How do you give an agent the state of a relationship — not just the history — so its follow-up doesn't go generic?

I run a chunk of my commercial follow-up through agents now, and the wall I keep hitting isn't the writing — it's that the agent doesn't know where the relationship actually stands. Who owes whom a reply, whether we're warm or stalled, what the last real signal was. So I either hold all of that in my head (and I become the bottleneck), or I dump the whole thread history into context and the message comes back generic and expensive.

For those of you running outreach or follow-up through agents: how do you represent relationship state as something structured the agent reads and acts on — a status field, a per-contact context file, a "next best touch" the system proposes? And just as important, how do you keep the output from feeling automated on the other end?

I'm after the structural fix, not a better prompt. What actually lives in your setup, and what did you try that quietly failed?

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How do you give an agent the state of a relationship — not just the history — so its follow-up doesn't go generic?