Automated Lead Verification & CRM Workflow with AI & Zapier

The Problem: My client was spending over 12 hours every week manually sorting through lead inquiries, checking email validity, and updating their CRM. Because of this slow manual process, high-value leads were waiting hours for a reply, and invalid emails were causing a high bounce rate that hurt their domain reputation. What I Did: I built a fully hands-off automated pipeline to streamline the entire intake and verification flow: • Connected intake forms and incoming leads directly to Google Sheets and their CRM using Zapier. • Integrated automated email verification via NeverBounce to clean data and immediately weed out bad or risky contacts. • Used OpenAI to parse lead inquiry notes and generate personalized, context-aware reply drafts ready for the sales team. • Set up real-time Slack notifications so the team could instantly know when a qualified lead arrived. The Result: • Saved roughly 12+ hours of manual administrative work every single week. • Dropped email bounce rates from nearly 18% down to under 2%. • Slashed initial response time from several hours to under 3 minutes, giving the sales team a huge edge in closing leads faster.