[EO Austin] Transforming Lead Generation and Customer Engagement Through AI With Eric Evans

Eric Evans is the CEO of HyperTarget Marketing, a performance marketing agency specializing in generating leads for industry sectors such as legal, insurance, and financial services. He is also the Co-founder and CEO of Pipes.AI, an AI-powered sales engagement platform that automates and optimizes lead follow-up processes. With a background in performance marketing and technology development, Eric builds innovative solutions that transform how businesses connect with customers to drive conversions.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[04:14] Eric Evans talks about HyperTarget Marketing’s unique performance-driven business model
[08:33] How Pipes.AI was created and evolved into a sales engagement platform
[13:36] Challenges businesses face with timely lead follow-ups
[15:23] Key features of Pipes.AI that boost automation and conversions
[16:54] What the lead generation process looks like from the customer’s perspective
[22:52] How AI improves calls, voicemails, and follow-up processes
[31:18] Resources, tools, and mentors that shaped Eric’s entrepreneurial journey
[35:23] The importance of company culture and how Eric fosters integrity and collaboration within his teams
[38:41] Key hires that helped scale HyperTarget Marketing and Pipes.AI

In this episode…

Lead generation and customer engagement techniques are evolving faster than ever, with technology transforming how businesses connect with potential clients. In an age where speed and personalization are critical, how can companies ensure they’re reaching the right people at the right time — and converting them into loyal customers?

According to Eric Evans, customer acquisition and AI technology leader, the key lies in leveraging AI-driven systems that combine speed, precision, and automation. He highlights that businesses often lose valuable leads due to delayed follow-ups or inefficient processes. AI-powered platforms like Pipes.AI can solve this by streamlining lead nurturing through automated SMS, calls, and voicemails. By integrating smart technology into their workflows, companies can enhance lead conversion rates while creating a seamless and effective customer journey.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz meets with Eric Evans, CEO of HyperTarget Marketing and Co-founder and CEO of Pipes.AI, to discuss how AI is revolutionizing lead generation and customer engagement. They dive into the importance of “speed to lead,” the power of automation to simplify workflows, and how personalized follow-ups can turn prospects into long-term clients.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

“We always sell exclusive leads by nature; we’re collecting that person’s information and then finding the best match for them.”
“Attorneys are good at providing legal services, not necessarily experts at marketing or follow-up in a timely manner.”
“I always felt like I was working as a free product manager for other companies, constantly giving feedback and feature requests.”
“There’s so much horsepower put into just getting people on the phone to have good conversations.”
“We wanted to keep the marketing team involved through the whole journey and allow split testing of the follow-up process.”

Action Steps

Embrace “speed to lead” with automation: Implementing tools like Pipes.AI can ensure quick follow-ups with potential clients, increasing the chance of conversion by engaging leads when their interest is highest.
Integrate marketing and sales efforts: Use seamless integration between marketing campaigns and sales follow-up processes to ensure consistent communication and reduce lead losses.
Focus on high-integrity actions: Make integrity a core company value, ensuring transparency and trust in all business dealings. This enhances client relationships and the company’s reputation.
Harness the power of AI and SMS for engagement: Utilize AI-driven tools to handle initial customer inquiries and follow-up processes, reducing strain on human resources while maintaining high engagement.
Continuous optimization of customer touchpoints: Regularly test and refine communication sequences to enhance customer engagement and maximize conversion rates, much like optimizing web experiences.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:13

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Eric Evans. You can check out his companies at I and hypertargetmarketing.com. Eric, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is kind of like a combination, right? It’s top. I have a top agency series, which Eric is. I have a top SaaS series, which Eric is, and I have an EO series, which Eric is. So, you know, when you have these serial entrepreneurs, they fit into multiple categories. So a couple top agency episodes people can check out. I did one with Jason Swenk. Jason Swenk built up his agency to eight figures and sold it. Then he started an agency group and helping agency owners. It’s kind of the group he wish he had when he first started. And he also has been buying up agencies, which was interesting to hear. The space agency space. That’s a good one in that realm. And the EO profile one I had Rich Walker on. Rich Walker of EO Austin, amazing guys. You know he’s got a great software. He really focused on customer support and service his podcast so you can check him out. And Rusty Shelton was another one from EO Austin. And he’s got a great story. Zilker Media. And then Mat Zalk of EO Tulsa was also a great story from the SaaS side. I had one of the Co-founders of Zapier on. That was a really interesting episode, how they built that up. And one of the Co-founders of Pipedrive, you know, Eric, when I first had him on, I think they had 10,000 customers. Now they have they have over 100,000 customers. They’ve grown, you know, quite a bit. So check out more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. And Eric, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, most importantly, focus on running their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how to give to my best relationships, and I have really found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and the companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com. I am super excited to introduce Eric Evans. He’s the Founder of both HyperTarget Marketing and Pipes.AI. HyperTarget Marketing is a performance marketing agency focused on legal. They’ve helped many different companies in legal, insurance, financial, all over the place. And we’re going to dig into that because I think, Eric, you have a really interesting business model from an agency perspective. Also, Pipes.AI is a cutting edge sales engagement platform that automates the process of connecting with customers and prospects as well. So before starting his own companies, he actually worked in Hollywood. He did special effects for blockbuster movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean. So Eric, thanks for joining me.

Eric Evans 03:42

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s good to be here.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:44

You have a very interesting journey. And even early on, you know, I’ve watched you’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve watched videos of you from, like, 12 years ago, and even early on, you were building these sites that were producing like a couple thousand dollars a month, which is pretty amazing at the time. Just we’re going to get into that. But talk about HyperTarget Marketing first and what you do there.

Eric Evans 04:14

Yeah, absolutely. HyperTarget is an agency we’ve been around since 2009 as performance marketers. Started off in the paper call space as a mobile media buyers back. You know, when iPhones were brand new and, you know, learned how to drive phone calls for companies. And it’s since evolved and grown and changed with the times. And now we own and operate a number of web brands. We buy our own media and work with a number of different partners to generate leads for companies. And we then take those leads into our own internal call center to further qualify them, get them on the phone, warm them up and then deliver a prospect who’s, you know, very deep into their buying journey to our customers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 05:00

With that and we’ll talk about HyperTarget Marketing for a second. Are you working specifically with a company per niche? Because I know there’s lead generation companies that will serve up leads to like, here’s three potential. You know, companies that you can work with. Are you working more just with a specific company because this is you know, you’re putting your money on the line here for them.

Eric Evans 05:31

Right. So. Yep. Yeah. No, it’s it’s risky. I mean, we we are proficient at what we do. And, you know, we know we’re capable of of doing a great job. And and you know, and making it work from, from a profit perspective obviously in order to take that risk. And so we work with a number of different companies. You know, we try not to overlap too much by geography. But, you know, different customers are looking for different things. And so we do work with a number of different companies and a few different spaces. But yeah, as you mentioned, legal and personal injury attorneys is one of our largest categories now. And we’ve got a lot of great customers there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:07

Yeah, I want to dig into that because I know you work with them all over the country. But let’s take for example, like a PA attorney in California, would you when you you’ll walk through kind of how it works. I’m curious if you get a lead someone who’s like a good, good prospect for the company, will you deliver that to three local companies or you’re like, listen, we’re working this one company in this geographic area and everything we get in that geographic area, we refer to this firm.

Eric Evans 06:39

Yeah, we always sell exclusive leads, right. By by nature. Right. We’re we’re collecting that person’s information. They’re requesting a follow up from us. We then follow up with that person, qualify them and find the best match for that person and, you know, introduce that company warm, transfer them to to the end person who’s going to service them. And and those attorneys then have the opportunity to retain them as clients.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:05

I’m curious. You know, it seems like a no brainer scenario, right? Like you’re basically putting in the money and the time and you’re qualifying them. What objections do you get from a firm with this scenario? Or maybe you’re just like, you could just choose who you want to work with and just go to them. Hey, do you want leads? And like literally you only pay for the leads that we give you?

Eric Evans 07:28

Yeah. It’s a I mean, it’s a really easy pitch, right? It’s definitely not it’s not a hard sell by any means. If someone says no, it’s you know, it’s really no big deal to us, right? It’s it’s it’s very low risk on their part. And we’re providing a lot of value, putting a lot of work in to get those people there. I mean, the only objections we typically get are from people who just aren’t familiar with buying leads from third parties, and might have an internal marketing team that, you know, feels like, rather than us coming in to supplement what they’re doing and help them grow, that we’re somehow competing with their internal marketing departments, that they can sometimes have some pushback to us. But at the end of the day, I mean, we’re not competing with those teams. We’re just providing additional value on top of whatever they’re doing for their own brand.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:14

Yeah, I want to get into the process and services because that’s kind of how Pipes.AI was born. So talk about let’s talk about the like a pie attorney in California, for example, and what you did with them. And then we can get into Pipes a little bit more.

Eric Evans 08:33

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the attorney space, attorneys are good at providing legal services, right? They’re not necessarily experts at marketing. And even if they are good at marketing, they’re not necessarily Early experts at following up with people in a timely manner, or they get busy and don’t have the staffing or resources to follow up on those leads. And so what we found, you know, was happening is we were, you know, we were driving inbound calls for companies or we were selling just just leads. Like if someone had filled out a form and requested to be contacted by somebody, you know, we would then sell that lead to somebody. And, you know, oftentimes we would get the feedback that they weren’t able to get those people on the phone. And so, you know, they would they would come back to us and say, hey, you know, these leads aren’t quite working at the level that we were hoping. We’re not able to get these people on the phone. So we finally started digging in deeper and deeper over the years into why they weren’t getting these people on the phone. And there’s a number of different challenges that go into that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 09:34

Maybe they weren’t answering the phone.

Eric Evans 09:37

They weren’t answering the phone, or they weren’t following up in a timely manner. Right. And so the the, you know, it’s it’s a direct downward graph from the time someone actually expresses interest and says, hey, I need to talk to somebody. I’d like to get a call from someone. If you don’t follow up with that person in five minutes, the odds of that person answering the phone keep going down. And we found that, you know, people would get busy and they might not call until the next day, at which point that person’s probably already found another competitor to work with, or made some other phone calls, filled out some other forms. And so that’s where we we started putting more effort into doing that follow up ourselves, not just selling the leads, but saying, hey, we’re going to generate this lead. And not only are we going to, you know, get this person information for you, we’re actually going to get them on the phone, make sure their information is correct, make sure they meet all the criteria that we know you would ask once we get them on the phone and kind of serve them up on a silver platter, and so they just need to make sure that they’re ready to answer the phone. And so we solve those challenges in a, you know, both a cost effective and efficient way, right? You know, it can be expensive to hire. Resources to make outbound phone calls to follow up on these leads. And so that’s where Pipes kind of came into the picture. Years later of finding ways to automate that through SMS and AI, to make sure that we’re meeting those people right when they’re interested. Getting them on the phone, qualifying them and getting them over in a way that’s that’s super efficient.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:09

I think, you know, Eric, this is instructive, I think, for any business. So I want to go through the process a little bit because it seems like the first step is obviously you became masters at paid search. It sounds like there’s some SEO as well. So do you build like custom pages for the company from like an SEO perspective as well, from a traffic perspective or like, what are all the ways that you, first of all, attract the person, the lead just to even sign up?

Eric Evans 11:39

Yeah. So we we own and operate our own web brands in a number of different verticals and industries and, you know, drive traffic to our own websites that we can then optimize those consumer journeys. And, you know, get people through our own marketing funnels. And so we’re we’re handling all of that in-house through our own web properties.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:00

And then those those ways you do it are are they combination? I’m looking here at your page if people are watching the video but it could be paid. Search local listing, SEO, blogging, social media, radio, all these all these channels display email, TV and web video. All these channels kind of to drive traffic.

Eric Evans 12:19

Yeah. So we’re yeah, we’re buying traffic and media from a number of different channels and funneling them all through our own call center and websites.

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[EO Austin] Transforming Lead Generation and Customer Engagement Through AI With Eric Evans

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

In this episode…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

Action Steps

Sponsor for this episode…

Episode Transcript

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