How to Automate 70% of Your Sales Process
The most valuable thing a salesperson can do with their time is get on the phone and close the deal. Everything else — building prospect lists, writing cold emails, tracking follow-ups, booking meetings, researching accounts — is just infrastructure to get you to that moment.
But in many companies, the prep isn't creating the close, it's crowding it out. Most CEOs set sales up the same way: the team runs the entire process manually, and then — with whatever energy is left over — tries to sell. That means they're showing up to the only moment that counts already exhausted from getting there.
They set it up like this because in the beginning that's how they did it. I was recently coaching a founder who had been personally running the entire sales operation for months — waking up at night too stressed to sleep, too exhausted during the day to focus on anything else. So she finally brought on a team.
When I asked her to define their role, she described everything: find leads, write outreach, book meetings, close, follow up. She was about to bury her new hires in the same exhausting process that was breaking her.
At the beginning, you have to do things manually. That's the only way to learn who your customer is and what language makes them lean in or pull away. But that isn't your sales process — that's the raw material you need to build one.
From Raw Material to System
When I was building Butler, I spent weeks running sales myself. I learned every nuance of how our customer bought.
The better I got, the more repetitive the work was. All the emails I was sending were virtually identical. The follow-ups were the same cadence. The voicemails used the same script. The only thing that changed was the name at the top. I was repeating myself hundreds of times, and the close — the only part that actually required me — was getting crowded out by all that manual work.
So, using the knowledge I'd collected, I built a system that automated roughly 70% of the process — everything up until that final moment. When I hired a sales team, I handed them the system. Now they could show up to calls shiny — rested, prepped, focused entirely on the one thing that actually required them.
It took less than a week to build, it didn't require an engineering team, and I did it all before AI — today's tools make it even easier.
The Sales System
Here's what the system looked like layer by layer, from the moment a lead enters the pipeline to the follow-up after a close.
Layer 1: Prospecting
Instead of manually researching prospects and building lists one name at a time, build a tool that scrapes for you. This leaves you with a complete, unfiltered dataset — every potential customer you could reach. That data is the foundation of the entire system.
At Butler, I paid a developer $500 to build a scraper over a weekend. We were selling to independent therapy practices, so the tool pulled every practice listing from online directories, county by county, and dropped the results into an Excel file.
Today, tools like Clay or Apollo do this without needing a developer at all. The point isn't which tool you use. The point is that no one on the team is spending their time building lists.
At this step, you're not asking the scraper to make decisions about who's a good lead, you're casting the widest possible net. Sorting happens next.
Layer 2: Lead Cleanup and Qualification
Once you have the full list, then you filter against what you already know. This is where all the knowledge from selling manually starts to pay off. You already know who your customer is — what kind of company, what role, what problems they care about. That profile becomes your filter.
My chief of staff did this manually. She identified the prospects that matched our criteria, and copy and pasted the qualified ones into our CRM (we used Airtable).
Today, AI can do the filtering for you. Feed it your ICP criteria, give it the scraped list, and have it categorize and score. You still want a human spot-check, but the heavy lifting is done.
From this point forward, the rest of the system runs off the smaller, qualified list in your CRM. But the key is not to throw away any data. Your full dataset stays in the spreadsheet in case you need it later.
Layer 3: Outbound and Follow-Up
This is the biggest time sink on any sales team. Your people aren't just writing every cold email from scratch, they're writing the follow-up, sending out voicemails, and most importantly, they're tracking the whole sequence in their heads.
Using the work you already did — the email that got replies, the follow-up cadence that converted, the voicemails that got callbacks — you can create templates for each step and run the whole thing automatically.
I built this layer using Zapier and Mailshake. Here's how it works:
When a new lead appears in the CRM, Zapier triggers Mailshake to send the first email. To keep things fair and make sure every closer got a shot, I used a round-robin model to assign leads.
Follow-ups are pre-written and pre-scheduled on rules — three days later send this, next day send that. Every follow-up email is sent from the originally assigned salesperson's name.
In parallel with email, automated voicemail drops go out using tools that ring once and go straight to voicemail. Voicemails are pre-recorded in the assigned salesperson's voice.
The entire outbound sequence is hands-off, and every touchpoint — email, voicemail, response — is automatically tracked in the CRM for later.
Layer 4: Handling Responses and Booking Meetings
Once a prospect responds to the automated outreach, either through email or voicemail back, you need to book the meeting.
I built this layer using templates for common response scenarios:
"What do you do?" → Template A
"I might be interested" → Template B
"Send me more info" → Template C
But we still had a person using them to reply as the salesperson and book meetings in their calendar.
Now AI can do this layer entirely — classify the response, draft a reply in the salesperson's voice, and book the meeting. Meanwhile, in the CRM the lead's status automatically moves from "Lead" to "Qualified Lead" to "Meeting Booked."
Layer 5: The Close
By the time a salesperson sits down for a call, the only thing left to do is sell. They open the CRM and everything is there — the prospect's background, every email that was sent, every voicemail dropped, every response and what the prospect said. They don't have to scramble to research an account five minutes before a meeting. It's all ready for them.
Everything before this point exists so they can focus entirely on the one thing that requires their skill — reading the room, building trust, and closing. When your closers aren't spending their energy on lists, emails, and scheduling, they bring their full attention to the work that actually requires a human.
Layer 6: Automated Post-Call Follow-Up
After the call, the salesperson sends one personalized follow-up. This follow-up also uses a pre-built template that they personalize with specifics from the conversation.
As soon as they send it, the lead's status in the CRM automatically moves to "Post-Call." That triggers a new set of automated follow-up sequences — pre-written templates that go out on a schedule, swapping in the prospect's name and relevant details, until they either convert or the sequence ends. The system handles the reminders, the nudges, the persistence.
What Actually Changes
This sales system gives the people doing the selling the space to be great at it. They aren't tired from a morning of cold emails or distracted by a follow-up they forgot to send. They show up with full context and full energy, and it shows.
The mechanics are straightforward, none of it is technically difficult, and most of it can be assembled in a few days. The real skill — the one that goes well beyond sales — is learning to recognize when you've outgrown a manual process and where a system wants to be built.
At some point, every founder finds themselves doing too much — personally running processes that have grown past the point of being manageable, stretched so thin that nothing gets their full attention. The common instinct is that something is fundamentally broken and you need to start over. But you don't have to build from scratch.
Whenever you're overwhelmed, when the bottleneck is clearly you — the system you need is likely sitting inside the work you're already doing. For sales, that meant the emails I was already writing became templates. The cadence became automation rules. The qualifying instinct became a filter. Nothing got thrown away — it just moved from inside my head into a structure that could run without me. You don't have to burn it down, you have to build with it.
Reply to share your thoughts — I read every message. See you next week! 👑
Keep Building,
⚫️ The 20 Hour CEO Self-Paced Course: The frameworks, systems, and playbooks to stop being the bottleneck — on your schedule.
⚫️ The 20 Hour CEO: Scale as an AI-First CEO:3 weeks, 6 live sessions. Bring your actual business, rebuild how it runs, leave with systems already in motion. Next cohort starts May 15.
