ISSUE 07 · 8 OCT 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Hi {{first_name|there}},
I started using Claude Code in January. I'd never written a line of code in my life. It was all very new, and honestly, it felt pretty scary.
Within a short space of time I started to understand how it worked, and I was blown away by what I could do with it. Over the last nine months it has improved drastically.
We're not anti-AI at JumpLead. Far from it. But AI is a tool, and the person using the tool gets the best value out of it.
Put the human first and AI makes what you do better. Get lazy and depend on the tool, and it can produce awful results.
01 The mistake I nearly made
In the early days, I thought we could run all of our outreach just using Claude.
I never put it in front of real buyers. Partly because I was fearful, and partly because I could see the copy it wrote wasn't good. It was very AI, and poor. Let software speak to your market without a human in the loop and you burn trust before the conversation even starts.
Now I've built a JumpLead brain, a personal brain and brains for our clients: the context Claude works from. Through MCP, Claude connects to my other tools, so I can come up with copy ideas and then scale them.
02 How it all connects
Claude sits at the centre. Here's the flow:
Apify spots buying signals from hiring ads.
Apollo.io finds the accounts and contacts.
Smartlead delivers the cold outreach.
Trellus (YC W22) runs my parallel dialler calls, three lines at once.
Website analytics shows which pages people visit.
Slack alerts me and stages draft replies.
Granola captures notes on discovery calls.
Claude drafts the proposal from those notes.
Attio tracks every deal and contact.
Disclosure: I get free access to Trellus.
03 Where we draw the line
THE LINE WE DON'T CROSS
Claude never sends a reply to a buyer. We're firm on that.
When a prospect writes back, Claude drafts the reply. I read it, edit it and send it myself. We want human conversations, and I want to hear the buyer in their own words.
Claude helps us find the right people, and we run some automated processes. But everything we send is in our own words and comes directly from us. When someone replies, that's where we step in. We still do lots of manual outreach ourselves.
04 What saves me the most time
The biggest time saver is taking a project from ground zero all the way to completion, with a team of agents checking the quality, on a premium paid Claude plan.
I build tailored proposals in Claude Code, heavily influenced by trumpet, which is an amazing tool. Through MCP I can also do design work, tailor our messaging with a third-party tool and search for the right people within our ideal customer profile.
05 Where to start this week
If you only use Claude to chat, it's a great tool. Claude Code is a different beast. You don't need to be technical: I wasn't. Set up a repo (a project folder Claude Code works in), try to build something, and learn from your mistakes as you go. The more you do it, the better you get.
I'm still very much in my beginner phase, but what I've learned since January is incomparable, and it's had a positive impact on everything we do.
Using AI this way lets Chris and me get our thinking out there in a really good way, because we still have control. It's a human running the tool.
Where do you draw the line with AI in your sales process? Hit reply and let me know. And if you want a steer on getting started with Claude Code, ask away.
Joe Stone
Co-founder, JumpLead
PS If you'd like me to show you a few things we can do to take your GTM strategy up a few levels, book a free 30-minute call.
The numbers, scripts and set-up behind the four channels we run.
Want an honest look at your pipeline? Free, 30 minutes, no pitch.