The follow-up system, start to finish
An enquiry arrives, lands in your CRM, gets a reply within minutes written in your voice, and is chased twice if it goes quiet. You do nothing after setup.
What it does
A new enquiry arrives. It lands in your CRM as a contact, gets a reply within minutes written in your voice, and if that reply goes unanswered it follows up twice more on a schedule. You do nothing after setup.
What you need
- Make, free tier, the canvas the whole thing runs on.
- HubSpot, free CRM, where contacts and deals live.
- Claude, which writes the replies inside the workflow.
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The build, in order
- 1. Catch the enquiry. Point your website form or inbox at a Make webhook. Every submission becomes a bundle you can act on.
- 2. Create or update the contact. Search HubSpot by email first, so a repeat enquiry updates the existing record instead of creating a duplicate.
- 3. Draft the reply. Send the enquiry text to Claude with a prompt that carries your tone, your services and your prices. Ask for a short reply that answers the actual question and proposes one next step.
- 4. Send it. Out through your own mailbox so it threads normally and replies come back to you.
- 5. Chase twice. A scheduled scenario checks for contacts with no reply after two days and after six, then sends a shorter nudge. Anyone who replies drops out of the sequence automatically.
The prompt that does the work
Give the model the enquiry, then constrain it. Something close to: "You are replying on behalf of [business]. Answer the specific question asked, in under 120 words, in a warm and plain tone. Do not invent prices. Propose exactly one next step. If the enquiry is unclear, ask one clarifying question instead." The constraints matter more than the persona.
What breaks at scale
The free Make tier covers a real small business comfortably: 1,000 credits a month, and most actions spend one credit each. Make renamed these from operations — their pricing page says “As of August 27, credits are the billing unit in Make”. Older tutorials and forum answers still say operations, the same thing, converted one for one. The usual first ceiling is that allowance, and the usual cause is a polling trigger checking too often. Move to webhooks wherever the source supports them and the cost mostly disappears.