Navigating a messy API and its documentation is a lot like Indiana Jones' search for the golden idol: One wrong move and you'll be outrunning a boulder. Some APIs have robust, updated documentation. Other APIs were hastily thrown together and have been jerry-rigged since.

For account-based marketing firm obo. Agency, digging through APIs is part of the job. The team helps clients improve their marketing automation, optimize sales processes, and drive engagement through content and design—something they do effectively by working with custom softwares' APIs and connecting them to other tools.

"A lot of these larger companies we're working with built custom software," says Doug Puccetti, Business Solutions Analyst at obo. Doug's average day consisted of sifting through APIs—some organized, but most cluttered. He strategized how to pull data from a client's API and send it to new, efficient systems.

It turns out, Doug wasn't the only one thinking about efficient automation.

"I spent a lot of time going through documentation and trying to automate things that [app automation tool] Zapier had already built," Doug explains. Chief among those tasks was moving and generating leads between customer relationship managers (CRM). With Zapier supporting him, Doug was able to cut his time spent uploading data by over 25%.

Automatically Generate and Move Leads to Your CRMs

Manually migrating data is one of the most tedious tasks when changing systems. It swallows time and if there's a problem with the upload, you have to start from scratch.

So Doug built a few Zaps—a connection between two or more apps—that would automatically handle most of the workload. To accomplish this, he uses two of Zapier's homegrown apps: Webhooks and Code.

With Zapier's webhooks, Doug can grab any piece of information from a client's database. When he pairs it with Code by Zapier, Doug transforms the data from the webhook into information ready for CRMs, like HubSpot and Salesforce.

While these Zaps are a bit advanced, if you take the time to get to know webhooks and JavaScript, the entirety of the internet will be at your fingertips:

Thankfully, not every single client needs custom integrations built. Some want a seamless migration to a new platform—without losing any data, of course. Others want to add leads from email campaigns or webinars to other tools.

To that end, Doug connects HubSpot and Salesforce with marketing automation software and webinar application .

By mixing and matching these applications with each other, Doug's Zaps can do just about everything: transfer leads from CRM to CRM, create new leads from webinar attendees, add webinar attendees to mailing lists—the Zaps do whatever obo. Agency's clients need them to do.

Try out some of obo. Agency's most used Zaps to cut down the time it takes to create leads:

"We started using Zapier and it just made things easier," Doug says. "It's freed up at least 25% of my time by automating data uploads for multiple clients." As obo. Agency, a 2-year-old startup, continues to grow its base of clientele, the time spent automating manual work will translate to more time spent on their clients—and not on data entry.

All images courtesy of obo. Agency.