CRM automation guide

While a customer relationship management tool (or CRM) can be a powerful resource, it's only as good as the data it contains. For most sales and marketing teams, prospect, company, and contact information doesn't exist only in their CRM. Quite the opposite: it comes from your website, social media, forms, events, and more. 

The question becomes: what's the most efficient way to get that data into your CRM? 

Manual data entry isn't a good option. You risk making mistakes or someone forgetting to add the info to your CRM altogether. And as your business grows, you need a reliable lead management system that can scale with you. 

Table of contents

• What is CRM automation?

• Add leads from ads to your CRM

• Turn calendar events into deals or leads

• Add info based on form submissions

• Connect your CRM to a spreadsheet

• Send notifications for important activity

• Automatically update records across your CRM

• Capture data from webhooks

• Advanced tips for automating your CRM

What is CRM automation?

CRM automation takes data from one system and moves it into your CRM. A lot of times, the "other system" is used for lead capture, like a form on a website. 

With CRM automation, you map the fields so everything appears accurately in your CRM. For example, if the system has a field "First Name," this would show up in your CRM's "First Name" field.

Automation adds data to your CRM almost immediately—you're not waiting for someone to enter the data. You can alert the appropriate person within your organization so they can take action, whether it's sending an email, making a phone call, or following up in another way. 

Of course, to get the full power of an automated CRM, it can help to use a database tool that's purpose-built for automation. By using Zapier Tables as a CRM (or pairing it with your existing CRM tool), you can build fully automated systems that capture contacts and send automatic emails, score and enrich leads before adding them to your CRM, and more.

Contact List Template

Capture contacts and send them emails automatically from one Table.

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Lead Scoring Template

Score leads and get related company data—then add to your CRM.

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Lead Sync Template

Automatically sync Mailchimp subscribers and HubSpot contacts and view in a single table.

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Sales CRM Template

Organize and automate your sales pipeline to confidently grow your business.

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Add leads from ads to your CRM

If you're running ads through Facebook or Google, you might be pulling in a lot of potential leads. Within your CRM, you can start reaching out to these leads, but exporting and importing them into the right tool is a pain. Plus, you have to make sure you're only importing new leads each time you're adding the records to your CRM. 

Instead, CRM automation can create a deal or contact (or both!), depending on your CRM. You can also check your CRM for an existing contact and update it, if it's a lead you've talked to before. 

Pro tip: Not every lead should be entered into your CRM the same way (or at all). A multi-step Zap can save your team from wasting time wading through unqualified leads to get to the gold. For example, a filter step can send only the right kinds of Facebook ad activity to your CRM. Or, you might use conditional logic in a paths step to route different leads to the appropriate list or segment.

Turn calendar events into deals or leads

By the time a lead schedules a meeting with you, you should be tracking the potential deal in your CRM. If you have a "Schedule a Meeting" link on your website, social profiles, or email signature, you're capturing data about that lead. 

Don't worry about adding the contact's name and email address to your CRM. Automation can add the lead or a deal when the meeting is created. Or, if you already have the contact in your CRM, automation can update the contact. 

Add info based on form submissions

You might be using forms in various ways, whether it's a "Contact Us" on your website or interest in an upcoming event. 

If you have multiple forms, you can use each form to kick off a different automated workflow. For example, registration for an event might start an email sequence, whereas a record created via your "Contact Us" form gets the lead over to a salesperson. 

Keep in mind that since you can map fields with automation, you can collect data on the form that you can map to custom fields in your CRM (depending on the CRM). You can also use CRM features like tags to identify the original form source. 

Connect your CRM to a spreadsheet

Capturing data in a spreadsheet? No problem. You can send data from your spreadsheet to your CRM. 

For example, you might limit access to your CRM, so your customer data stays secure and tidy. But, you might have multiple teams that need to collect and interact with customer data. Often, the answer is using a spreadsheet.

But to keep your pipeline clean, you need that information to get to your CRM—and the sooner, the better. Automation ensures that you capture what you need in the spreadsheet while also being able to work through the leads in your CRM. 

You can even add an AI step to analyze sales data before adding it to your spreadsheet. For every new deal closed in HubSpot, this Zap uses Roboflow to automate your data analysis and send that information to Google Sheets for better decision-making. 

Send notifications for important activity

Lead management is a lot like trying to cup water in your hands. The longer you wait to do something with it (say, take a refreshing sip, or—more depressingly for the purposes of this tortured business metaphor—bail that water over the side of your sinking boat), the more water inevitably slips through your fingers.

It's crucial to follow up with new leads and sales right away because a lead's interest in your business is never higher than at the moment they first reach out to you. But when your sales team uses dozens of apps to do their job, it's easy to miss important notifications.

If your team lives in Slack, it can be helpful to consolidate all your notifications into one place. That way, you don't have to be glued to several open tabs just to make sure you don't miss any time-sensitive activity. 

Automatically update records across your CRM

Did you know you can use Zaps to standardize and automate repetitive lead management processes inside your CRM? Maybe when a deal is moved to a new stage in Pipedrive, the Zap updates that deal with a follow-up task checklist. Or maybe when a specific field is updated in Salesforce, Zapier assigns that record to the appropriate salesperson.

By automating tasks within your CRM, you ensure your records are kept up to date and your sales processes run smoothly without any admin-related bottlenecks. And the less time your team spends manually updating your CRM, the more time they have to actually nurture leads.

You can even add AI into the mix to send personalized outreach messages to new leads. For new leads added to your CRM, these Zaps generate personalized email drafts or images using ChatGPT, or even personalized videos using Synthesia. These files are then added to the lead's profile in your CRM, ready for signoff and use. That way, your sales team can hit the ground running with new leads, reaching out to more prospects at a time without sacrificing speed or quality. 

Capture data from webhooks

Although Zapier connects with thousands of apps, you might be using a more niche tool that doesn't yet have a Zapier integration. In that case, you can use webhooks to push data to your CRM. 

Webhooks are a way for online tools to talk to each other through standardized messaging. When new data is added to a unique URL, Zapier can "catch" the hook and send the data to your CRM. 

Advanced tips for automating your CRM

The best way to streamline your sales workflows is to go beyond a simple two-step Zap. When you start with the bigger picture, you can find even more opportunities for scaling while improving efficiency.  

For example, here's a visualization (using Zapier Canvas) of how a hypothetical sales team might build an automated lead management system that collects leads from multiple sources, enriches and scores them, and funnels them into the sales pipeline. (Click to see a larger image in a new tab.)

And if you're looking for even more inspiration for streamlining and supercharging your sales, we've rounded up the best ways to automate the most popular CRMs.

• Automate Salesforce

• Automate Pipedrive

• Automate Zoho CRM

• Automate Follow Up Boss

• Automate Close

• Automate Keap and Keap Max Classic

• Automate Streak

• Automate Microsoft Dynamics 365

• Automate Mojo

• Automate Salesloft

Your CRM should be your source of truth

Without the right organization, your customer or lead data risks being siloed. A meeting attendee exists only on a salesperson's calendar, your Facebook Ads leads haven't been imported for a week, or someone on the team forgot to add a form submission to your CRM. With fragmented information, it's hard to grasp where your pipeline stands.

CRM automation eliminates those problems. You're working from a single source of truth for all leads and can move them efficiently through your deal stages.

Better yet, add automation within your CRM to continue updating leads as you work with them. You can use all types of data, such as follow-up meetings, shipping information, or a signed contract, to keep your CRM in sync with activities from other tools within your organization. How will you automate your CRM?

This article was originally published in October 2014, written by Matt Guay with previous contributions by Anna Burgess Yang. It was most recently updated in February 2025 by Nicole Replogle.