How to automate your CRM

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. It’s much better to use CRM automation to add data to your CRM from outside sources. Here’s how.

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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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

More ways to automate your CRM

Looking for more inspiration? We’ve rounded up the best ways to automate the most popular CRMs so you can streamline and supercharge your pipeline.

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. It was most recently updated in October 2024 by Anna Burgess Yang.