Alex asks: “I’m getting leads, but it only works if I’m constantly chasing people. If I take my foot off the gas for even a few days, everything slows down. I didn’t start this business to live inside my inbox. How do you build a follow-up system that doesn’t feel cold or robotic, but also doesn’t require me to personally remember every conversation?”
In this episode, Scott reveals why Alex’s real problem isn’t follow-up automation—it’s that he’s still the salesperson and the business bottleneck. You’ll learn the Braided River system for combining humans and automation (humans for active leads, automation for dead leads, humans again when they raise their hand), hear Scott’s sports team consulting story about fixing low contact rates, and understand why the business will only grow to Alex’s capabilities as long as he’s stuck in the inbox.
The bottom line: Build the system. Get yourself out of it. The braided river works—but only if you’re not the one personally doing all the rowing.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
Full Transcript
Scott Todd (00:00)
Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you get unstuck by answering your questions so that you can grow the business to be what you want it to be. I’m Scott Todd and today’s question comes from Alex. And Alex says, I’m getting leads, which I know is a good problem. That’s a good problem. But it only works if I’m constantly chasing people, emails, texts, reminders. If I take my foot off the gas for even a few days,
Everything slows down. I didn’t start this business to live inside my inbox. How do you build a follow-up system that doesn’t feel cold or robotic, but also doesn’t require me to personally remember every conversation?
Alex, ⁓ I think that you have a number of different problems in here. ⁓ In your email, you have a number of different things, challenges. And here’s what I think the first challenge that you have is. I know you’re focused on a follow-up system, but the challenge you’re facing that’s keeping you stuck in the muddy mile is that you are the hub. And you even said it, you’re living in the inbox.
you’ve created another full-time job for yourself because you still have all of the sales coming through you. You’re the salesperson. At least that’s what it sounds like from this question. You’re the salesperson. And what you really want to do is you want to take that sales follow-up and give it to ⁓ an automation, an AI agent that goes out there and makes all these, I don’t know, phone calls or follow-up emails.
but you are running into the challenge that it sounds robotic and it’s going to sound robotic because it’s not a human. That’s the way it is and it sounds generic and canned. Now, the way that I would challenge you to think about this is I would challenge you to not build yourself into the system, to build the system where you’re not in it. And then what happens is when you go out and you map out this new system,
you’re creating not just a follow-up system, but you’re creating a sales system. Hey, this is the way that we handle leads within our company. They get a phone call from a human being within this amount of time. They get an email to acknowledge that, we got you, we’re working on you, or we’re trying to reach out to you. Okay, maybe it’s in your business, maybe it’s a text. We map these steps out. This happens, and then this happens.
But while you have somebody who wants to buy from your company, that is not a time to give it to automation. That is the time to give it to a human. The time to give it to something that’s automated is when the human has exhausted its ability to connect with that person any longer because they went dark, they’ve ghosted you, whatever it is. That does not mean that the sales process is over.
It means that the sales rep has followed through their sequence. They’ve gotten to where they can’t do anymore. They’re not buying. It makes no sense for the sales rep to continue to follow up with this person, but the lead isn’t necessarily dead. So now we in our CRM, now we want to build a system that goes through this sequence, picking up where the sales rep left ⁓ last left off. So we want to go out there and we want to say, Hey, you know,
Here’s the situation. Here’s what we understand situation is. Here’s how we can help you. And then we want to kind of take them into almost like a nurture sequence until they raise their hand again. And when they raise their hand, they say, Hey, I’m interested or I want a price or I want something else. Guess what? They come out of that follow up loop and they go into the human loop again. It’s what I call the braided river. It’s this building of a system that combines technology and humans and it’s a dance.
Humans are doing it and then it goes to the automation until the automation gets them back on board again and then it’s human again. But that human should not be you because if it’s you, you have another job for yourself and that’s the challenge. I was working with a professional sports team and they somewhat had this challenge. See what was happening was their sales reps kept following up with people. The people would go dark and the next thing you know the sales reps their contact rate
the people that are getting on the phone with the rep went down because people lose interest. That’s the way that it is. I did this to a sports team as well. I was interested until I wasn’t interested and then that was it. But yet the rep still wanted to call me and or email me and I was done. I had already made my decision. I just didn’t tell them. So then what I told the sports team that I was working with it, I said, Hey, why don’t you, why don’t you map out the sequence when it gets to this point, when the rep says I can’t do this any further.
Then we go over into the automated sequence, which is the follow up. But those follow up messages are written by a human being. Maybe someone in your marketing team, maybe you. It’s a one time job. We want to write this nurture sequence that says, hey, when people meet this criteria, this is probably what stops them from moving forward. And then when they raise their hand again, it goes back to the human. Now the human is back involved with it. And that’s the sequence that I really want you to work. That’s what I did with the sports team.
is I said, hey, we got to do it this way. And they’ve done that. And now their contact rates are higher. Their reps are working with people who, guess what, are making deals. That’s the way that it is. Right. But Alex, you now know what to do. You got to build out this system. You got to think about it from that approach. But I want to challenge you, Alex. I think you have a different problem. I think you have an underlying fear that you’re not addressing because you even said it.
You are living in your inbox. You are the one doing the follow up. You are the one that’s powering this business, not someone else. And I would challenge you, like why are you the one doing it? Because as long as you’re the one doing it, the business will only grow to your capabilities. That’s the way business works. It grows to the leader’s capability. If the leader does not have the capability,
to get out of the way and they stay there, that is the constraint of the business. And the only way out of this whole deal is to map out your systems, to build a system that does not require you involved with it. But that’s also going to take you addressing your fear, whatever that fear is, fear of reps not doing their job, fear of sales dropping. Well, guess what?
If you’re taking your foot off the gas because you need a break, sales are going to drop. So either way, you have the same problem, in my opinion. All right. ⁓ So there you go. You got the solution there. If you have a business challenge that’s stopping you, keeping you stuck, head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. Put your question there. And I look forward to helping to solve it on this ⁓ show. And I will see you in our next episode.