Emfas runs 60+ customer relationships without a CRM admin

Challenge

Scaling founder-led sales with manual notes and scattered context

As Co-Founder and CEO of Emfas, Vidar Trojenborg runs a founder-led sales motion, meeting directly with e-commerce brands to understand their catalog management challenges. As a first-time founder, he quickly learned that every brand conversation came with a detailed web of context to track, and that context varied widely.

Some customers managed thousands of SKUs across multiple platforms. Others wanted to explore automation workflows. Each conversation uncovered practical details like feature priorities, technical requirements, and pricing considerations (all critical for delivering personalized demos and proposals).

To keep up, Vidar built a Notion-based tracking system where he manually logged customers, captured call takeaways, managed leads, and recorded next steps. But as Emfas scaled, important details became scattered across meeting transcripts and email threads. Working with multiple brand stakeholders only increased the cognitive load.

Beyond managing customer context, keeping the rest of the team aligned added another layer of overhead. As new customers were onboarded, Vidar spent hours digging up and relaying sales context so the team could track discussions and align on plans.

Inbound interest was growing, and so was the manual work. Vidar spent more time researching leads (piecing together ICP fit, company size, and funding stage) and drafting personalized follow-up emails for each inquiry. While this worked in Emfas's early days, it became harder to sustain as opportunities rolled in.

Emfas had strong interest and product-market fit, but Vidar knew the pace of their growth depended on how many customers he could personally manage. He briefly explored a popular tool, but its automation capabilities focused mainly on drafting emails. "I still couldn't see the big picture or the whole journey for each customer and brand," he says.

The turning point came when Vidar realized he was spending more time maintaining systems than advancing relationships. Soon, Vidar heard about Zero through a shared investor. This time, the promise was different: a platform that could finally eliminate manual data wrangling, context-switching, and constant note-taking. Right away, he knew he'd found the right solution. "Previously, all of our tracking work was happening in my mind. I had to keep mental notes for every single customer, which quickly became unscalable."

Solution

Turning fragmented sales context into a single system of action

From day one, Zero's platform felt intuitive to Vidar. In fact, the tool's modern design and ease of use match the high standards he has for his own product. “It was very quick and easy to get started, and the customer support is stellar,” he explains.

Zero automatically connects to Vidar's core tools, gathering data from every email, meeting, customer call, and interaction. Once ingested, this disconnected data is organized carefully into complete company views. This means Vidar can instantly pull up the context needed to personalize every interaction.

Instead of hunting through Gmail threads and meeting recordings to find talking points, he surfaces everything he needs in one snapshot. And that clarity frees up time for high-value work. "Now that I'm not constantly filling out CRM forms, I can do what I do best: speak with customers and understand their pain points," Vidar says.

Even better? Emfas no longer depends on manual lead research. Zero enriches leads with details like ICP fit, company size, and funding stage using built-in data, so Vidar and his team always have a detailed, actionable view of each lead.

When prospects request demos or ask questions, Zero automatically captures their information. Then, the platform manages follow-up sequences by drafting and sending emails, updating the CRM, and suggesting new tasks as conversations progress.

For accounts with multiple stakeholders, context doesn't just accumulate. Instead, Zero connects every interaction into a single, coherent customer journey. From there, the system builds a focused plan, including suggested tasks. Vidar can easily highlight open questions, flag pending follow-ups, and pinpoint the most important steps to keep each relationship moving forward.

Vidar also uses Zero's webhook automation to push sales activity out to the rest of the stack. New customers created in Zero automatically sync to tools like Linear, so the team can track work related to each account. Key sales moments, like when new leads close or contract renewals, also trigger Slack notifications. This keeps the team in the loop without manual status updates so they can react or celebrate accordingly. "Zero's task system helps me manage what should come next. I can see which person to talk to and what to mention, with all the context-aware next steps right there."

Results

Emfas unlocks 10x more lead-handling capacity

With Zero, Vidar finally has a CRM that thinks alongside him. Instead of juggling follow-ups and chasing context, he focuses his energy on the conversations that drive revenue.

The impact:

• 400+ hours reclaimed annually
• 60+ customer relationships managed with unified context
• 10x more capacity for handling leads

What's next

Vidar sees Zero moving closer to his vision of a zero touch CRM. As the platform continues to evolve, he's looking forward to even more autonomous capabilities, like Zero automatically sending emails and managing reminders without any manual intervention.