Every small business knows the frustration of chasing leads. You spend hours sorting through enquiries, emailing back and forth, and trying to figure out who’s actually serious about working with you. Meanwhile, genuine opportunities slip through the cracks because there’s only so much time in the day.
We decided to put AI automation to the test. Guided by a structured project from Liam Ottley’s Skool community, I built a system that takes the heavy lifting out of lead qualification. Using tools like Make.com, Airtable, Vapi, and PandaDoc, we designed an automated pipeline that collects inquiries, filters them by budget, follows up instantly, and even makes AI-powered calls before a human ever gets involved.
In this article, I’ll walk you through how we built this step by step. By the end you’ll see how automation can give faster responses to leads and help scale without adding more staff.
The Problem with Manual Qualification
Qualifying leads normally takes more time than most owners realize. Every new inquiry means copying details into a spreadsheet, screening, and deciding who to follow up with. After which; the back and forth emails, calling the lead (if answered), and trusting that the person following up with the lead isn’t having a bad day.
The result? Slower responses, missed opportunities, and wasted hours on people who were never a good fit in the first place. For a small business, that lost time can mean lost sales.
This is where automation makes the difference. Instead of spending energy sorting through inquiries, you can focus only on the leads that are worth pursuing.
Version 1: Basic Automation
We started simple. The goal was to make sure every inquiry was captured, stored, and followed up with automatically—no more copying and pasting into spreadsheets.
Tally – Used as the front door: a simple form where leads entered their name, email, phone number, company, budget, and any extra notes. This could easily be swapped with Google Forms, a landing page form or any other tool. Tally was simply the preferred choice by Liam.
Airtable – The central hub (or database). Each form entry was logged into a table with matching fields, plus extra columns to help with tracking. like the date a lead came in, whether they were qualified, and when they were contacted. Airtable’s flexibility made it easy to store and later analyze lead data.
Make.com – Ties it all together. As soon as a new lead hit Airtable, the Make scenario triggered. It immediately sent:
- An email to the lead through Gmail, thanking them for there interest and sharing a booking link.
- A Slack notification to the sales team so no one missed the update.
This version didn’t filter leads yet, but it solved a big problem: no inquiry slipped through the cracks, and every lead got an instant response.
Version 2: Smarter Automation (Voice Calls)
Once the basics were in place, the next step was to speed up how quickly leads received personal contact. Instead of waiting for an email reply or scheduling link, we introduced an AI voice agent into the process.
Vapi – The voice agent of choice. You can substitute this with VoiceFlow, Synthflow, or PolyAI. This pulls the phone number from Airtable then makes a call using its own voice banks as the voice (like Siri) and ChatGPT’s voice recognition algorithm as the brain. The voice agent greets the lead, asks a few key questions, and records their responses. If the call wasn’t answered, the system fell back to the original version: sending an email to the lead interested and a Slack message to the alert the team.
To track this, we added a new column in Airtable that marked whether the lead was “interested,” “not interested,” or “no answer.” This made it easy to see the status of every lead at a glance.
The benefit was clear: qualified leads were contacted within minutes instead of waiting days for a response. That made the process feel faster and more professional—without a human lifting a finger.
Version 3: Full Automation (Proposals with PandaDoc)
The final step was to take interested leads straight into the proposal stage. If someone said yes on the AI call, we don’t want to waste time drafting documents manually since it’ll eat up more time in-between the lead being interested to them receiving an offer.
PandaDoc handled this part. Connected to Airtable through Make.com, it automatically generated a proposal with the lead’s details and sent it directly to their inbox. This meant that by the time a human stepped in, the lead had already reviewed a tailored offer.
A small but important part of this build was the use of Parse JSON inside Make.com. Think of it as a formatting tool: it cleans and structures the raw data so each piece of information (like name, budget, or company) can be passed smoothly between apps in Make. Without this step, the automation might misread or jumble details. With it, PandaDoc could pull exactly the right information into the right fields of the proposal—making the whole process seamless.
By version three, the pipeline looked like this:
- Make.com – Orchestrates the workflow and connect all apps.
- Airtable – Store and track lead details.
- Vapi – Call the lead instantly.
- Parse JSON – Format the data for clean handoffs.
- PandaDoc – Send a proposal if they’re interested.
The result was a fully automated system that could qualify, contact, and move leads toward closing—all without manual effort.
Why This Matters—and How We Can Help
Most small businesses don’t lose sales because their service is poor. Its the slow follow-up! A lead fills out a form, waits days for a reply, talks to a tired out employee, then moves on to a competitor who responded faster.
Automation changes that. Every step of capturing information, filtering by budget, making contact, and even sending proposals, can happen within minutes. That speed builds trust and keeps prospects engaged while they’re still interested. At the same time, it saves hours of manual work. Instead of chasing every lead, you only step in when it really matters: having a real conversation with someone who’s already qualified and ready to talk.
This guided project represents the same benefit I give my clients: practical, affordable, and customized to their workflow. Whether you want to qualify leads automatically, follow up faster, or streamline the entire sales pipeline, we can help you put the right tools in place.
If you’re ready to cut out wasted time and give your business a faster, smarter way to handle leads, get in touch. Let’s build an automation that works for you.
