The month I stopped researching prospects was the month I closed the most deals.
If my first message lands, I’m in a real conversation; if it doesn’t, I’ve already lost the deal before my coffee goes cold.
Click, scroll, copy, paste. Another day, another search.
I’ve secretly embraced my inner laziness – a trait I’ve always thought would doom my career. I relish achieving results quickly with minimal effort. One afternoon I caught myself staring at tab 47 of LinkedIn and thought that it would be so much easier if someone could introduce me to these people and start the connection.
‘What I really need is a business wingman,’ I realized,.
This stayed with me for the rest of the day. Every warm intro I’d ever gotten worked the same way: someone vouched for me, and the conversation started from trust instead of suspicion. I got to the conclusion that it was simpler because I had something in common with the people – same friend.
The problem wasn’t finding people – it was finding the right excuse to reach out without being another stranger in their inbox. There are also so many people that I don’t even know that I should be introduced to, so I wondered if AI could fake the same shortcut.
It can, and the trick is treating it less like a search engine and more like a well-connected friend who’s read everyone’s LinkedIn bio.
I’d spent two years building my LinkedIn presence, so brute-force scraping was off the table – I needed something smarter. Brute-force scraping would torch the audience I’d spent two years building – I needed something that worked with my existing presence, not against it.
After three weeks of broken prompts and outputs that confidently hallucinated shared employers, I had something that actually worked: a flow that reads a prospect’s profile and surfaces what we genuinely have in common. It highlighted shared experiences and interests with bullet-point precision.
Though it can’t say ‘hey, Joe, meet my friend,’ it suggests who I should meet and why.
The engineer in me couldn’t stop at a workaround – I turned the whole thing into a repeatable morning routine that takes four minutes instead of four hours.
After three weeks of testing, my reply rate jumped from 0.2% to 1.2%. Same me, same message length, better targeting. Each morning I open one list instead of 47 tabs – the AI has already done the excavation, I show up to the conversation.
Don’t get me wrong, I still write every message myself. But writing to someone you actually know something about feels like a conversation, not a cold call.
Now, my daily routine has changed. Instead of investing so much time into research I got my AI wingman do do this job for me. I can now focus on thing that I consider more relevant – translating these leads into meaningful relationships.