so now everybody does it.
Once a tactic gets that crowded, Google tends to adjust. I asked Mitchell whether owners have the same “monkey see monkey do” problem. He split the question in two. Copying competitors is “shiny object syndrome.” Repeating something that already works for you is the opposite, and he thinks owners under-do it.
“If something is working in business, do it more.”
His example was a marketing process that’s bringing in clients: “then if we can scale that, then do that.” Too many owners run a good campaign and move on. “Now on to the next thing. No, no, no, no. Repeat that.” The exit signal is the numbers. When results start to dwindle, “if something’s changing, we need to pivot.”
For your reporting, that means two separate questions. Is this channel working for this client, measured in leads that close? And is it working because it’s still uncrowded? The first tells you to double down. The second tells you how long you have.
Questions to ask before you buy a client more traffic
- What happens to a lead in the first hour after the form fill, and who owns that step?
- Does the sales process produce the same result each time, or does it depend on who picks up?
- Which marketing process brought in the last five clients, and is anyone still running it?
- Does everyone on the team using AI have access to the same positioning and brand guidance?
- Do you know your numbers well enough to tell when a working tactic starts to fade?
Mitchell also says “you can’t scale chaos,” and that line anchors the full episode recap: read Mitchell Wilson on why you can’t scale chaos on Unscripted Small Business, and my own take on doing the boring stuff consistently. Mitchell writes about this on the Coachbirds blog, including how to build a predictable sales pipeline. He’s opening The Business Nest, a paid group, and offered listeners a free pass: reach him on LinkedIn or at coachbirds.com, or see The Business Nest.
Sponsor disclosure: Oleno, uSERP and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.