Tuesday, October 13th, 2026

Open your phone. Go to your contacts and start scrolling.

Don't stop at the people you talked to last week. Keep going. The old client who referred you twice and then you just sort of stopped calling. The guy from the conference three years ago who said "we should grab lunch" and you both meant it. The former coworker who runs a company now. The neighbor from your last city who always asked what you were working on.

Count how many of those names belong to people who would take your call today. Who'd be glad to hear from you.

Now count how many of them you've actually talked to this year.

That gap is the most underpriced marketing asset you own. And almost nobody touches it, because reaching out to someone you've ignored for two years feels awkward, and running another ad feels like work.

So we run the ad. We buy the list. We set up a cold email sequence that a robot writes, a robot sends, and a robot on the other end filters into a folder nobody opens.

Meanwhile the warmest leads you'll ever have are sitting in your pocket, wondering what happened to you.

Adam Grant's new book, Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, comes out today. I'll give it a proper write up in Friday's roundup. But the premise is worth knowing now, because it's the whole reason this letter exists.

His argument is that close relationships drive both happiness and success, and that building them keeps getting harder. Screens replaced rooms. We hand our communication off to AI. Everybody's lonelier, including the people you sell to.

Don't file that under feel good stuff. It's a market condition.

Your buyers are drowning in messages that were never written by a person. They can smell it now. And the scarcer real human contact gets, the more a real, specific, one person to another person note is worth. Supply and demand. When everybody's automating outreach, the one who actually remembers your kid's name wins the meeting.

There's research on this, too, and it's older than the AI flood. A team of researchers led by Daniel Levin asked hundreds of executives to reconnect with people they hadn't been in touch with for at least three years and ask them for advice on a real work project. The dormant ties study found those old connections were often as valuable as current ones, and sometimes more. The advice was more novel, it came faster, and the pool of useful old contacts was bigger than the executives expected.

Read that again. Bigger than they expected. Everybody underestimates how many people would still take their call.

Here's a rough way to think about it. I'm not going to hand you made up conversion rates, because yours depend on your business. Run it with your own numbers.

Take the number of people in your world who know what you do and liked working with you. Most owners who've been at it a while have somewhere between one hundred and five hundred of them if they're honest about it. Past clients. Past colleagues. Vendors. Peers. People who've referred someone before.

Now ask two questions.

How much does it cost you to get a cold stranger to a first call? Ads, time, content, the whole thing.

How much does it cost you to get a past client to a first call? One good message.

The second number is nearly zero. The trust is already built. You did that work years ago. You're just not collecting on it.

And Q4 is the best window of the whole year to collect. People are planning next year right now. Budgets are getting decided. And the holidays hand you a built in, totally normal reason to reach out that doesn't feel like a sales move. You don't need an excuse in December. December is the excuse.

Six steps. You can set it up this week and run it in about twenty minutes a day.

Block ninety minutes. Not a whole week of "I'll add to it as I think of people." One sitting.

Pull names from everywhere. Your phone contacts. Your email, sorted by people you've emailed back and forth with more than five times. Your old invoices. Your LinkedIn connections. Your CRM, if you have one. Old event attendee lists. Group texts from past projects.

Dump it all into one sheet. Name, how you know them, last time you actually talked, and one line about what they care about.

Don't filter yet. You'll want to skip people because "they probably forgot me" or "it's been too long." That's the exact instinct the dormant ties research says is wrong. Put them on the list.

If you'd rather not live in a spreadsheet, a personal CRM does most of this for you. Clay is built for exactly this. It pulls in your contacts, email, and calendar and shows you who you've drifted away from. It'll tell you the last time you actually talked to someone, which is a humbling little number to look at.

Now sort. Every name goes into one of three rooms.

The Inner Room. People who'd pick up on the first ring. Past clients who loved you, peers you trust, the folks who've already sent you business. Usually twenty to fifty names.

The Middle Room. People who know you, like you, and haven't heard from you in a while. This is the biggest room, and it's where most of the value is hiding.

The Outer Room. People you met once or twice, had a good conversation with, and never followed up. They'd remember you if you reminded them how you met.

Then, separately, mark anyone who's ever sent you a referral with a star. Those people are gold and you probably haven't thanked them properly. We'll get to that.

This is where people blow it. They haven't talked to someone in two years and the first message is a pitch. "Hey! Long time. Quick question, are you still working with an agency on your marketing?"

You can feel the eye roll from here.

The first touch has one job. Reopen the door. No ask. No link. No "let me know if you need anything." Just a real, specific human sentence that proves you thought about them in particular.

Three versions that work.

The memory: "I was driving past the place where we had that terrible conference lunch and thought about you. How's the business treating you these days?"

The noticing: "Saw you opened a second location. That's a big deal. How's it going over there?"

The plain honest one: "I realized I haven't talked to you in way too long and that's on me. How are you doing?"

That last one is my favorite, and it's the one people are most scared to send. It works because it's true. Owning the gap out loud is disarming. Everybody has a list of people they've lost touch with, and when you're the one who breaks the silence first, you're doing them a favor.

Here's the rule I hold myself to. If the message could be sent to anybody else on the list with the name swapped out, it doesn't go. Every first touch needs one detail that only applies to that person.

When they write back, and a lot more will write back than you think, your job is to be interested. Ask about them. Ask what they're working on, what's hard right now, what they're excited about for next year.

Then listen for three things.

A problem you can solve. Not "they mentioned marketing," but something specific like "they're losing leads between the form and the first call."

A person you could introduce them to. Sometimes the best thing you can do is connect two people who should know each other. That builds more goodwill than any pitch.

An opening for a real call. Something like "I'd love to hear more about that, want to jump on for twenty minutes next week?"

Notice the order. Conversation first, help second, offer third. If you go out of order, you're back to being a cold email with a familiar name on it.

I record the calls that come out of this with Fathom, and once a week I scroll the transcripts for one thing. What did they say they're worried about? That word for word phrase goes in my notes on that person, and it's exactly what I bring up the next time we talk.

Remember those starred names? The people who've referred you before?

Most owners thank a referral once, maybe with a gift card, and then never mention it again. That's leaving the best relationship in your business on read.

This week, send every starred name a short note that tells them what happened because of them. Not a generic "thanks for the referral." The story. "The client you sent me in March just renewed for another year. I don't think I ever told you how much that one mattered. Thank you."

People rarely find out how their help turned out. Tell them, and they get to feel like part of the win. Folks who feel that way tend to send the next one too.

You don't have to ask for another referral in that note. In fact, don't. The thank you does the asking for you.

Here's the part that keeps this from being a one week sugar rush.

Every weekday, twenty minutes. Five real first touches from the Middle and Outer rooms. Two follow ups with people who wrote back. One thank you.

That's it. That's roughly a hundred first touches a month. Even if only a fraction write back, that's a few hundred real conversations a year with people who already trust you.

Use tools to remember. Don't use tools to write. Set reminders so nobody goes more than ninety days without hearing from you if they're in the Inner Room, or six months if they're in the Middle. If your business already runs on Go High Level, you can build a simple pipeline with a stage for each room and a task that pops up when someone's overdue. If your contacts are scattered across a few apps, Make.com can pull new contacts into one place and fire you a daily list of the five people you're supposed to reach out to.

Plain English, because people blow this one constantly.

Do not let AI write your reconnection messages.

I know it's tempting. You've got two hundred names. A model could crank out two hundred "personalized" messages in a minute. And every one of them would sound like it was written by a model, because it was. The person on the other end has gotten fifty of those this month. Yours will land in the same pile.

This whole thing works because a person wrote it. Hand that part to a bot and you just torched the asset.

Here's where AI is genuinely useful. Research and prep. Before you reach out to someone in the Middle Room, use it to catch up on what's changed in their world. I run these through Galaxy.ai so I can bounce between models.

"Here are my notes on this person from our last few conversations. What are three questions I could ask that would show I remember what matters to them?"

"Summarize what this company has announced publicly in the last twelve months."

"Here's what they told me they were worried about last time. What might that problem look like for them now?"

You write the message. AI just makes sure you walk in prepared.

The bait and switch. Your warm note gets a warm reply and you immediately drop a calendar link. Now every future message from you looks suspicious. Earn the second conversation before you ask for the meeting.

The mass blast pretending to be personal. If you're writing "Hey [First Name], been thinking about you!" in an email tool and sending it to four hundred people, everyone knows. Everyone. A newsletter is a great thing to have. I send one. It is not a relationship.

Only reaching out when you need something. If the only time people hear from you is when your pipeline's dry, they'll start to notice the pattern. The rails in Step Six fix this. You reach out when you're busy, too.

Quitting after one round. Some people won't reply. That doesn't mean no. People are busy, it's the holidays, your message got buried. Send one gentle follow up two or three weeks later and then let it breathe. Silence is usually bad timing. It's not a no.

Don't measure this by deals closed in October. That's not how relationships work, and you'll quit too early.

Watch these instead. How many first touches you sent. How many people replied. How many real conversations came out of those replies. How many introductions you made for other people. And the slow one, which is how many inbound referrals show up over the next ninety days from people you reconnected with.

That last number will be zero for a few weeks. Then it won't be.

I put the whole system together so you don't have to rebuild it from this email.

It's called The Warm Room Kit. Inside you'll find the ninety minute list building checklist with every place to pull names from, the three room sorting guide, a contact tracker you can duplicate, twelve first touch message starters organized by situation, the reply playbook for turning a reconnection into a real conversation, the referral thank you templates, the twenty minute daily rails, the AI research prompts, and a thirty day scorecard.

It's free. No sequence behind it. Duplicate it into your own workspace and go.

Get The Warm Room Kit here

And if you work through it and realize your problem isn't the outreach, it's that you don't know what to say once someone says "so what are you working on these days," that's a positioning problem, and it's exactly the kind of thing we work through at Pinnacle Masters. Hit reply and tell me what you found.

Pick five names. Just five. People you liked working with and haven't talked to in over a year.

Send each one a message with one detail that only applies to them, and no ask at all.

Then see who writes back.

I'll bet at least one reply makes your whole week. Probably more.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman

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Tools I use and trust. If you sign up through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I actually use.

Clay, the personal CRM that tells you who you've drifted from

Fathom.video, AI meeting notes that actually capture what matters

Galaxy.ai, all your AI tools in one place

Go High Level, forms, CRM and follow up in one place

Make.com, automate your workflows without writing code

Beehiiv, where serious newsletter operators publish