I went 6 months with zero leads.
April → October?
Crickets.
Outreach felt like screaming into the void.
I tried to diagnose the “empty calendar” problem.
Turns out the problem was… me.
I was doing what every AI consultant does:
“Hey [Name], I help companies with AI automation…”
Instant delete.
It wasn’t wrong.
It was just aimed at nobody.
So I stopped trying to “scale outreach” and asked a different question:
What if every cold email felt like I actually read their LinkedIn?
Not the fake personalization.
Not the “I noticed your post about…” nonsense.
Real relevance.
So I built an n8n workflow that does the boring work for me:
1. Scrapes a prospect’s latest LinkedIn activity
2. Spots their real business pain (based on what they publicly talk about)
3. Generates an icebreaker tied directly to their world
4. Drops it into a tight, ROI-driven email
15 seconds per lead.
100 leads/day without feeling like a spammer.
Before:
200 generic emails → 2% replies → ~1 call/month
After:
100 personalized emails → 6% replies → 6 calls/month
Same effort.
New system.
I stopped pretending people should care about my pitch.
I started proving I understand their world.
Most cold outreach fails because it’s selfish.
You’re asking strangers to care about YOUR solution before showing you get THEIR problem.
AI doesn’t magically fix that.
But it does make the research scalable.
Automation should do the mechanical work (scraping, checking posts, creating briefs, filling templates)
so you can do the human work (writing emails people actually respond to).
I wasted 6 months before accepting that volume without relevance is just noise.
Relevance at scale?
That’s a pipeline.
If you’re stuck in the spray-and-pray loop:
Don’t just “improve your templates.”
Fix your targeting.
Speak in their language, not in “AI automation jargon.”
Make every first line earn the next sentence.
What’s killing your pipeline right now—volume or relevance?