WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.572 Hey. So twice this week — two different people, same week — asked me basically 00:00:04.572 --> 00:00:09.323 the same thing. Can I set up an AI that answers my leads the second they come in? 00:00:09.323 --> 00:00:13.895 Someone fills out a form, or sends an email, and before I've even seen it, the 00:00:13.895 --> 00:00:18.229 AI's already replied. Answered their question. Asked a smart one back. And 00:00:18.229 --> 00:00:22.624 then dropped it into my CRM. That's it. That's the whole ask. And the short 00:00:22.624 --> 00:00:27.196 version is... YEAH. You can. It's one of the easier things to do with AI right 00:00:27.196 --> 00:00:30.046 now. But there's a question hiding underneath it. 00:00:30.046 --> 00:00:33.793 This is "AI Honestly." I'm Drew. Each week I take one real question from a 00:00:33.793 --> 00:00:37.694 founder or business owner and tell you what's real, what's not, and what it'd 00:00:37.694 --> 00:00:39.798 actually take to build. No hype. No DOOM. 00:00:43.798 --> 00:00:48.100 Okay so — the thing people are calling this is "speed to lead." And right now 00:00:48.100 --> 00:00:52.118 there's a lot of noise around it. Everybody's selling speed to lead. But 00:00:52.118 --> 00:00:56.420 when most people say it, they mean this big thing — agentic customer support, 00:00:56.420 --> 00:01:00.439 lead nurturing, a whole system that babysits every contact from hello to 00:01:00.439 --> 00:01:04.741 closed. That's not what these two were asking for. They wanted the one piece. 00:01:04.741 --> 00:01:09.269 Just... answer the lead. First response. Maybe a little back and forth. Then hand 00:01:09.269 --> 00:01:09.665 it off. 00:01:09.665 --> 00:01:14.090 And I get why that's the piece they want. It's the piece that matters most. And the 00:01:14.090 --> 00:01:18.515 numbers on it are kind of wild. There's a study everybody cites — the MIT one — and 00:01:18.515 --> 00:01:22.454 it says if you get to a lead within five minutes instead of thirty, you're 00:01:22.454 --> 00:01:26.285 something like a hundred times more likely to even reach them. A hundred 00:01:26.285 --> 00:01:30.278 times. And a lot more likely to qualify them once you do. Now — the average 00:01:30.278 --> 00:01:34.272 business? Takes over a day to respond. Some never respond at all. So a lead 00:01:34.272 --> 00:01:38.265 comes in Friday night, half these shops aren't touching it till Monday. And 00:01:38.265 --> 00:01:42.258 here's the thing — people don't send one inquiry. They send three, four, to 00:01:42.258 --> 00:01:46.359 whoever showed up in the search. First one to reply — first one to reply with 00:01:46.359 --> 00:01:50.406 something that isn't garbage — usually gets the deal. So if you're not fast, 00:01:50.406 --> 00:01:53.644 your competitor is. That's really what's driving all of this. 00:01:53.644 --> 00:01:57.470 And most of the tools that do this well only sell it bundled into the big 00:01:57.470 --> 00:02:01.455 platform. So if you just want the front door — the fast, smart first reply — 00:02:01.455 --> 00:02:05.440 you're kind of left going, do I really have to buy the whole house for that? 00:02:05.440 --> 00:02:09.755 So — is it real? Yes. Like I said, it's one of the lower-hanging fruit things you 00:02:09.755 --> 00:02:13.746 can do with AI. Let me walk through what's going on under the hood, because 00:02:13.746 --> 00:02:17.899 it's simpler than people think. The AI reads the lead inquiry — reads what the 00:02:17.899 --> 00:02:21.674 person wrote, what they asked, what they're worried about — and then it 00:02:21.674 --> 00:02:25.935 responds with something intelligent. Not a canned auto-reply. A real answer. And 00:02:25.935 --> 00:02:30.141 usually a question back, to keep things moving. And you train it ahead of time. 00:02:30.141 --> 00:02:34.402 On your website. Your sales docs. Even just... free-form text where you type out 00:02:34.402 --> 00:02:38.663 the rules — here's how we talk, here's what we do, here's what we don't promise. 00:02:38.663 --> 00:02:40.874 All of that is straightforward to set up. 00:02:40.874 --> 00:02:45.290 The way I've built this before — you spin up its own little box. A virtual private 00:02:45.290 --> 00:02:49.652 server, with Claude Code running on it. Or in its simplest form, it can be just a 00:02:49.652 --> 00:02:53.741 serverless function. Then you need a way to catch the email. I use a service 00:02:53.741 --> 00:02:57.884 called Postmark. Postmark gives you an email address, and when a message hits 00:02:57.884 --> 00:03:02.028 that address, it takes the whole thing apart — who they are, their email, the 00:03:02.028 --> 00:03:06.063 body — turns it into clean structured data, and posts it straight into your 00:03:06.063 --> 00:03:10.043 app. So now your app has the lead. The AI's already trained. It writes the 00:03:10.043 --> 00:03:13.914 reply, sends it back out through Postmark, and you're off. If the person 00:03:13.914 --> 00:03:18.330 writes back, you go again. Another turn. As many as you want. And it's fast. On my 00:03:18.330 --> 00:03:22.473 own app I say "under a minute" on the site — but it's usually more like four, 00:03:22.473 --> 00:03:24.109 five seconds. It just answers. 00:03:24.109 --> 00:03:28.733 So the "can it be done" part — that's a yes, no asterisk. The real question, the 00:03:28.733 --> 00:03:33.241 one hiding underneath, is: do you build this custom, or is there something off 00:03:33.241 --> 00:03:37.924 the shelf you just... switch on? And what I've found — today, right now — is that 00:03:37.924 --> 00:03:42.431 things mostly point to custom. Here's why. Everybody who sells a speed-to-lead 00:03:42.431 --> 00:03:46.353 product sells it as part of a bigger offering. HubSpot's got agents. 00:03:46.353 --> 00:03:50.860 Salesforce has something too. But they're not just "answer the lead." It's the 00:03:50.860 --> 00:03:55.309 whole nurture-and-support suite, and answering the lead is one feature buried 00:03:55.309 --> 00:03:59.875 inside it. There isn't really a clean, drop-in, one-size-fits-all speed-to-lead 00:03:59.875 --> 00:04:03.856 that just slides into everybody's process. Maybe that exists someday. 00:04:03.856 --> 00:04:04.558 Doesn't yet. 00:04:04.558 --> 00:04:09.322 So let's say you go custom. What does it take? Tools: a VPS, Postmark for the 00:04:09.322 --> 00:04:14.149 email coming in and going out, and Claude Code to build and run the thing. You 00:04:14.149 --> 00:04:18.976 train it on whatever you've got — site, docs, a page of rules you wrote in ten 00:04:18.976 --> 00:04:23.928 minutes. Time: for someone who knows what they're doing with AI, this is maybe a 00:04:23.928 --> 00:04:28.567 couple days. Call it a week on the outside. It's not a months-long project. 00:04:28.567 --> 00:04:33.130 And once you've got the bones, you can shape it however your business works. 00:04:33.130 --> 00:04:37.998 Maybe it answers by email. Maybe it texts them instead. Maybe it's one clean turn 00:04:37.998 --> 00:04:42.561 and done. Maybe it goes back and forth over a couple days, and then a little 00:04:42.561 --> 00:04:47.185 later drops a follow-up with a video to watch. Whatever fits how you actually 00:04:47.185 --> 00:04:51.931 sell. That's the part that gets kind of cool — you end up with a responder that 00:04:51.931 --> 00:04:56.920 sounds like your business. Acts like your business. Knows what your business knows. 00:04:56.920 --> 00:05:01.848 Somebody asks a real, specific question — the kind that'd normally sit in an inbox 00:05:01.848 --> 00:05:06.533 till Thursday — and it gets answered in under a minute. Because the AI already 00:05:06.533 --> 00:05:08.784 knows the answer, and the AI is fast. 00:05:08.784 --> 00:05:13.419 Now — if you're already living inside HubSpot or Salesforce, and you want this, 00:05:13.419 --> 00:05:17.876 the off-the-shelf path might make sense, even though you're buying the whole 00:05:17.876 --> 00:05:22.392 platform to get it. And if you're a smaller shop that's not on one of those — 00:05:22.392 --> 00:05:27.086 that's the gap I built a product called Request Router for. You sign up, you get 00:05:27.086 --> 00:05:31.662 your own agent trained on your business, and it answers your inbound leads for 00:05:31.662 --> 00:05:36.119 you. The way it works: a lead comes in through a form, the AI answers once — 00:05:36.119 --> 00:05:40.694 with a question — in seconds. And when that lead answers back, it forwards the 00:05:40.694 --> 00:05:45.270 whole thing to you. One turn, then a warm handoff. That's the smaller-business 00:05:45.270 --> 00:05:48.538 version. In between those two... you're building custom. 00:05:48.538 --> 00:05:53.008 Alright — what to watch for. Because this is the part the person selling it to you 00:05:53.008 --> 00:05:57.037 won't bring up. First: know where the human takes over. The AI can go turn 00:05:57.037 --> 00:06:01.452 after turn forever, technically, but you don't want that. Pick the handoff point. 00:06:01.452 --> 00:06:05.812 One good question and pass it to a person — or two, three turns and pass it. But 00:06:05.812 --> 00:06:09.344 decide. Don't let a bot run a whole relationship into the ground. 00:06:09.344 --> 00:06:14.038 Second — and this is a real choice — you can make the reply look like it came from 00:06:14.038 --> 00:06:18.790 a person, or you can say straight up it's AI. Both work. Both move the conversation 00:06:18.790 --> 00:06:22.615 forward. But think about your brand before you pick. Getting caught 00:06:22.615 --> 00:06:27.193 pretending is worse than just having said so up front. Because if someone clocks 00:06:27.193 --> 00:06:31.829 that the "person" emailing them back in four seconds flat at 11pm was a bot — and 00:06:31.829 --> 00:06:36.118 they will clock it — you want that to land as "oh, that's clever," not "oh, 00:06:36.118 --> 00:06:37.161 they lied to me.". 00:06:37.161 --> 00:06:42.081 And third: the buy-versus-build tax. Go off-the-shelf, and you're often paying 00:06:42.081 --> 00:06:47.130 for a whole platform to use one corner of it. Go custom, and — it's yours. Which 00:06:47.130 --> 00:06:52.114 means the upkeep is yours too. Neither one's wrong. Just know which bill you're 00:06:52.114 --> 00:06:52.625 signing. 00:06:52.625 --> 00:06:56.556 That's it for this episode. If you've got a question you've been wondering about — 00:06:56.556 --> 00:07:00.195 can AI do this thing?... send it to me.... The address is in the show notes.