5 ways to automate your marketing and sales ops processes

If you work in marketing or sales ops, you know you have to run a very tight ship to navigate the complexities of your pipeline. From first capturing prospects to converting them into paying customers, encouraging upsells, analyzing data, and distributing personalized messaging across all your channels, it can feel like an uphill battle.

In fact, it takes a team of dedicated people to help manage all the different tools, campaigns, and processes that make up each moving part. And trust me, even with a solid team working flat out, you won't get far without automation. 

That's because when you take the time to automate these complex processes from scratch, you can turn your sales and marketing departments into a unified machine that scores leads, moves deals to closed-won, and ultimately drives more revenue. Here are five things you should start automating right now to do just that. 

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• Capture and organize new leads

• Assign, nurture, and follow up with leads 

• Offer personalized communication at scale

• Streamline your campaign management

• Automate the quote-to-cash process

Capture and organize new leads

Let's take a look at the first stage in the lead cycle journey: capturing leads. Most people need to see your ads at least a couple of times before they bite and reach out. That's why you probably use a ton of different platforms to surface your brand and get your hands on your prospects' information. You might use website forms, landing pages, and social ads to capture their interest. 

Once someone fills out a form or clicks an ad along with their details, you'll want to add them to a centralized spot (like your CRM or leads database) for the next stage of the journey. 

But the process is rarely that simple. You likely have steps in between to keep your prospect data organized and ready to use. 

Depending on the apps you use, you might need to clean up that data and reformat it for your CRM or other tools in your workflow. You probably also need to filter email addresses for priority, enrich lead data, and even create different paths for different types of leads—all before they even land in your CRM. 

Building out this process on Zapier means you can connect your CRM, website, social media, and other marketing tools to organize this information in a way that suits your business needs—with total data accuracy. 

That means building out multi-step workflows that can do everything from sending high priority leads to your CRM to guiding other types of leads down different paths depending on their level of engagement. 

To help you get started, we've compiled a few Zap templates that offer basic workflows you can build on. Whether you're looking to send high-value leads directly to your CRM or set up nurture sequences for less-engaged prospects, these templates are flexible starting points that can be customized to fit your tech stack. 

Want to have complete control over your workflow? With Zapier Tables and Interfaces, you can create and customize an online lead capture tool that you can embed on your website or share as a public link on a landing page. Try this template to get started:

Lead Capture Template

Easily capture new leads and email them from within the connected table.

Try it

Assign, nurture, and follow up with leads 

Once you've figured out how to best use automation to organize your new leads, it's time to think about the next part of the puzzle: taking action on them with lightning speed. 

You already know that speed-to-lead matters. Following up with prospects soon after they've shown interest can make or break a deal—literally. That means prioritizing high value prospects (hello lead scoring) and handing them over to the right sales rep for the job. 

But in order to prioritize your leads and organize automatic hand-offs, there's a bit of work that needs to be done in the middle (made all the easier by automation). 

With Zapier, you can build an entire system that helps you score leads based on their behavior in other apps (like page visits, email opens, or link clicks) and then create different paths depending on their value. You might want to continue nurturing lower-priority leads, for example, and automatically add them to a campaign that surfaces personalized content designed to convert them. 

Alternatively, you could use filters and logic to send higher-priority leads an automatic email follow-up, then tag the right sales rep in an app like Slack with all the available context.

Again, the process you're building will depend on your company's tech stack, but the outcome should be the same: routing the right leads to the right reps for faster follow-ups and higher close rates. 

Ready to give it a go? Here are a few Zap templates to give you a general idea of how to start experimenting. Use these as a starting point to build out your full nurture funnel. 

Want to customize your workflow even further? Try this lead router template with Zapier Tables and Interfaces:

Lead Router Template

Alert qualified sales reps with active claiming and decrease lead response time.

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Offer personalized communication at scale

A marketer's job is never finished. Even when you've converted leads into paying customers, it's up to you to make sure they're happy, loyal, paying customers. That means using customer data to deliver personalized messaging throughout different touch points—across all your channels. 

What happens if a customer abandons a cart in Shopify? Or a user is about to hit their trial end on a subscription plan?

With automation, you can easily identify the activity that's taking place in real time across your website or inside your product. Then you can segment your audience and activate different paths with a tailored message for each scenario. 

For example, if a customer abandons a cart, you could trigger a personalized follow-up email or SMS, which might lead them back to the purchase page. If they complete the purchase, the system then activates a post-purchase workflow, sending bespoke thank-you messages, custom product recommendations, or upsell opportunities. If they don't engage, they can be funneled into a re-engagement campaign. 

Want to see some examples broken down into smaller parts? Here are a few Zap templates to help you get started:

Streamline your campaign management

Your marketing campaigns are only as good as your contact list. If you use tools like Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads, you probably rely on features like Customer Match (targeting users similar to your customers) or conversions tracking (seeing which ads results in sales) to build custom audience lists. 

You might also want to rely on other customer or lead behavior, like closed-won deals, website visits, or email engagement, and add these folks to specific campaigns you've created for maximum impact. 

But capturing all of this data manually will likely mean your marketing ops teams are constantly glued to their dashboards, stuck in an endless spiral of downloads, formatting, and uploads. 

With automation, you can make sure all the data between your ads tools, CRM, eCommerce, and reporting tools flows seamlessly. That way, you can create a unified view of your most important metrics to optimize your campaigns and audience lists. 

Automating this process might mean passing post sales leads from your CRM back to Google Ads for reporting visibility. And then creating new customer audiences in LinkedIn Ads based on contacts you've acquired in a Google Sheet from that data in Google Ads. 

While this is a broad process that will include many automated steps, we've gathered a few individual Zap templates to give you a starting point: 

Or are you ready to build your own customizable CRM? Give it a try with Zapier Tables and Interfaces:

Sales CRM Template

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

Try it

Automate the quote-to-cash process

Once your sales team closes a deal, you'll want them to focus on onboarding new customers—and not waste time chasing invoices or getting contracts signed. By automating the entire quote-to-cash process, you can eliminate manual data entry, ensure smooth handoffs between teams, and get paid faster. 

With Zapier, you can streamline everything from generating a quote in your CRM, to sending it out, and then automatically creating an invoice once the deal is closed. Payment reminders, tracking, and updates can all be automated as well, reducing human error and speeding up the process.

For example, you can set up a workflow where every time a deal in HubSpot is marked as closed-won, a quote is generated in QuickBooks and an invoice is sent directly to the client. Once payment is received, the system can update the deal record, notify the sales team, and send a receipt to the client automatically.

By automating these tasks, your quote-to-cash process becomes faster, more efficient, and less prone to error—helping your business keep cash flowing and reducing administrative burden.

Here are a few Zap templates that can help you kickstart this process:

Automatically align sales and marketing

The journey from lead to customer is anything but straightforward. From sourcing and nurturing leads to managing customer relationships and analyzing metrics for future campaigns, every step requires careful attention and personalized strategies.

By connecting all your marketing and sales tools and automating key processes across the board—like lead follow-ups, data syncing, and reporting—you can ensure a seamless journey for every customer, while freeing up your team to focus on strategy and growth.