What would you do with an extra hour each day?
Catch up on invoicing? Leave a job site on time? Actually sit down for lunch instead of hunching over a laptop between client calls?
We recently asked a client that question after she reached out to us feeling overwhelmed. We asked her to narrow it down: what’s the one thing she’d take off her plate if she could?
“Sorting through leads. That would save me so much time each week if I didn’t have to do that.”
She was spending up to seven hours a week going through emails, updating contact information, and cross-referencing every lead that came in.
That’s exactly the kind of repetitive task that can be handed off to AI.
Every New Lead Was a Change for Duplicate Data
New leads come in through a few different forms on her website, and most land cleanly in her CRM. But every so often, a lead comes in from a company she already has on file, and the name doesn’t match.
For example, a lead listed his company as “Midstate Electric.” But her CRM already had that same company saved as “Mid-State Electric Co.”
To the CRM, this looked like a brand new company. To the person filling out the form, he typed his company’s name exactly the way he’d say it out loud.
Neither one of them was wrong. But now our client had two versions of the same account sitting in her CRM system. Multiply that by every form submission, every week, for years, and you’ve got quite a lot of time spent cleaning up leads.
How We Used AI To Save Her An Hour A Day
To address this problem, we built a custom AI skill that could review and edit leads for her.
It recognizes that everyone at a given company shares the same email domain. So when a new lead comes in from a domain already in her CRM, the AI checks it against what’s on file.
If it finds a clear match or a close variation, it fixes the name automatically. If it’s not sure, it flags the lead for her to check instead of guessing.
Now she gets seven hours back each week. She’s able to focus on other areas of her business because she handed this task off to AI.
Where Could You Save Time Each Week?
We see a lot of small business owners spending hours each week on similar, repetitive tasks that feel unavoidable. But as her experience shows, those same tasks are often the easiest ones to hand off to AI.
It’s important to note that with a workflow like this one, you can choose how involved the AI is. For this client, she decided to have this AI automatically sync the new lead data every two weeks. But you get to decide what workflow would work best for you.
So back to that question: what would you actually do with 1 more hour in your day?
If you’re drowning in busy work, our team can help design a custom AI workflow built around saving you time. Contact Sweet Rose Studios today to get started.
