If you took a random poll of your teammates and asked about their biggest roadblock, "not enough time in a day/week/month" would appear multiple times. If you're busy with repetitive or manual tasks, you may not be able to spend as much time on higher-value initiatives. So how do you find more time if you don't own a DeLorean with a flux capacitor. The answer isn't hitting 88 mph—it's efficient workflows.

Creating more time at Mode Analytics is Alexa Guerra, Senior Demand Generation Manager. Mode provides their customers—who include Lyft, Trello, Shopify, and plenty more—collaborative analytics to answer the questions behind the questions.

"While it may seem like a quick and easy thing to take a leads export and upload it to marketing automation software Marketo, it's the kind of task that is prone to human error," Alexa says. "And that can negatively impact your workflow."

With app automation tool Zapier, Alexa and the Mode team found an easy way to automate time-consuming tasks—but more importantly, they found a tool that grows with them. Using Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders, Mode builds efficient workflows together, from creating leads to team updates.

Create Leads in Marketo from Multiple Sources

Taking collaboration beyond the halls of the office and into the community, Mode created a jobs board for analysts, data scientists, and data engineers. Companies submit jobs and folks on the hunt can find them easily.

In order to submit a job to the board, a company fills out a Google Form, which notifies the team in Slack. Once the job is approved, it's added to content management software (CMS), Contentful. When the job is pushed live with Contentful, Zapier then syncs the submitter's email address in Marketo.

With this workflow, Mode doesn't have to ping each submitter about the status of their job listing. Instead, Marketo automatically sends an email when the job posting is live, completing the feedback loop with the hiring manager. Mode saves time on these tasks with a few Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps. We'll break down these multi-step Zaps into their components so you can steal their workflow and give time back to you and your team.

Mode also collects leads from G2 Crowd, a business and software review site. These leads are potential customers, curious about Mode and their product. On a business app's G2 Crowd page, there are a few different calls-to-action (CTA); in Mode's case, they have "request a demo", "free trial", and "ask Mode a question".

Zapier takes the responses to the G2 Crowd CTAs and funnels them into Marketo as new leads:

Send Team Updates in Slack

To embrace transparency, Mode opens up their communication, boosting visibility of go-to-market processes across the entire company.

"It helps bring more visibility into goings-on in the business—like new opportunities in Salesforce—which leads to more discussions and dialogue around improvements we can make," Alexa says. Mode uses Slack to share this information and start those discussions.

With a couple simple but powerful Zaps, Zapier sends Mode's new Salesforce leads and new Recurly transactions to a specific channel in Slack. And in an instant, the whole company can celebrate.

"We also use Zapier to push celebration-worthy information about Closed Won deals from Salesforce and Recurly to Slack. Before Zapier, it was harder to communicate those wins."

Collaborating on workflows is an essential part of Mode's teamwork. They share responsibility for creating Zaps in their Shared Folders to improve the company's workflows.

"We're growing quickly and folks on the team wear many different hats," Alexa says. "It's important that individual Zaps not be owned by any one person, so that as a team we can continue improving processes and avoid occasional the bottlenecks of individual ownership."

"At Mode, we don't work alone—we need each other to achieve our goals."

All images courtesy of Mode Analytics.