At SideDrawer, innovation isn’t a buzzword—it’s how we operate. Over the past few months, we’ve accelerated our use of AI and automation to streamline operations, improve the client experience, and free up our team to focus on what matters most.
This month, we’re sharing how these efforts are shaping our workflows—and how they might inspire your own process improvements.
🍎 Start with the Low-Hanging Fruit We identified tasks that ate up time in Sales and Marketing, such as:
Researching new demo and webinar leads (10–20 mins per booking)
Monitoring news for blog ideas (10–60 mins/day)
Writing blog and LinkedIn posts (20–60 mins each)
Tracking call feedback and objections (often via separate internal meetings)
Spotting gaps in our website or deck messaging (slow and inconsistent)
📣 Want to participate in an automation webinar?
On Tuesday, April 29th at 12-1pm ET, we'll host a webinar to showcase some of these automations and take any questions.
📊 Define the Data Each problem required minimal but key data:
Lead research = name, company, email (already in forms)
News filtering = parsing high-volume public sources
Messaging review = contextual analysis and judgment
🛠️ Pick the Right Tools We use:
Zapier to connect everything
HubSpot as our CRM
ChatGPT for content and decision logic
Google Sheets for logs and summaries
Gmail for notifications
Zoom for meetings
Everything is non-confidential and public, so our current setup works well.
🤖 Automate and Iterate Here's an example of our News to Blog automation:
Google Alerts tracks “data breaches” (20–40 items/day)
Zapier triggers on each RSS update, cleans and parses content
ChatGPT evaluates articles for relevance (sector, breach type, impact) and formats a summary
Gmail sends this summary to the team
If someone replies “Include,” the item is logged in Google Sheets
Weekly, ChatGPT turns new entries into a blog draft and LinkedIn post and cleans up the sheet while maintaining a backlog for history
Marketing fact checks, polishes and publishes
Result: Faster, smarter content creation—no more starting from scratch.
📈 The ROI? We’re saving over 5 hours per week, reducing the number of internal meetings on these issues, and eliminating the mental drain of tracking news manually. This setup scales easily to cover more topics and sources.
All automations follow our strict policy of excluding client-confidential data.
Relevance to SideDrawer?
Our 100% API-first platform has significant flexibility to accomodate a variety of workflows and automation. We have recently added new Triggers and Actions in Zapier to further support a broader range of automation to reduce your work and allow you to focus on growing your business and enhancing the client experience.
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SideDrawer is an API-based document management platform that improves the client experience around collaboration and organization for businesses of all sizes. Our SaaS product is used by advisors, planners, executors and other professionals to securely collect and share sensitive client data and documents. Enterprises leverage our APIs to facilitate document collaboration within their existing VPC or on-prem servers, along with other infrastructure.
