Creating a garden starts simply enough: you plant a few seeds, give them some good soil and water, and soon you have a smorgasbord of vegetables and flowers and all the rest. Birds and bees visit, taking bits and pieces of your garden to another, and bring your garden pieces of something else.

Scaling the use of a helpful tool at a business is similar: you find your use case and the app that'll solve it, like the seeds for a specific vegetable. But maybe the seeds from another plant snuck in—and you find another use for the tool. Pretty soon, you've found even more reasons to use the tool and your co-workers take notice. And it spreads from you, to them, to the team, to another team, and on until the entire company is on board.

This is what happened at Outbrain, a content and product discovery feed. Yaniv Nava, a senior online acquisition manager at Outbrain, first started using the app automation tool Zapier to manage leads.

"We wanted to enable our Sales team to reach out to leads as fast as possible," Yaniv explains. "So we started to use Zapier's leads ads integrations from the main acquisition platforms and push the leads directly into Salesforce's sellers queues."

For the simplest use cases—managing lead creation—Yaniv built a couple of Zaps, our word for automated workflows. With those Zaps, Yaniv cut out hours of work and a lot of headaches from his team. And while they initially kept their use straightforward, Yaniv and the marketing team soon saw potential to add more to these Zaps.

With Zapier, they could now add information to the leads, with an app like Clearbit, before sending them on to Salesforce. They could add the new lead to an email marketing campaign at the same time, too. In fact, the possibilities were, and are, endless.

Soon, Zapier usage at Outbrain grew beyond Yaniv and the marketing team, and into customer support, IT, and throughout the rest of the company. Now, Outbrain uses Zapier's Company plan, providing their team with shared folders and most importantly, extra security with SAML authentication.

About Outbrain

Odds are you know Outbrain, even if you haven't realized it. When you finish reading an article online, you usually see several recommended links—some from the website you're on and some that are targeted to you based on your search habits. Outbrain helps publishers and advertisers create these recommendations.

Outbrain was founded in 2006 to help online publishers replicate the experience of turning the page and finding the next article or product to pay attention to. With an emphasis on native advertising—non-jarring ads that are part of the reading experience—Outbrain helps advertisers and publishers bring relevant content front and center.

Make Security a Priority with a Company Account at Zapier

What began as a means to automatically create leads quickly became a way for Yaniv and the wider Outbrain team to work more effectively.

"We integrate our live chat solution with Salesforce, we integrate our registration with webinars, landing page solutions, with Zoom, with an email life-cycle tool—so we've built some complex processes," Yaniv says.

With usage spreading across the company, security, which was always a top priority for the Outbrain team, became a topic of discussion with Zapier. With clients that include publishers and advertisers—like CNN and Vox—maintaining privacy and data integrity is a key element of Outbrain's offerings.

And since they now had dozens of employees using Zapier across multiple teams at Outbrain, it was important that those users be authenticated properly. With a Zapier for Companies account, the Outbrain team could take advantage of SAML single sign-on.

"At Outbrain, data security is a top priority, which means SAML authentication is absolutely essential," Yaniv says.

Zapier usage at Outbrain has grown from one person to the marketing team, on to the Customer Support team, Finance team, IT team, and beyond, but all this began with the lead management Zaps we're about to show you.

Outbrain's Tools

Automatically Manage New Leads

Managing leads by hand, whether that's copying and pasting or exporting and importing from a lead generator to your CRM, is tedious and error-prone. What happens if the file isn't formatted correctly, or if you copy the same data over again? And even if everything goes smoothly, it still takes an annoying amount of time.

That's why Yaniv put together these two Zaps, connecting Facebook lead ads to Salesforce, and Linkedin Lead Gen Forms to Salesforce. Basically, whenever a new lead comes in from one of these sources, Zapier automatically creates a matching lead in Salesforce.

Automatically creating leads means you can focus on more important work, or save your teammates from the mundane tasks that drag a workday to a halt. Give these Zaps a try and see how much time they can save you.

Need a little help with those Zaps? Check out this video to help you get the Zap up and running:

Want to see your business use Zapier as effectively as Yaniv and Outbrain? Try Zapier for Companies yourself.

Our stories explore how Zapier's users solve common problems. From marketers to CEOs, educators to real estate agents, millions use Zapier to automate their most tedious tasks. If you haven't yet, try Zapier for free to see what we're all about.

All images provided by Outbrain.