Founders Get Their AI Return By Fixing Follow Up And Onboarding Behind A Campaign

AI is generating more leads for companies than their teams can handle. A campaign performs, the leads arrive, and then they sit in an inbox behind a backlog, until the prospect books with a competitor.

Carly Meyers is an AI Consultant and the Founder of Made For MoreAI, which sells CRM software and AI training to agency owners and consultants. Her own client work is built around audits, where she interviews a founder and their team, works out where AI fits, and hands over a roadmap for a partner to build. She danced professionally in West End musicals until an injury ended it overnight, then worked at an Apple store, where she learned to break down complicated technology for customers in terms they could follow. In auditions she had 90 seconds to learn a routine after seeing it once, and she says business processes stick with her the same way.

"AI is great, but it amplifies what's already there. If your systems aren't solid, you amplify chaos," Meyers says. Most of her clients come to her with tools already in place, sitting on workflows they built when the company was a fraction of its current size.

Simplify then amplify

Meyers works in a fixed order, and AI comes at the end of it. "I take my clients through a process of simplify, automate, and then amplify. People are working backwards a lot of the time," she notes. Simplifying means clearing out the subscriptions a company isn't using. Automating means the core steps keep moving without anyone chasing them, and AI only goes on top once they do.

"Most people are signing up to the tools and thinking that the tool is going to fix all of their problems," she adds. Doubling inbound leads doesn't change anything about the person who has to answer them. That person was already stretched, and now there are twice as many emails waiting, on top of an onboarding routine that was creaking before any of this started. Meyers has seen companies post a jump in leads while the person handling first contact is drowning.

Mind the gap

Every audit starts with the company's founder, in a conversation that lasts about 90 minutes. "On that call I'm like a toddler and I don't stop asking why," Meyers says. She asks how something gets done, then why it gets done that way.

She then interviews the heads of sales, marketing, customer service, and HR, along with the admin staff who handle the work every day, and asks them to share their screens and walk her through it. "The gap between what the founder thinks is happening and what the team is actually doing is where the gold is," she notes. A founder will describe four steps that should take 10 minutes. The admin team will open a spreadsheet somebody built because the official route didn't cover a step, then a second workaround built on top of that.

Those workarounds usually exist in one person's head, with no record of them anywhere else. "Only that one person knows how the process works, and that leaves your business in a very vulnerable position," Meyers warns. Writing them down is the first thing the audit produces.

Those interviews also show where roles have blurred, with a marketing hire picking up sales, then proposals, then a queue of admin. "How can we get the people who were hired for specific skills to stay in that lane, and get AI to do all of the work that no one wants to do," she says.

Where AI pays off

Companies put more than half their generative AI budgets into sales and marketing tools, and the clearest measured returns so far have come from the operational side, where AI takes over work that used to be outsourced or done by hand.

The same pattern shows up inside marketing teams, where AI goes on the posts and images. Meyers uses it a step earlier in her own marketing, to work out what to say. "I don't want to spend months and months testing. I want to spend the time figuring out what people are already resonating with," she notes. She'll point AI at YouTube and Instagram, pull her competitors' best-performing posts from the past three months, and read what her audience has already told her it wants. That research goes through a model she's trained on her own call transcripts, so it comes back in her positioning and her vocabulary. She records the videos herself, in the car after the school run, and in her own numbers those beat the polished ones.

Website copy is another job that nobody watches, and it decides whether anyone finds the company at all. Close to half of US adults now use ChatGPT, up from about a third a year earlier. "The type of websites that work now are all about answer engine optimization. How can you write in a way that is a direct answer to a question someone is asking in ChatGPT," Meyers says. Pages that say what a company does and who it serves in short, specific sentences come back cleanly inside an answer. Long stretches of positioning language give the system less to work with.

"No one cares about that fluffy language anymore. They just want the direct answer to the question that they've asked," she adds. A company that doesn't have a large SEO budget can compete on how clearly it explains what it sells, which is a change in who gets found.