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3 min read

5 ways to automate Salesforce

By Joanna Rutter · January 23, 2023
The Salesforce logo in a large white square connected by dotted orange lines to smaller squares containing the logos for Slack, Mailchimp, and Stripe.

If you're like most sales teams, you probably spend the majority of your working day in Salesforce. This popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform houses an enormous amount of data, including all of your customers' contact information, the products they've purchased in the past, lead tracking information, and the status of sales opportunities. 

To make the most of this business-critical app, you want to ensure it easily communicates with the other tools and systems used across your sales team—and your company. With Zaps—our word for Zapier's automated workflows—you can automatically connect Salesforce to your favorite apps to streamline your sales processes and multiply your team's impact.

Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with 6,000+ apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more.

Table of contents

To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.

Create new leads and records

When someone clicks on an online ad or fills out a form, how do you make sure that person ends up in Salesforce? Do you manually download their information, reformat it, and upload it into Salesforce, losing valuable to-the-second tracking information about their activity? Do you sit down and type their details into your CRM by hand, inviting in human error? 

Manual lead management is a huge time-waster, and the misery multiplies the more leads you have. Save time by automating lead data sharing. Build a faster—and more scalable—lead management program by automating lead data sharing.

Here are a few Zapier and Salesforce automation ideas that will do the trick:

Add new Facebook Lead Ads leads as leads in Salesforce

Add new Facebook Lead Ads leads as leads in Salesforce
  • Facebook Lead Ads logo
  • Salesforce logo
Facebook Lead Ads + Salesforce

Get notifications for warm leads and opportunities

When a new lead comes in, you often have only minutes to reach out if you want to convert them into paying customers. Staying on top of new leads in real-time can be frustrating, especially when you're trying to track hundreds or thousands of sales opportunities. It also makes it practically impossible to scale your lead management efforts.

A great solution to this problem is to push new leads into whatever chat app your team uses. That way, they can immediately see when a new lead comes in, along with the relevant contact information they need to reach out. Here are a couple of Zaps that can do this:

Use webhooks with Salesforce

Zapier connects to thousands of apps, but there may be tools you use that don't have a Zapier integration. In that case, you'll want to use webhooks that push info from your apps to Salesforce.

For example, say you capture leads in a tool that doesn't integrate directly with Salesforce. Rather than manually entering that lead data in Salesforce each time you receive it in your lead capture tool, you can create a webhook that automatically looks for new lead information and sends it to Salesforce. Here are some Zaps to get you started.

Add follow-up tasks to your to-do list app

Salesforce offers a create task feature that allows you to associate tasks with leads or assign them to specific people on your team. Some teams have these automatically set up within Salesforce, and some sales managers prefer tracking their team's work activity by monitoring tasks.

But not everyone wants to manage their tasks in Salesforce directly, especially folks with their own method for managing their to-do list.

You may also want to assign tasks to team members who don't have access to Salesforce. For example, if you want to send feedback to your product team or ask a customer support rep to follow up with a customer.

Instead of manually copying your Salesforce tasks into your favorite to-do app, here are a couple of Zaps that can do it for you:

Keep your sales and financial data in sync

Another area where many businesses can save time is in keeping their accounting app up-to-date based on the most recent Salesforce data. When a new contact or opportunity is created in Salesforce, you'll eventually also need to create a corresponding contact or customer in your accounting program. Similarly, when a Salesforce opportunity closes, you'll have to create an invoice for that amount in your financial hub.

That's a lot of data entry to ask of your sales and accounting staff, so here are a few Salesforce automation ideas that can lighten the load:

Streamline your CRM workflows with Zapier and Salesforce

Keeping your CRM tidy is essential to building a streamlined, scalable lead management program. Using Zapier and Salesforce together to keep your data clean and organized will make tracking leads and closing deals that much simpler—and faster.

And this is just the start of what you can do with Salesforce and Zapier. Check out our App Directory to see what else you can do.

This article was originally written by Zapier staff writer Hannah Herman and published in November 2019. It was most recently updated in January 2023.

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A Zap with the trigger 'When I get a new lead from Facebook,' and the action 'Notify my team in Slack'