How Vendasta recovered $1M in lost revenue with automation and AI

Sales reps at Vendasta were spending more time updating records than closing deals. Handling customer relationship manager (CRM) entries, contact enrichment, and internal updates wasn't just a chore—it was costing the company nearly 300 working days every year.

"Life before Zapier was manual, repetitive, and tedious," says Jacob Sirrs, Marketing Operations Specialist at Vendasta.

Vendasta empowers over 60,000 businesses to grow with AI-driven sales and marketing tools. But for a company helping others scale, their own internal systems weren't keeping up.

To reclaim lost time, Jacob started using Zapier and AI. What started as a fix for a broken lead process soon snowballed into something bigger: a company-wide transformation that saved time, boosted revenue, and embedded automation into Vendasta's culture.

Vendasta's results, by the numbers:

• $1 million in revenue recovered through automating manual work

• 282+ working days saved annually by eliminating manual admin for sales reps

• 1,200 minutes saved daily by using AI to summarize sales conversations

Automating lead enrichment to drive revenue

Before they started relying on automation, lead enrichment at Vendasta was painfully manual. Reps had to pull data from multiple sources—company names, phone numbers, job titles—then enter it by hand into the CRM. This slowed down the sales cycle and introduced inconsistencies that hurt their close rates.

Jacob used Zapier to transform this process into an automated pipeline. Here's how their Zap runs:

1. Leads enter from Facebook forms, webinars, or Vendasta's website, triggering a Zap.

2. The lead data gets enriched through Apollo and Clay.

3. AI summarizes lengthy company descriptions into digestible sales insights.

4. Using Vendasta's custom-built Zapier app, the system automatically creates company, contact, and account

   records.

5. Leads are instantly routed to the right sales rep based on industry or segment.

"With Zapier, our sales reps are able to focus on deals and not have to worry about doing all these tedious tasks before they're able to get to the next deal."

Empowering sales with AI-driven follow-ups

Sales reps were losing valuable time on CRM updates and follow-ups. They had to revisit call transcripts, log notes, and craft emails manually. To reduce that burden, Jacob implemented AI-powered Zaps.

Here's how the new process works:

1. After each sales call, a transcript is run through AI using Zapier's built-in AI step and ChatGPT.

2. Key takeaways are extracted and added directly to the CRM.

3. A personalized follow-up email is drafted based on the conversation.

4. Notes are stored in Vendasta's CRM.

"Through implementing AI into our automations, we're saving 15 minutes per call," Jacob says. "That adds up fast across 20 reps making four to six calls a day."

All in all, that saves the team 1,200 minutes or 20 hours of work per day.

Scaling a culture of automation

"Because of automation, we've seen about a $1 million increase in potential revenue," Jacob says. "Our reps can now focus purely on closing deals—not admin."

Jacob helped lead Vendasta's journey from scattered, basic Zapier usage to an enterprise-wide automation strategy. Early on, he discovered that the company had eight individual Zapier accounts. He unified them under one Enterprise plan and hasn't looked back.

"Zapier is extremely critical to Vendasta's operations. Tons of our operational processes are directly in Zapier," says Jacob.

The future for Vendasta? Infusing even more automation into the company.

"Before Zapier, we'd hack together solutions. Now, we think automation-first," Jacob says. "We're solving problems in a way that empowers our team and drives real results."