Back to the studio
Studio Calanque FR

AI agents10 min

AI agents for marketing: the one that answers your inbound leads, sorts them and follows up

AI agents for marketing that earn their keep: one that answers, qualifies and follows up on inbound leads. A pool builder's numbers, and what stays human.

In April 2025 a pool builder from Auriol, inland from Marseille in the south of France, lost a Saturday morning for nothing. Forty minutes on the road to a house above Ceyreste, and the garden was at the top of about 60 stone steps, with the closest spot the crane truck could reach 30 meters away and 2 terraces down. He installs shell pools. They arrive in one piece and a crane drops them in the hole, so by noon he was back home.

I tell this story when people ask me about AI agents for marketing, because the one that paid for itself in his company does not write posts or ads. It answers the people who fill out the form on his website, by text and then by email, 2 minutes after they send it, and asks them the 2 questions he'd ask himself: can a crane truck get within 15 meters of the pool, and is it for this year or next?

With the answers it sorts each request into A, B or C, offers the A's a visit in his calendar and follows up twice with people who don't answer. Prices, refusals and unhappy people stay with him. From March to June 2026, his first 4 months with the agent, he did 61 site visits (44 the year before) and signed 19 pools (15).

One request, from the form to his van

His old form had 11 fields: budget, soil type, even the year the house was built (I still don't know why). According to his site stats, about 1 in 2 people who started it never sent it, and some of the rest typed any old thing to get to the button. We kept 4: name, phone, town and an open text box, "your project in 2 sentences." The questions come later, from the agent.

Take a retired couple in La Bouilladisse who wrote at 10 p.m. on a Thursday in April: "8 m shell, for this summer if possible." The agent checks the town against its list first, 41 towns, everything within 35 kilometers of Auriol by road (a circle on a map doesn't follow the roads, and around here the roads go around a lot of hills). Then it waits. The first version answered in 10 seconds and nobody read it, nobody types that fast, so now it's somewhere between 1 and 3 minutes, still faster than anybody else in the valley.

The text says what it is ("Hello, this is the company's automated assistant. The owner will call you himself, and to prepare that call I have 2 questions"), then it asks about the crane and whether it's for this year or next. For a shell pool the crane decides almost everything, as he learned above Ceyreste. The couple answered the next morning (58% of people answer at all): yes, and this year, so it was an A.

Three letters, two follow-ups

We started with a score out of 100. Three days in he asked me what he was supposed to do with a 64, I had nothing, and we switched to letters.

A means he goes: inside the zone, a crane can get within 15 meters, work within 6 months. If one of those three is shaky it's a B. C is everything else: projects for 2028, anything out toward Toulon, the student and her thesis on in-ground pools, the man selling coping stones.

A's get 3 slots of 75 minutes out of his Google Calendar with the driving counted in. The first week it wasn't, and the agent had him in Trets at one and Cassis at two. The couple took the Saturday with one tap.

The B's get a call from him within 24 hours, after he gets 3 lines on Telegram with the exact sentence the person wrote. The C's get a short, honest answer, "we don't go as far as Toulon, but here are two good companies down there."

If people don't answer they get a text after 2 days, and after 6 days an email with 3 photos of a similar job, then nothing more. He wanted a third follow-up and I said no, we argued about it for 15 minutes in a parking lot in Roquevaire, and a month later he told me I was right. That does not happen to me very often.

In the US there is also the law. The FTC gives a business 10 business days to honor an email opt-out, and each email that breaks the CAN-SPAM rules can cost up to $53,088. His agent is in France and does not wait 10 days, it stops as soon as somebody writes "stop" or "we went with somebody else," which is the most common way to say it.

Why the score matters more than the speed

Everyone who sells lead qualification automation leads with speed, and there's a number behind it. In 2007 InsideSales and James Oldroyd, who was a fellow at MIT's Sloan School then, found that contacting a web lead within five minutes produced 21 times more qualifications than waiting even 30 minutes. I don't doubt it, and going from 26 hours (the median his wife measured over 54 requests in 3 weeks in February, when 9 never got a call back at all) to 2 minutes clearly helped him.

But a fast reply on its own is cheap, any form can send one in a second, and nobody read the 10-second ones. What made the speed worth something was that the reply to an A already had three real slots in it, and you can only do that if the agent knows who's an A. Going through the 17 extra visits one by one with his wife, we found 14 from people who'd written after 7 p.m. or on a Sunday and had a slot in their inbox before they'd filled in anyone else's form.

The other half is the C's. They were 31% of his requests, which he didn't believe until I showed him, and before the agent each of those got a call from him in the evening, so about a third of his evening calls went to people he was never going to build a pool for. Salesforce's sixth State of Sales report says sales reps spend 70% of their time on things that aren't selling, and those are people whose whole job is selling. He was taking that time out of the few hours he had left after work.

To be fair, his requests went from 188 to 207 between the two springs (he'd redone the photos on his Google Business Profile in January and doubled his Google Ads budget in April), so I wouldn't credit the agent with all 4 extra pools. The visits I would.

What broke

Budget was the first question in the first version. It was my idea, every lead form I know asks for it. In 15 days 6 people wrote "we'll see" or nothing, the agent put all 6 in C, and in April he heard from a supplier that 2 of them had signed with somebody else, one of them for a shell at 31,000 euros. People don't give a form their budget, they give it to a person, sometimes. Since March 17 the agent no longer talks about money and asks if there is already another quote, which for him is almost the same information.

The second problem was dumber. A woman called the office the day after her request and booked her visit by phone with his wife; 2 days later the agent texted her its follow-up anyway, since the call was in the paper appointment book and the agent can't read paper. She laughed. He didn't. Now a call logged in the CRM cancels the follow-ups, and his wife has a button on her screen that says "already spoke on the phone."

Ten AI agents for every seller by 2028, Gartner predicts, and in July Dan Gottlieb, an analyst there, said that if the systems the agents work in are fragmented, "the agents will scale the fragmentation." For a company this size that is most of the CRM automation work: the agent and the people have to write in the same place, and here the paper appointment book was the fragment.

The score has other traps. A real estate agency in Cassis gave a 5 out of 5 to everybody who wrote "financing all set," and one couple toured 3 houses before talking to any bank. It's one of the cases in my notes on seven AI agents at small businesses.

AI agents for marketing: what stays human

People ask me for an AI sales agent now and then, and I say I don't build agents that sell, I've never seen one sell a pool and he would not let it try anyway. His agent sorts and books, that's all. The selling happens in a garden in Gémenos or Roquevaire with him and a tape measure, and the client showing him where the shower should go.

So the first call is his, the agent only prepares it, and he phones every A the day before even when they booked online, because "I want to hear the voice."

The price is his too, and on that point he was stricter than me. I wanted the agent to give the "starting at" price that is on his website, but the same 8-meter shell in Auriol and in Cuges-les-Pins, where you need 40 more meters of trench for the electrical line, can mean 2 quotes a few thousand euros apart, and he says that once you put a number in writing, it's the number the client shows you on signing day. I had no answer to that.

He keeps the C's, too. He reads them on Friday afternoon, it takes 10 minutes and he gets 1 or 2 back a month, like the retired woman who put Lyon as her town (she lives in Lyon, the house is in Peypin). Anything with feelings in it goes to him as well, the complaint about a pool from 2024 or the man who asked "are you a robot?", who had a call from him within the hour.

Cost and tools

With me an agent starts at 900 euros before tax, around $1,000, and takes 1 to 3 weeks. His came to 1,300 euros because his quoting software has no API and we had to work from exports. It took 2 weeks to build, then 2 more of me reading the agent's logs over coffee every morning, all included. In April, his busiest month, the model and the text messages cost him 38 euros. In July, 14.

It runs on n8n, on a server in France in his name, and he can take it over without me if he wants, which to me matters more than the choice of tool. Why I install n8n and not Make or Zapier is in the n8n, Make and Zapier comparison, and if you would rather build one yourself, my guide on how to create an AI agent for your business goes step by step. If your customers call more than they write, a voice agent can do the same work on the phone (there's an example interface in the portfolio).

Count first, 2 weeks of requests with the time each came in and the time you first answered. With a median reply under an hour you probably don't need an agent, just a better way to sort, and for choosing what to automate first there is my piece on where AI automation pays back first. If it's over an hour and you don't like the number, a 15-minute call is usually enough to see whether an agent would help.

FAQ

Can an AI agent qualify leads on its own?

For the clear cases, yes, once you have written down what an A and a C mean for you. Asking the questions and sorting the answers is what the models do well. I would not let it turn somebody down by itself or decide the cases in the middle, so at the pool builder's the A's book on their own but he reads every C on Friday.

How much does lead qualification automation cost?

With me it starts at 900 euros before tax for the setup, about $1,000, and it takes 1 to 3 weeks. The pool builder paid 1,300 euros because his quoting software has no API. After that he pays for the model and the text messages by volume, 38 euros in April and 14 euros in July.

Can an AI agent do cold outreach for me?

It can, and some sell that as AI for lead generation, but I don't build it. This one only writes to people who contacted the company first, and in the US every commercial email it sends must still follow CAN-SPAM, opt-outs included.

Sources

Related