How FairBuild AI Transformed Their Sales Pipeline with Salesforce.

FairBuild AI is a business with a distributed team of just ten people and big ambitions to bring modern AI risk management to construction, an industry where contracts can make or break profitability. But like many emerging businesses, their sales approach began without a dedicated platform. Instead, the team relied heavily on spreadsheets to store information and lacked a central way to collect data, which sometimes led to crucial details being lost across email inboxes. For Sherry Lee, Customer Service Manager, the lack of a single place to track leads and manage customers meant that she had to memorize details or lose time sifting through various channels.

The spreadsheet approach held up until FairBuild AI’s first major public event – which was also the launchpad for its initial product release.

The team was thrilled when the response to the launch at the event was overwhelmingly positive. In a matter of days, they had hundreds of potential new customers to nurture. While the results were incredible, the team immediately felt the strain on their old ways of working. Handling the high-volume of leads along with all the context to effectively nurture them, would prove to be a huge operational challenge. They realized they needed a single place to manage sales, support, and marketing — a system that could turn this new spike of interest into an organized, nurtured pipeline, without creating more work for the team.

Rather than allowing the huge influx of leads to overwhelm them, the FairBuild AI team seized it as an opportunity to change.

The team was first drawn to Salesforce through Megan Cosgrove, FairBuild AI’s Marketing Director. Cosgrove had used the platform in previous roles, and had been personally experimenting with using Free Suite, Salesforce’s free CRM, at FairBuild AI. The free option gave her a chance to make sure the platform was the right fit before upgrading to Starter Suite and rolling it out to more of the team. 

When Cosgrove saw the leads flooding in during their launch event, she knew it was time to capture that momentum and move beyond the test-driving phase with Salesforce. Cosgrove, Lee, and the team didn’t waste a minute: they decided to upgrade to Salesforce Starter that same day. “I knew Salesforce was tried and true – it’s fast, efficient, and we had a team that would use it daily, so it was an easy decision,” explains Cosgrove.

Upgrading to Salesforce Starter Suite unlocked the multi-user access and additional capabilities they needed to keep every conversation, follow-up, and customer detail in one place. Instead of hunting for siloed and fragmented data, all the vital information would be visible to sales, leadership, and customer service.

Lee took the lead on bringing leads into Salesforce. Before Starter Suite, this was a huge spreadsheet which included over 500 names, color-coded sections and splits across tabs. But while it captured some information, it didn’t provide a clear way of tracking updates or adding new context. “I was asking myself ‘Where am I putting notes? Do I go back to the list or create a new one?’” Lee adds. That uncertainty motivated her to rebuild the sheet as a living database in Salesforce. From there, the team created opportunities for the most engaged prospects and could easily track the next steps in real-time. 

The pay-off was instant, with the team estimating this new approach saved them two weeks of work while accelerating their sales pipeline. 

Alongside faster sales processes, Starter Suite also changed the team’s day-to-day collaboration. Before moving to Salesforce, Lee’s inbox was inundated as people would need to CC her into all customer conversations so she could manually log them. Now, using Salesforce Inbox which connects directly to their email and calendars, each teammate can have customer communications automatically logged in Salesforce. The result is a shared, searchable history that keeps the whole team aligned without cluttering anyone’s inbox or losing time to copy-pasting updates manually. 

Beyond sales, FairBuild AI is also using Salesforce for customer support. Customer queries are logged as cases which can then be tracked and resolved with seamless internal handoffs and a clear audit trail. That means less time logging updates and no customer interactions getting buried in a busy inbox — win win.  

For FairBuild AI, the Salesforce journey has been seamless, testing with Free Suite, learning fast, and upgrading when the business was ready. Salesforce gave the team a no-risk foundation and Starter Suite turned that foundation into a new way of working, with enough seats and structure to power a growing pipeline, a distributed team, and a professional customer experience.

The upgrade and onboarding was frictionless. As the team added event leads and assigned owners, they could quickly identify the next-best conversations to pursue and accelerate follow-up while the event was still fresh. Lee had never used Salesforce before but found learning the basics quick and intuitive. 

Following a strong initial launch, FairBuild AI is forecasting exponential increases in its conversion rate as it further scales its use of Salesforce. The team is exploring reminders and calendar-based follow-ups, and looking ahead to deeper integrations, from automated onboarding emails to unifying all financial processes on the platform. Starter Suite gives them a practical starting point today, with a clear runway to add more automation, customization, and even AI capabilities as the business grows.

With Salesforce, FairBuild AI’s ten-person team has moved from siloed spreadsheets and overflowing inboxes to a sales pipeline that’s clear and actionable. As a result, they’ve nurtured hundreds of leads and clawed back countless hours once lost to manual work. With a new product launch on the horizon, the team has the scaffolding in place to keep building the business — knowing that no matter the scale, Salesforce is there to support their growth. 

See for yourself on how Salesforce can help your organization today!