Brad Killgore [00:00:00]:
The fortune is in the follow-up. I don’t know what the statistics say about how many times you have to touch somebody once they’re interested before they make a buying decision.

Laura Sutherly [00:00:09]:
When we’re working with clients and teaching them how they can take their quick notes, grab their phone, talk to their AI as they’re leaving a grower’s farm and say, okay, then we covered X, Y, and Z with them. Put that in.

Chris Hunter [00:00:27]:
This is AI Marketing Experts, where bold marketers and next Each week, join us as we decode trends, test tools, and share real wins from the AI-powered front lines. No fluff, no hype, just straight talk and smarter marketing. Tap subscribe and let’s geek out on AI.

John Clendenning [00:00:55]:
So I got a question for you. Have you ever had somebody reach out to you, seem like a really hot possible prospect for your business, go stone cold silent, and you sent them that automated, in-the-can message number 1, message number 2, message number 3 follow-up and still heard crickets? Then you heard somebody tell you, hey, maybe you should add tokens to it and put their name in it and stuff like that. And you still hear crickets. We are in 2026. We are halfway through 2026, depending on when you’re listening to this. And AI should be your hyper-personalized follow-up lead gener— lead nurturing process so that you can stop losing leads that you’ve already paid for and have something intelligent, like almost like a real person, chase them down, message them based on their input and cadence and knowledge and information and be way more intentional. So we are going to talk all about that today on this episode of the AI Marketing Experts Podcast. I’m your host, John.

John [00:02:09]:
We’ve got the distinguished panel, as Brad would always call us. I don’t know how distinguished we are, but we’ll let Brad go with that when he calls us that. And we’re going to unpack this entire subject because I think it’s critical to any business and now a game changer and a huge differentiator to those are first movers versus those are gonna be laggards. So who would like to jump in on this first and, and, uh, either second what I said or tell me I’m completely, you know, off in left field?

Laura Sutherly [00:02:39]:
Well, I know everybody’s gonna go deeper, so I’ll jump in first to, yes, that’s the way a lot of people, a lot of success has come in the past with those follow-ups, the automated emails that You took time as a small business owner to craft. It was a strong message. It really did work. But to your point, this point in time, it just doesn’t get you that much further. But if you’ve had that phone conversation, just think you have those notes. And the one thing that I’ll just give you as a very— as a starting point for those who just wanna get their toes in the water, go a little bit further with AI, is take those notes from that call, that conversation, and run those through AI. And even if you are just replying back, Mm-hmm. Your follow-up will reference what they were calling about.

Laura Sutherly [00:03:26]:
It’ll talk about their problems. You have the solutions and just those mere points, they’re going to take note that you remembered them, that you were following up. You remembered their problem. You had the solution. So that’s just an easy way. And like John said, we’re gonna unpack this and go a lot deeper, but if you can just take Any calls coming in today? One way to follow up next week would be to review your notes and have AI extract those key points. Look at your systems, your other messages you have in place, and then all of a sudden that’s going to be a very hyper-personalized message back to them.

John [00:04:06]:
Brilliant. What are you thinking, Chris? Jen? We’ll go with Jen. You spoke first.

John Clendenning [00:04:11]:
Chris is going to go deep on this. I know he will. Yeah.

Chris Hunter [00:04:14]:
And so I’m letting y’all talk first.

Brad Killgore [00:04:16]:
Fair enough.

John Clendenning [00:04:16]:
So let me just say really quick, if you are a small business owner who is doing your own marketing and you have any sort of follow-up system in place, or you are manually following up, I’m just gonna give you a quick kudos because you are following up. There are so many small business owners that don’t do any follow-up. So, um, like John always says, good, better, best. And so just if you are following up in any fashion, give yourself a pat on the back really quick. I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna give you that. So now we can go into Chris’s, this is how you do the, the, the better and best version.

Laura Sutherly [00:05:05]:
Yeah.

Chris Hunter [00:05:06]:
So, all right. I, I definitely know a lot about this subject just because I’ve built what we call Chase, right? So it was funny that you said to chase people down. We built a bot at my agency to really fix this problem because it’s a real problem in the roofing industry of people not following up, right? As if anybody who has ever hired a contractor or tried to get a contractor for anything, you realize that one, they don’t answer their phones. So we built Samantha, which is a voice— she’s a voice AI agent. Number 2, we built Chase because of their follow-up. Okay. So what Chase does is that she actually handles every single interaction that is not voice-based essentially, right? Email, SMS, primarily, you know, direct message through Meta, you know, Messenger, whatever way that people come in, even WhatsApp. What she does is, is that she gets them into an appointment first.

Chris Hunter [00:06:09]:
That’s the very first thing, right? So this nurturing idea.

John [00:06:12]:
Yeah.

Chris Hunter [00:06:13]:
is that if someone fills out a form on, on your website at 2:00 AM, she immediately follows up. Hey, this is Chase. Saw that you just filled out a form on our website. Here is, uh, you know, what can I help you with? It looked like you had problems with such and such and such, right? And I’ve seen her and watched her at 6 o’clock in the morning when I know that those roofers are definitely not gonna do that.

John Clendenning [00:06:38]:
Right.

Chris Hunter [00:06:39]:
I’ve watched her real time go back and forth with the homeowner that needed help right then and there to schedule an appointment. So that appointment would have gone probably unscheduled. Okay. That later turned into a job, by the way, for $25,000 roof replacement.

Laura Sutherly [00:06:57]:
Okay.

Chris Hunter [00:06:58]:
That was $25,000 that Chase specifically saved because she was there. Now, on how do you do that? Well, I’m using all sorts of things for agentic coding and all that kind of stuff. A safer way for any small business, I would highly recommend CloseBot. It’s pretty plug and play. There are tons of CloseBot professionals that you can hire to do that and set it up for your small business. I used to use CloseBot for me and my clients. I went a step further because we’re creating what we’re calling the brain for this AI operating system for other agents. And this is just the first set of agents that we’ve built for our clients.

Chris Hunter [00:07:41]:
I have seen real time her, like, not only saving that appointment, but the other part is the follow-up after an estimate is sent.

Laura Sutherly [00:07:48]:
Right.

Chris Hunter [00:07:49]:
And so we solved for that as well. She also then once they’re put into a certain stage in the pipeline, she will follow up afterwards because I know y’all roofers are not doing it.

Laura Sutherly [00:08:02]:
Okay.

Chris Hunter [00:08:02]:
You are not following up after the fact. After an estimate is sent. So she will follow up for as long as you tell her and you give her the instructions to do that. But I told our, our bot, our Chase, to follow up for 6 months. Okay. And she’ll follow up weekly with helpful things, nurturing, if you will. You know, hey, did you know that we did this? Or did you know that we did that? Do that. Once people figure out, the funny part is once people figure out that they’re talking to Chase, And that she’s selling herself, right? That’s the funny part.

Chris Hunter [00:08:38]:
People book and then, and then, you know, get into appointments with my sales staff. So it’s, it’s definitely something that you need to be doing in 2026.

John [00:08:47]:
I think, I think it is. And we’ll bounce to Brad. One of the things I would, so Jen is absolutely right. People that follow up, like every salesperson knows the, the, the money’s in the follow-ups, right? They, they, they, we’ve heard this in every business book for 50 years. All automation was, was, okay, well, you weren’t doing it. Let’s, let’s at least automate it. That made it so much easier, except for the fact that still nobody did it. Like, it’s still the, the, when we talk to clients, the percentage, we talk to agency owners, the percentage of them that even ever wired that in, but wired that in as, again, better than doing absolutely nothing.

John [00:09:22]:
But if you actually hired a really good business development manager, sales development manager, whatever, and they were the one picking up the phone and calling, they were checking out the LinkedIn listings. They were, you know, all of those kinds of things after a lead came in, because maybe this, this lead you’re talking to, this lead went cold. There’s, there’s all kinds. This one likes text messages. This one sent an email and, you know, meet them where they’re at was, would be the human in the loop. Well, you can train all of that into an agent system, like good enough. Start with like CloseBot, as Chris said, straight up. Better start building out these, these agents.

John [00:09:57]:
Even there’s a best level now where we’re, we’re starting to build in what’s called a warm collision, where if they go cold again, We like, we’re looking like the AI that we’re, that’s working in our own agency, but now for clients coming up as well, is where they act. It actually MCPs, so connects, whatever. Let’s not get too techie into LinkedIn and Facebook and stuff like that. Ingests even more information, puts it into a database and said, I know about this kid’s daughter’s softball award that she just got. And, and this, can I figure out a warm collision between this owner, business owner, and this client that reinvigorates that conversation again, um, down the road. So again, may not apply to a roofer 3 months down the road as much because hopefully the roof is solved by then if it was leaky. But, um, it, it may, you know, and a carpet cleaner, they probably already got the carpets cleaned, the dog urine’s taken care of right now, maybe. But if it’s sort of a B2B, if it’s a, you know, you are a business owner reaching out to your Dream 100 referral partner list.

John [00:10:58]:
So not just necessarily customers, but what if you’re using these things to reach out to the people that are gonna help you align and bring more customers in? Growing a business is more than just picking up the phone and getting leads. It is how you’re doing it everywhere. And that’s all part of this as well. So Brad, what is your thoughts on kind of old school business, you know, to, uh, you know, the way, the way you and I ran businesses 20 and 30 years ago, the brick and mortar crap to what we are recommending our audience and our clients do today?

Brad Killgore [00:11:27]:
Well, I think that everything you guys have shared makes a lot of sense. The first thing that really comes top of mind, I believe Jen said it, is how many businesses don’t follow up at all. I know I was at an event in Florida last March, signed up for a trial of a software and, you know, they were going to get back to me. Nothing. You know, I was actually kind of interested in that software. But since they never followed up, they didn’t communicate with me at all. It’s like, yeah, went by the wayside. Right.

Brad Killgore [00:11:57]:
But what John just said is literally I’ve had companies going back 20+ years. My first one was way back when, but back 20 years ago, we had in-house callers. You know, I had a construction company, so we would, you know, we wouldn’t let a lead die. Until they said, nope, we’re done. Or we found somebody else or stop bothering me, you know? So the old school way was literally calling them and that’s still effective. We’ve had callers in recent times as well, where they’re following up there, they’re communicating, they’re using online tools to text them, to look up information about them, learn more about them, that type of thing. But now, you know, we have a system, not quite as elaborate as Chase, but it’s the same concept. Meaning when a lead comes in, we have, we know where they came from, whether that was from a website form, whether it was a chat on our website, whether it was a phone call, whatever it is, it’s the same concept.

Brad Killgore [00:13:01]:
We’re going to keep communicating with them until they say, leave us alone, or hey, let’s talk further because the fortune is in the follow-up. I don’t know what the statistics say about how many times you have to touch somebody once they’re interested before they make a buying decision. What is it, 12 times or however many times?

Chris Hunter [00:13:20]:
I think it’s upwards of that.

Brad Killgore [00:13:22]:
Yeah, it’s upwards of that. And so it’s like, okay, so many companies in general, they don’t follow up. And if they do, it’s very short-lived. And we’ve done it. I mean, there’s times where we dropped the ball and we didn’t follow up as much as we probably could have. Or we learned a hard lesson. It’s like, well, gosh, we had all these leads. We paid for all this, these ads or whatever it is.

Brad Killgore [00:13:42]:
But if you can find different ways to hyper-personalize it, at least communicate with them in some way, shape, or form. Like I say, if you have a series of follow-up emails, but they’re super generic and not very well thought out and it doesn’t speak to them, it’s better than nothing. But it’s not necessarily what we’re capable of doing these days.

John [00:14:06]:
And I want to bounce back to Laura because the hyper-personalization is the key there. Like we’ve talked on other episodes about, you know, and I am big on this in the industry. Anybody in the cleaning industry knows John will say, do not have babies lying on carpets and families and dogs sitting on couches on your website. Be authentic, be real, tell your story. Donald Miller’s StoryBrand, go learn it. Be the guide for the hero, which is the customer trying to solve their problem. That, that whole kind of idea. And in, in the, I, in the follow-up and nurture and in the immediate chase, chase and the follow-up and nurture plan, if you are sending form messages, maybe, and we’re all kind of used to now form messages with their name at the, in the subject line and their name on the first, you know, you might get an 80-year-old granny that didn’t realize that, oh my God, he sent me a real email.

John [00:14:57]:
All the rest of us know. That was a form email with my name shoved into it. But when it turns around to be that hyper-personalized, cuz AI is going, oh no, no, I’m going back to being like a real, like Jerry the sales development manager. I’m gonna go back and be like him and how he would’ve done a little bit of research and to listen to the conversation. And what we just replied back with is about your conversation. That is super, super killer. And even on our team, we just, like, I just wired in the other day where We’ve got our AI note-taker. We’ve got Zoom.

John [00:15:27]:
We’ve got phone calls inside tools like Go HighLevel and stuff like that and into our phone system and all that. I’ve just now got them all connected that I can just pop into an agent and go, yep, that was a sales call. Yep. That was a client meeting. Yep. That was a team member meeting or a vendor meeting. And it goes, oh, I know what lane that is. Off it puts it, creates all the notes, creates all the stuff, creates all the follow-up, creates an entire series, sends the first one and sends me the rest as a draft and schedules it all.

Brad Killgore [00:15:49]:
Right?

John [00:15:50]:
It’s like from any source. Right? So That’s once you start building it, what you can build next is, is like you now the onions have layers. AI has layers. You can do now just start putting layers on it once you’ve, once you get the basics down. So that hyper-personalization, Laura, like what’s, uh, you know, you, you kind of first focused on that. What, what are some of your thoughts around why that’s even important beyond what I said?

Laura Sutherly [00:16:13]:
Well, I’ll even say that you’re, I mean, everybody is bringing to the table here. As to where to get that hyper-personalization and what to stand out in their email box, stand out in the phone calls or the text messages. But if we think of how we have a lot of success already in our inboxes, all we have to do is ask it to review. Or if you’re like, okay, I’m not ready to have it connected and looking at my email, we get that. So pull out when you’ve had those successful closes, when you feel like, wow, I took a lot of time. I have a great reply. Show them your, how you answer, the tone, your voice, how you, um, made it your own voice reaching out with care and providing that information that they need. So it can review your past emails.

Laura Sutherly [00:17:01]:
If you do wanna connect, it can review all your emails, pull up, okay, this works. This really doesn’t seem to be the strong point. And again, as you have those meeting notes, as you have now in agriculture, we don’t have like High volumes of calls per day, per se. So you get to know your growers, you get to know the areas they’re at, what fields they’re working. So there becomes a very strong story and history to them. And that’s the reason why if you can gather that information, follow up saying, hey, we have something new, follow up saying, did that work for you? Follow up and just present again solutions to their problems. They’re gonna see that you’ve been paying attention. And what you find out, that follow-up doesn’t take you as long as it used to.

Laura Sutherly [00:17:45]:
So I think that’s the biggest thing is when we’re working with clients and teaching them how they can take their quick notes, grab their phone, talk to their AI as they’re leaving a grower’s farm and say, okay, Stan, we covered X, Y, and Z with them. Put that in. Then when you’re following up, it just allows us to make those quick edits or—

Brad Killgore [00:18:07]:
Yeah.

Laura Sutherly [00:18:07]:
the business owner to make those quick edits and the follow-ups are quicker and very personalized.

John [00:18:15]:
So a couple of things that I’ll bounce to Chris, a couple of things there was context is important in AI. So give the more context you give it, let it learn, train, update the data, like a database, a memory system of some sort, context memory. And then eventually it can, you can reverse the, the, the loop and say, okay, you’ve learned on all my stuff. Where do we suck? Do better, right? Once you start iterating and getting, getting minimum viable going and you measure, now modify before you turn into a machine. I call it my framework, but it’s MVP, measure, modify, and then become a machine, lock and load and have itself improve from that point forward. So, and you’ve done a bunch of that, Chris, with your tools as well.

Brad Killgore [00:18:57]:
Mm-hmm.

John [00:18:58]:
The whole, now you get to the, hey, this is how far you can take it. Like you can actually turn it To be really agent. Start with the basics, you know, have it help you write a better email, right? Because it has context. Eventually have it write a better email than you ever would’ve in your life.

Chris Hunter [00:19:14]:
So one of the things that we solved with Chase this week was questions, right? Clients, potential customers have questions that you would’ve never thought of before. So we built a way for her to say, hey, you know what? Not quite sure about that. Let me ask someone and I’ll get right back to you. So she does that, gets with us on Telegram. We reply what it is, what the, what the true answer is. One, she gets back with the customer on that. Number 2, she says, okay, I’m placing this in my memory system now so that I know this from now on.

John [00:19:50]:
Never have to ask again.

Brad Killgore [00:19:50]:
I think that’s, that’s huge.

Chris Hunter [00:19:53]:
And that’s something that we solved this week because we were in Our customers, our clients, you know, were— their customers were asking some strange questions that Chase didn’t know. And she didn’t really have a way to deal with that at all. She, you know, I mean, most humans will be like, well, I don’t know that answer, you know, and just move on. And that’s exactly what, you know, the agents were doing. And so we caught that in the conversations. Right. And then solved for that. So, I mean, that’s, that’s just one of the little things that you can do with any agentic system is give it a memory, give it a way to remember its, and, and, and a way to learn over time.

John [00:20:38]:
And we said that like CloseBot and these, some of these tools have been around for a couple of years really, but I would say the whole shift in late, late January, early February of this year. And we’re only like 6 months out of that, has transformed. Like, it’s scary. It’s scary how far it’s gone. We say that on almost every episode, but it’s just like how what you solved this week was like it would’ve been patched together a month ago, maybe, you know, or whatever, harder to solve. Now it’s like even the latest models, the latest stuff, you know, loft engineering and all this crazy crap. Now all of a sudden it’s solvable. What’s your thoughts on any of this, Jen? Like, we’re, we’ll swing back around to you because you’re, Is it nodding at all of it? What are you thinking?

John Clendenning [00:21:22]:
Well, I’m listening to Chris honestly and going like, okay, mine does that.

Brad Killgore [00:21:27]:
Okay.

John Clendenning [00:21:27]:
Mine does mine do that? Do I need to look into that? So, you know, part of what I love about getting together with all of you guys and recording this every week is that sometimes I have a lot to contribute and other times I have a lot that I want to listen to because I want to know how to improve my own systems. Um, so anyways, I don’t have an answer to your question, John, because I was too, uh, in, um, in my head and listening to, um, everything that, that Chris was saying too.

Chris Hunter [00:22:03]:
Sorry.

John [00:22:03]:
No, all good. So where do we think we take anybody listening right now? We’re, we’re again, the good, better, best. That’s the way my brain works. So where do we take them right now saying, hey, following up to stop losing leads by using hyper-personalized, bringing AI into the loop. Right. We’ve kind of given some ideas. Let’s, let’s, let’s put it back into, okay, practical steps. So who wants to go and just kind of give a, you know, on, on the, on the very basics, just dovetail it back into what we’ve talked about all the way, you know, good, better, best.

John [00:22:30]:
How would we fit that in?

Brad Killgore [00:22:32]:
Well, I think, go ahead, Jen. Ladies first.

John Clendenning [00:22:36]:
My, well, my, I was just gonna say, um, if you are following up with leads, And so you don’t have the, you know, the internal, like meeting notes and stuff like that doesn’t apply. But if you have leads, you can use AI to scrape the internet to gather that business intelligence, that the information on the company, the person, the, you know, whatever it is, get that, use AI to get that information so that You can personalize your response and your follow-up.

John [00:23:14]:
Plug into Zillow and know the size of the roof of the house, right? Like literally, like there, there, there’s an actual floor plan in Zillow of pretty much every house. If you’re not plugged into Zillow, hey, I noticed that you have a, you know, 2,800 square foot roof, you know, blah, blah, blah. Did you get damaged by the hailstorm last week? You know, and then like whatever. So what, what are you gonna say, Brad?

Brad Killgore [00:23:34]:
What was your thoughts on this? I just will say, taking it down to the bare bones basics. You know, if you’re, if you’re stuck and you know you need to follow up and maybe one thing you could do is, you know, if you’re using Google Workspace, for example, there’s AI tools built right into the Google tools. So you could literally get ready to respond to an email and ask for some help. I mean, you can also, speaking of, you know, Google tools, Is if you need, like John was just saying, where you can hyper-personalize about different things, you could pull up their website in a Chrome browser, for example, ask Gemini, because there’s a little button at the top of Chrome now, and ask it something about that company. Say, you know, what’s a really unique thing about this company that most people don’t talk about or most people don’t realize? So you could use that as well to where if you’re kind of looking for ways to personalize, granted, you know, if you’re right now you’re in South Texas. You know, there was a bunch of flooding. There’s lots of ways you can use, you know, AI tools. But then the last one I think is if you’re like, hey, I really, this is a big deal.

Brad Killgore [00:24:48]:
Maybe this is a B2B thing and you really want to stand out to that prospective customer. You could throw together a quick NotebookLM, which just changed their name yesterday to Gemini Notebook. So it’s not called NotebookLM anymore. You could do that where you could pull in their website, you could pull in their social media, you could stack those sources in there to say, gosh, I want to, I want to talk intelligently to this person, but I don’t really know who the heck they are. I know they’re a big company and I’d like to have them as a client. So you could use Gemini Notebook now, put all the sources in there and then talk to it intelligently because Once you put the sources in there, now it knows what you’re discussing. So those would just be some, some super basic ways, free ways, uh, without having an elaborate Chet system or, or some of the other systems we’ve talked about, Closebot, all those different things. If you’re just kind of doing it a little bit more manually, lean on your AI tools that are at your disposal, even if it’s ChatGPT, uh, use something.

Brad Killgore [00:25:54]:
So that you can gather information.

John [00:25:57]:
And you can do that on your cell phone in the, in the, in the truck before walking into the contact or, you know, whatever as well. So did anybody else get any, uh, sort of parting tips or famous last words?

Laura Sutherly [00:26:06]:
I’m gonna, um, say to start with what success looks like. As a small business owner, we define that differently for all of us. And, uh, we’ve kind of gone from the basics to the complex to even beyond at this point. But if you open your favorite AI tool and tell it what success looks like for you and ask, how can I get there? That reverse engineering, the reverse loop, you will be pleasantly surprised as to what’s offered up. You may find yourself closer to something very AI-generated sooner than you think. You won’t be doing as much manually. So I would say, tell it what success looks like, what done, how you define done, and that’ll get you started.

Brad Killgore [00:26:50]:
Love it.

John [00:26:51]:
Yeah, I think it’s a good way to put it. And I’m going to give one more success tip for everybody. Join the AI Marketing Experts Insiders Group in the show notes below, wherever you see this. And we’ll go deeper on this with you. Ask questions, ping us, have a conversation in the back end.

Brad Killgore [00:27:05]:
What are you using?

John [00:27:06]:
What do you need help with? Stuff like that. Might as well just join the community of people talking about what we talk about on this show and, uh, and, and go a little bit deeper on these topics. So check the show notes, Take Action with Amy is in there as well when these episodes come out. So that’s a little bit deeper on everything we’ve talked about as well.

Brad Killgore [00:27:21]:
So.

John [00:27:22]:
Join us there and that would be very helpful as well. Uh, and if nobody else has anything else, I think we’ve, uh, we’ve left the audience with some really interesting things to think about on how to just take a first mover advantage before everybody else starts to just catch up and do this. So with that, I will say bye everybody and we’ll see you next week.

Brad Killgore [00:27:41]:
Take care.