Follow Up with Every Lead in Minutes

Read time: 4 minutes

Welcome to the Succession newsletter where 1,000+ life science sales reps improve their skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re getting value from these newsletters, we'd love it if you could forward it along to your sales colleagues. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

If you’ve worked in sales or marketing at any company, you’ve definitely seen the same argument play out a hundred times.

Marketing generates leads. Maybe from a webinar, website visit, or whitepaper download. They get assigned a score, and once that lead hits a threshold, they pass it to sales.

And then?

Sales doesn’t follow up…

Sales looks at the lead and thinks, “They’re not ready to buy.” Marketing asks why no one followed up. Sales says the lead wasn’t qualified. Marketing says, “But they engaged!” And around it goes round and round.

It’s a tale as old as time.

The real problem now is that teams are still relying on a process built for a world where humans had to do all the enrichment, research, and writing themselves.

But that world doesn’t exist anymore.

Today, AI and automation can handle everything from enrichment to first-touch personalization. And when that’s in place, there’s no excuse for a single inbound lead to sit untouched.

The Old Way

Historically, inbound follow-up has looked something like this:

1. A prospect fills out a form or downloads something.

2. Marketing waits until they hit a lead score.

3. The lead gets passed to sales.

4. Sales eventually follows up (maybe?), and it’s normally a generic email template.

It’s slow, manual, and inconsistent.

And when leads go cold, both sides blame each other.

The New Way

With the latest tools in AI and automation, all you need is a name and company and you can find pretty much anything you want in seconds. This no longer should be a manual task.

• Enrichment tools like Clay pull title, LinkedIn, company size, funding, hiring patterns, recent news, publications, research areas, drug pipeline, and so much more.

• AI tools use that context to write a short, relevant follow-up email that references exactly what triggered their interest (the event, the download, the visit) and can connect it to the broader context of the company/person.

• Routing logic assigns it to the right rep and either sends it on their behalf automatically or sends them a notification and draft of the message to send themselves.

• The enriched data and activity is logged in your CRM automatically, so every lead or contact has all the context you would need from marketing or sales.

The result: every inbound lead gets a personalized follow-up within minutes, not days. Reps don’t have to start from scratch or use templates, and marketing can finally stop worrying about whether leads are being touched.

*One of the underrated benefits of this is that speed to lead is instantaneous. There are dozens of different reports that show how important it is to respond to leads right away. This process ensures you are the fastest while your competitors still lag behind.

How It Looks In Reality

Someone downloads a whitepaper from your site.

Within seconds, their name and company are captured. The system enriches their record. Finds their title, company size, funding round, and the last few pieces of news about them. The AI sees they’re a Head of R&D at a company that just raised a Series B, and it drafts a short email like this:

This message can get automatically sent in seconds day or night. Or if you prefer human in the loop (which does delay speed to lead), the rep gets a notification in Slack or CRM with the draft ready to send. They can tweak a line or two and hit “approve.” The system sends the email and logs it automatically.

All of this can happen in under 5 minutes.

That speed and context completely changes how you should approach inbound lead follow-up. Instead of cold, delayed follow-ups, prospects get thoughtful replies while their interest is still fresh and before your competitors reach out.

A Few High-Impact Workflows

You don’t need to automate everything at once. Start with a few workflows that move the needle fast:

• Demo or Contact Form Submissions: Immediate enrichment + short, relevant follow-up from the assigned rep.

• Content Downloads: Email that references the exact asset they downloaded and ties it to their role or company context.

• Event Leads: Automatically enrich booth scans and send a note referencing the specific session or topic they engaged with.

• Product Page Visitors: Trigger a quick outbound message minutes after they’ve been on your product page, asking if they want to chat with a technical expert.

These are small wins that compound. Even improving your average response time from a few days to a few minutes can more than double your conversion rates from inbound leads.

What Makes This Approach So Powerful

1. Speed
Leads go cold fast. Responding within minutes can multiply your chances of booking a meeting.

2. Personalization Without Manual Work
Every email feels written for the person because it is.

3. Consistency Across Teams
No more guessing which leads are “worth it.” Every inbound gets a first touch, every time.

4. Better Data
Because enrichment and CRM updates happen automatically, your database stays clean and usable.

5. Happier Teams
Sales doesn’t have to spend hours researching; marketing knows every lead is being followed up with. The finger-pointing stops.

Final Thought

There’s no excuse anymore for slow or generic follow-up.

The best-performing commercial teams have systems that reply to every inbound lead fast, personally, and with full context.

It’s the difference between hoping someone follows up and knowing they already did.

If your inbound follow-up still takes days, reply to this email with “FOLLOW-UP.”

We’ll help you build the system that makes it happen automatically.

To continue our support for Women in Sales Month, Nick and I are passing the mic to our newest members of the team (Jess and Divya). They will be hosting a series of interviews and discussions sharing stories, perspectives, lessons and challenges of being a woman in sales.

So if you want to come on the podcast and share your experiences, reply to this email and we’ll get you connected!

Here's to a well-deserved celebration of the women driving impact in sales, carving their own path, and laying the groundwork for those who come after them.

1. Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

2. Training for Reps: A skill development platform for life science sales reps who want to improve their sales skills, exceed their quota, and take the next step in their career.

3. Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.

4. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.