How to improve my sales without spending more on advertising: the answer had been hiding in my inbox for fifteen years. This is the story of a digital agency that discovered, with the help of artificial intelligence, that its best database didn't need to be bought — it already existed.
I want to tell you a story that happened to me last week.
Over the past few days I've been thinking, rediscovering and digging up databases. Or, more precisely, digging up everything sitting inside my inbox.
My corporate email has existed since 2010, when my agency started operating. When I actually looked at it, I found something that made me stop: more than 45,000 emails accumulated over all these years.
Relationship marketing: the pending task for almost every B2B expert
Every time I talked about relationship marketing, I thought about going back to the people I had worked with, spoken to or built relationships with in the past. The problem was that doing it involved an absurd amount of time and effort. It simply wasn't feasible manually.
Fortunately, today we have tools like Claude.
So I thought: it's time to start using artificial intelligence for myself.
I use it every day. I use it for my clients. I use it to build bots, automations and solutions. But honestly, I had never sat down to leverage it to build my own databases.
It had been on my to-do list for a long time.
15 years of emails, one day of work with AI
So I gave Claude access to fifteen years of professional history stored in my email and asked it to find something I knew was there but had never had time to look for: every person I have built a relationship with throughout my career.
Then I asked it to read my 45,000+ emails and extract, one by one, the names, email addresses and phone numbers of every person I had been in touch with over those years.
And something happened that still feels unbelievable.
In about one day, Claude turned that mountain of emails into an Excel database with roughly 1,400 contacts.
One thousand four hundred people.
One thousand four hundred people I've had conversations, meetings, projects, sales, alliances, wins, mistakes, laughs — and a few headaches — with over the last fifteen years.
Some projects went great. Others not so much. With some of them I'm still friends. With others we simply lost touch. But there they were. Fourteen hundred relationships built over time.
Generating leads without mass campaigns: the right call
When I saw that database I decided to do what I believe is right.
Not start blasting mass campaigns. Not send 1,400 automated emails. Not fire off mass WhatsApp messages.
I could have done it. In many cases it's a perfectly valid practice.
But these are not strangers. They are people I shared part of my professional history with.
So I decided to first look up my closest contacts — the ones time had pulled away from me — and start writing to them one by one.
Yes, one by one.
I've written to them on LinkedIn, sent them messages, remembered old times, laughed for a while and started talking again as if no years had passed.
Five conversations, three deals closed
And here comes the interesting part.
In less than a week I have already closed three deals with just five people I've spoken to.
Three deals. Five conversations.
That made me think about something very powerful.
If five conversations produced three real opportunities, I probably have hundreds — maybe thousands — of opportunities hidden inside that same database.
The question for any B2B marketing leader
And that raises an important question.
Are you doing the same?
Or are you still using artificial intelligence only to ask it things — instead of using it to solve real problems in your business?
Because if you have emails, conversations, historical clients, forgotten contacts or information accumulated over years, you are probably sitting on a treasure you have not yet discovered.
It took me fifteen years to realize it. And artificial intelligence helped me dig it up in a single day.
Sometimes we think we need more customers when what we actually need is to talk again to the ones who already trusted us.
I hope this idea is useful to you.