How We Recovered 150 Hours for a Sales Team Through Automation

Client

Our client is a medium-sized software house from Poland, specializing in creating dedicated software for B2B clients. The company has a 5-person sales team, whose key channel for acquiring clients is industry trade shows, conferences, and tech meetups.

Challenge

For many companies, participating in industry events is a key element of their sales strategy. Sales reps talk to potential clients, collect business cards, and build relationships. However, the problem appears after the event:

• data from business cards must be manually transcribed into the CRM,
• it's difficult to remember the context of each conversation,
• follow-ups are often delayed or skipped,
• there's a lack of one unified system of operation,
• sales reps, after many hours of conversations, no longer have the mental resources for tedious administrative work.

As a result, potential sales opportunities are lost, and all the effort put into participating in the event is partially wasted. The client wanted to create a simple system that would allow the sales team to quickly and intuitively convert conversations from events into real leads in the pipeline.

Solution

Our hypothesis: the business card as a trigger for the sales process

We noticed that a physical business card, though seemingly outdated, can become a trigger for a complete, automated sales process. The key lies not in the business card itself, but in the moment of receiving it. This is the moment when the sales rep has the greatest freshness of memory, energy, and context. If we capture this moment and automate everything that follows, we can not only relieve the team but also increase the effectiveness of follow-ups.

We created a proprietary automation system using Clay.com, which eliminates the above problems. It works in 5 simple steps:

Trigger: Taking a photo of the business card immediately after the conversation

Instead of complicated applications, it's enough to take a photo of the business card and upload it to a dedicated Discord channel. This channel is integrated with a data analysis tool that captures every new photo and triggers the entire automation sequence. Thanks to this, the sales rep doesn't have to open additional applications or log into systems, because the entire process happens in the background, in a communication environment they use daily anyway.

AI OCR: Automatic reading of contact data

The system recognizes data from the business card (first name, last name, company, phone, email) using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, which automatically recognizes text from images. The key at this stage is using AI Image Analysis: artificial intelligence not only reads text but does so contextually, with high accuracy, even if the photo is underexposed or slightly skewed.

For this purpose, we used OpenAI Image Recognition combined with Clay, a no-code tool that allows for lightning-fast building of automated sales processes and enriching lead data based on various sources (e.g., LinkedIn, company databases). Depending on the client's preferences, this step can also be implemented in Make or Zapier. However, Clay additionally allows integrating recognized data with 130+ other data sources and provides the possibility of automatic segmentation, scoring, and lead prioritization, which significantly increases the possibilities for further data analysis and maximizing sales potential.

Want to learn more about Clay? Read this article.

Enrichment and context: Adding notes and data enrichment

The sales rep can add a short note in the form of a comment to the attached photo (e.g., "conversation about AI system implementation in retail"). Then the system automatically supplements the data retrieved from the photo with context: company industry, size, insights - all to increase the chance of a successful follow-up. Importantly, all of this can be done from a phone, literally within seconds after the conversation. Thanks to this, we maintain the freshness of context and minimize the risk of losing valuable information. The only requirement is having organizational habits that make this process extremely simple, intuitive, and accessible to every sales rep on the phone.

CRM update: Lead enters the system

Contact data, company, note, and status automatically go to the client's CRM such as HubSpot, PipeDrive, or to Airtable if a CRM is not used. The lead has an assigned appropriate status field (e.g., "New lead from event") and is linked to a specific sales rep. For the sales team, this means order, data consistency, and full conversation context available immediately after the event. We eliminate the risk of duplicates, manual transcription errors, and ensure a quick start to the sales process all directly from within the company's existing CRM ecosystem.

Follow-up: Sequence or message

The system prepares follow-up communication, e.g., a draft message on LinkedIn or email, which can be sent immediately or automated in a sequence. Follow-up after an event is one of the most important moments in the sales process - this is when the lead is still fresh, and the contact is genuinely interested in conversation. Thanks to our solution, the sales rep receives a ready draft message with full conversation context, which they can only adjust to their communication style or specific client needs. Most of the work is done by automation, thanks to which they save time and act faster than the competition.

Want to implement such a solution in your team? See our elaboration!

Calculations are based on a 6-person sales team that participates in 6 events annually, generating approximately 720 leads in total (average of 20 per event).

With the manual approach, the team loses over 150 hours on repetitive administrative tasks: entering data, recreating conversation context, and creating follow-ups.

Thanks to automation, they recover almost 4 full weeks of work, which they can dedicate to building relationships and finalizing sal