Automation Teardown #3, professional services edition: a new inquiry lands, and before anyone even looks at it, someone on the team is retyping the same form fields into a spreadsheet by hand.
The manual reality
A prospect fills out an intake form, someone copies the details into a spreadsheet, and then it's email back and forth trying to figure out who on the team should take it and when they're free. A same-day inquiry can sit for two days before anyone actually replies.
What the agent does
- A new inquiry arrives.
- It's qualified against the firm's own intake criteria — scope, budget, whatever the practice actually screens for.
- If it qualifies, it's booked straight onto the right person's calendar, with the intake summary attached so nobody has to re-explain the request on the first call.
What stays human
The firm writes the qualification rules, not the model. And anything that doesn't fit the criteria cleanly — an ambiguous scope, a request outside the usual mix — gets routed to a person to sort out. No inquiry gets auto-declined or guessed at.
Honest sizing
This usually clears several hours a week of admin re-keying, and it's typically live in a week or two — not a quarter-long project.
We run free 20-minute teardowns of workflows like this. Reach out at hello@fullspecstudio.com.