stop circling back

a little before one in the morning, late saturday into sunday, i was talking to my own outreach software.

dictating changes. fix this button. move that panel. the usual late night build session.

and in the middle of fixing buttons i stopped, because i saw what the follow ups looked like.

"oh, and when we follow up, instead of just circling back, hey, you want to meet? you want to meet? these are dumb follow-ups."

that's what came out of my mouth. i stand by it.

you know the email. just circling back. bumping this to the top of your inbox. wanted to follow up on my last note. it's the most common follow up in business and it says one thing... i still want something from you.

it asks for attention and gives nothing. so it gets nothing.

everyone thinks the problem with follow ups is timing or persistence. send more, send at better times, add a fourth touch. but if every touch is the same ask, more touches is just more asking. you're knocking on the same door louder.

so i told the ai to rip those out and replace them with value.

every follow up should carry something. a small widget built for that person, something they can use. an introduction to someone they should meet. a case study that matches their problem. an excerpt from a book that answers a question they asked. a clip from an interview that matters to their world.

and the context to do that already exists. their emails in gmail. the notes from our calls. the replies sitting in the outreach inbox. if you put all of that in front of a model, it knows what this person cares about. it can draft the follow up that gives, not the one that asks.

it's like visiting a friend. if you show up empty handed every time and ask for a favour, they stop answering the door. bring something, even something small, and they're glad you came.

there was a second problem staring at me that night. the inbox had a hundred and twenty replies waiting.

a hundred and twenty people who wrote back, and i hadn't answered them yet. that's the worst follow up of all... the one where they replied and you went quiet.

so the other change on the list was a queue. every email where the other person replied and i didn't gets pulled to the top, with a draft already written for me to approve. the machine does the remembering. i do the deciding.

none of that means the human goes away. i still read every draft before it goes. i still decide who gets an intro and who gets a case study. the ai does the part i'm bad at at one in the morning, which is remembering a hundred and twenty threads at once.

think about the order of operations there. most people chase the ones who never replied, while the ones who did reply sit there going cold. answer the yeses first. then go back to the silences with something worth opening.

long term, ai makes the lazy follow up free. anyone can send a hundred circling back emails a day now. which means those emails are worth even less than they were. the follow up that wins is the one that took real context to write... and ai is finally good enough to help you do that at scale, if you point it at giving.

that's how we run follow up in the gtm engine... every touch carries something.

so look at the last follow up you sent. what did you give them... and would you open it if it landed in your inbox?