How to set up a lead follow-up bot that chases the quotes you forgot

The lead is not dead. The quote you sent three days ago is still sitting in your sent folder, unanswered, and the prospect is still reading it. You are going to follow up tomorrow. You said that yesterday too.

That is the whole problem with follow-up: the lead does not need a better email, it needs any email. And the reason it never goes out is not laziness. It is that every follow-up costs you a context switch, and you have forty other things open.

A follow-up bot removes the context switch. It watches the threads you have named, notices when one goes quiet past the line you set, and nudges you (or the thread) while the lead is still warm. Here is how to set one up in MyClawBots.

Step 1: name the exact rule, in one sentence

Vague rules produce vague bots. Do not tell it "follow up on leads." Tell it one thing like: "If I sent a quote and there is no reply after 3 days, flag it." or "If a prospect opened the proposal twice this week and never replied, flag it."

One rule per bot. You can clone it later for the second rule. The bots are cheap, your attention is not.

Step 2: connect the inbox it reads from

In your MyClawBots workspace, connect the email account where the quotes and proposals live. The bot runs inside a private workspace and only sees what you connect, so if your quotes go out of a second account, connect that one too. This takes a few minutes and it is the step most people skip and then wonder why the bot flags nothing.

Step 3: start from the follow-up template

MyClawBots ships ready-made templates, and follow-up is one of them. Pick it rather than building from a blank bot: the template already has the shape of the job, which is "watch these threads, compare each one against your rule, and act on the matches." Your job is just to fill in the rule from step 1 and the draft text it should use for the nudge.

Write the nudge draft yourself, in your own voice. Two lines is plenty: "Quick check-in on the quote I sent Tuesday. Happy to walk through any line of it if that's useful." The bot should sound like you on a good day, and only you know what that is.

Step 4: test it on one old thread

Before it touches anything live, point the bot at one thread you already lost. A quote from last month that went nowhere. Check what the bot does: does it spot the silence correctly, and does the draft read like something you would actually send? Fix the rule or the wording now, while the stakes are zero. A follow-up bot with a bad rule is worse than none, because it automates the wrong behavior.

Step 5: let it run, and check the workspace daily

The bot runs in the cloud around the clock, so it catches the 3-day silence that would have slid past you on a busy Thursday. Glance at its activity in your workspace once a day for the first week. You are looking for two things: threads it flagged that you agree with, and threads it missed that you had to catch yourself. Tighten the rule with the misses. After a week it should be catching everything you would have caught, minus the ones you were going to forget.

What it will not do

A follow-up bot fixes timing, not substance. If your quote lost because the price was wrong, no nudge changes that. It also cannot chase a lead that was never logged anywhere: if the conversation happened over the phone or in person, the bot never saw it, and it cannot flag what it cannot see. Feed it your threads and it is useful; expect it to find leads and it will disappoint you.

The practical limit is the trial window. MyClawBots is Lite $29/month, Pro $59, Max $119, Team $59 per seat, and the free trial is 3 days with no card. That is enough to run the test in step 4 and watch a full 3-day rule fire once, but only if you connect the inbox on day one, not day three.

What I would do differently

If I were starting over, I would start with fewer threads, not more. Pointing the bot at my entire sent folder on day one gave me a pile of flags I stopped reading. Pointing it at quotes only, the threads where money was on the table, made every flag worth opening. Start with the narrowest rule that still catches real money, then widen it once the bot has earned your trust.