Category: Automation

If we teleport back to the 2000s, automating a workflow was a technical task. But as those days are behind us, now anyone can use no-code tools to automate workflows.

A seamless workflow is essential for any business, and it can’t be achieved without automation. No-code automation tools make it easier for non-technical business people to automate their workflow. You no longer need to put in a request with a developer or engineering team.

Many folks hesitate to automate their business. But one can’t run or at least expand a full-fledged business without automating the routine tasks. No-code automation improves the workflow and makes everyday tasks faster and efficient.

Why Should I Automate My Workflow?

From Customer Relationship Management systems to Gmail and Callingly, a typical sales professional or business uses multiple tools. And it’s pretty confusing and time-consuming to pass information and connect every tool manually.

That’s where automation comes in. The automation process does everything for you once you have set the actions and triggers. For dummies, it means that automatically your leads will be sent to your CRM, and from there it will be passed over to Callingly, or any other sales tool.

You don’t have to keep checking the status of your leads or connect your sales team with the leads manually. Automation will take care of all the routine tasks and help you to focus on what’s more important.

Are you thinking of hopping on the automation bandwagon? Well, our recommendation is to use Zapier to help connect your disparate tools together.

Zapier – An Automation Solution

Zapier moves information between your apps automatically. Like a glue, Zapier connects thousands of apps together. It helps your apps to communicate with each other and collectively pull out a task.

Zapier lets you integrate, automate and innovate. With a few clicks, you can link your apps so they can share their data. After that, you can pass information between them and set triggers or actions based on your custom rules.

For instance, you captured a lead from your Facebook Ad Forms. Now you want to feed the information in close.io and start setting up calls and emails. With Zapier, you can connect your Facebook Ad Forms and trigger an action of feeding and calling the leads whenever you capture a lead.

CRM to email platforms and apps like Slack, Zapier supports over 2,000 applications. Connect, set triggers/actions and automate your daily tasks in a snap with Zapier.

Wondering how you can automate stuff with Zapier from scratch? The next section is all about how a newbie can use Zapier to connect apps and automate tasks.

How Zapier Works

Although Zapier gets up and running in no time, you first need to understand the language of this tool.

Understanding The Language of Zapier

All tools have their own terminology and language. And it’s essential to learn it before you start using them.

Here are some basic building blocks of the Zapier dashboard and setup wizard you need to absorb:

Zap:

A Zap in Zapier is referred to as the steps of automation you have to set-up.

Trigger:

An event that kick starts your Zap like getting a new email or capturing a new lead.

Action:

It takes place after your Zap has been triggered. For instance, your new lead is transferred to your CRM.

Multi-step Zap:

A Zap with one trigger but multiple actions. For example, uploading an image, updating CRM, etc. on receiving a new lead.

App:

A software or application that connects or integrates with Zapier like Gmail, Dropbox, Close.io, Callingly, etc.

Using Zapier to Automate Tasks

Here’s how you can use Zapier to automate your tasks:

Create a Zapier Account:

Firstly, kick start by logging or signing up to your Zapier account. When you’re creating a new account, Zapier will ask you to select all the web apps that you are looking forward to connecting and integrating.

Check out the plans and pricing of Zapier and see which one suits your biz.

Set-Up Your Own Zap:

Once you’re logged into your Zapier account, click on the “Make a Zap!” button. It will take you to the page where you have to set-up your Zap.

Create a Trigger:

Now you need to choose an application from which you would like to initiate the trigger. If you are looking forward to automating your CRM and leads, select an app from where you are capturing the leads. For example, you can pick Facebook Lead Ads.

After that, you’ll be asked to select a trigger. If you want to trigger the Zap based on a new lead, select the available option according to it. Then, click on the “Save + Continue” button. Now you’ll be asked to enter more details. For us, it was about entering the account details of our Facebook Leads Ads.

Next up, you’ll be prompted to edit more related options to the app you have chosen. Lastly, you can test your Zap and see if your trigger is working correctly or not.

Configure Action:

Now you must define the action that happens after your Zap has lighted up the trigger. Choose the application you want to set-up or configure for the action.

After that, you’ll be asked to choose the action and edit/set-up the template. Furthermore, according to the application you have picked for the action, you might see more options to configure.

After successfully completing the sub-steps of the action, you can test the action in the end.

Test Your Zap:

It’s time to test your Zap! Turn on your Zap and test it to see if you are getting the desired results.

Saved Zaps will be available in your Zapier dashboard. You can turn off/on your Zaps or edit them according to your needs.

Now Over To You

Zapier is an all-in-one automation solution. It supports all popular and useful sales tools to assist non-technical people in automating their sales department.

Be it Callingly, PipeDrive, SalesForce, etc. Zapier lets you integrate, automate and innovate with absolutely any tool.

Zapier passed the 1 million users mark back in 2016, and that shows us how quickly people are opting it to automate their business. Start using Zapier today to save yourself from manually completing everyday tasks.

It’s the human tendency to make complicated things more manageable and accessible. Thanks to no-code tools and human nature, you don’t need to rely on coding in order to switch your sales and marketing team to a digital workflow.

No-code tools help you to focus on the core business rather than worrying about hiring developers. With absolutely zero knowledge of coding, you can use no-code tools to create applications on your own.

Here’s how some no-code tools can come in handy when you’re looking to automate sales, client data, and everything in between.

Easy Automation and Integration

No-code tools make automation a piece of cake. You can integrate thousands of applications and set-up a bridge between them for automating tasks. Unlike traditional coding, you don’t have to write extended logics to automate or connect applications.

No-code tools work like a plug and play device. You just have to follow a few set of simple instructions in order to connect and automate tasks. Automation and bridging apps wasn’t an easy task before no-code tools became available.

Imagine receiving an email from a customer on your Gmail, which automatically sends a notification on your Slack sales channel. Cool, no?

Automation cuts down all the manual heavy-lifting. Your daily manual operations are now just a matter of integrating and bridging two-three apps. One activity on an app or software can trigger another (pre-defined activity) on the other app, and so on. And all this without even writing a single line of code.

With no code tools such as Zapier, you’ll be able to achieve an organized workflow. In just a few clicks, you can set-up unique tasks, connect apps, and create a workflow of your choice.

Zapier makes automation easy. It’s handy for automating tedious, repetitive tasks. Zapier supports over 1,300 business tools and advanced automation techniques. Your business can use it to cut all the manual work related to the sales department and set up a friendly and easy automated workflow. At Callingly, we have over 1,000+ integrations with common sales tools through Zapier.

Painless Set-up for Non-Coders/Developers

Business is about increasing sales, gaining customers, and developing a brand. But for the sake of digitization, many businesses switch their primary focus towards building software and applications. And believe me, it hugely affects their performance, sales, and other processes that actually matter in the long-run.

No-code tools can help businesses achieve a more efficient technology-enabled sales process without sacrificing their time and money. Those that can’t code can easily set-up no-code tools to accomplish complex tasks like analytics, CRM systems, and more.

Business professionals can now set up software and applications via no-code tools in just a few clicks and drags or drops. Without any prior knowledge of programming, businesses can use no-code tools to achieve results that were only possible with a team of professional programmers.

Straightforward Customer Relationship Management

Another significant benefit of using no-code tools is that you can easily set-up customer relationship management (CRM) or any similar sales database tool. From task management to project planning and tracking sales, you build your own unique version for your business, all with simple drag and drops performed by members of your sales team.

Many no-code tools give you a full-fledged experience of a database where you can enter your records and track them accordingly. With a few clicks, you can also integrate your spreadsheets rather than entering data from scratch.

The CRM systems designed with no-code tools are robust. They have the potential of scaling as your business grows. From customer data to how many sales you’ve made this month, the no-code tools’ CRM system tracks everything!

A CRM system created on a no-code tool gives every business a helping hand in efficiently organizing their sales and customer department. All lead information is safe and secure in the database, and at your disposal 24/7.

Take the example of a tool, Airtable. It mashes the best aspects of spreadsheets and databases into one great software. Businesses can count on Airtable to manage their customer relationship and sales department.

The visually appealing spreadsheet makes it easy for everyone to view information and organize it. Furthermore, Airtable gives you the opportunity of linking records and storing information in the database, and using tools such as Zapier to build automated workflows with other tools.

At Callingly, we’ve even used Airtable as our base CRM to show you how you can link a lead capture tool such as Typeform with Airtable, and then connect this to Callingly for automated callbacks. Check out how we did this here.

All-in-all, no-code tools make building CRMs simple, inexpensive, and straightforward.

Less Waiting and More Doing

Is your website converting customers to leads, but your sales team is unable to close those them? Manually managing the leads can be one of the major factors behind the inefficiency of your sales team.

Switching to no-code tools will let you sales workflows without ever needing a developer to implement complex logic. Whenever your website captures a new lead, you can use a no-code based custom CRM to capture their information, and then connect it with a service such as Callingly that can automatically call and assign an agent to the lead to contact them over the phone. This means your leads will no longer have to wait for hours for a response.

Manually managing leads and the sales funnel can be daunting and pretty slow when you’re juggling multiple applications. It could cost you, high-value customers, if you forgot to cascade changes, enter their information, or simply were not notified to get in touch with them. With no-code tools, automating sales funnels is feasible, effective, and beneficial.

Callingly can do all that. It’s a lead response management tool that allows businesses to respond faster and close more leads. We can integrate with any CRM, lead platform, or website within a few seconds, given our vast array of integrations. Tools like Callingly, Zapier, and Airtable help you build a fully functional sales workflow for your business that’s highly automated and caters to your unique needs.

Suppose you needed a use case where you can capture lead information through an online form or survey link, store the details in a CRM, and ensure the lead is reached out to via a phone call as soon as possible from when they demonstrate interest.

We’re going to build this using without a single line of code, and using commonly available inexpensive tools.

If you’re not a reader and would like to watch a video tutorial on this, head here

Alright, let’s dive in!

Typeform will be used to gather lead information. The information is then transferred into a CRM which is built on AirTable and then the lead is called using Callingly.

Setting it up

In this tutorial, we’re essentially going to use four things – Typeform, AirTable, Zapier, and Callingly.

Zapier is going to act as a bridge between Typeform and AirTable, and will pass the information about the leads from TypeForm to the CRM, which in our case is AirTable. The whole process will involve four flows and three zaps.

Flows include: – Capturing information about the leads using Type flow – Send this information to the CRM, which in our case is AitTable – Send the information from the CRM to Callingly to call the lead – Updating AirTable with the status of the call

Zaps:

We will create three separate zaps for this:

The first zap will listen to and capture the lead information from Typeform and passes that onto the CRM. The second Zap is whenever a new lead is added to our AirTable CRM, we want that information to be sent to Callingly. And finally, a third Zap, which will record the updated status of the call – taking information from Callingly back to our CRM.

In this article, we will take you through three easy steps that will automate your sales workflow seamlessly.

So, let’s get started.

Step I: Setting Up Typeform & Integrating It With The CRM

In this section, we’ll learn how to create Typeform and use that information to the CRM database (AirTable).

We will be using three things here. Zapier, Typeform, and, of course, AirTable. We won’t be going into details on how to create an AirTable or Typeform. If you want to know how that works you can check the guide here or click here to learn how to create Zaps.

We’ll start by creating a simple lead capture form on Typeform. To do this, once you’re signed in click on ‘New Type Form’

On the screen that follows, you can either choose ‘start from scratch’ or a useful template to save some time. To explain things better, we’re choosing ‘start from scratch’. Once you click the button you’ll be presented with a popup asking for certain details.

Click continue once you’ve filled in the info.

Next up you’ll have to create boxes for the leads to give in their information. It could be anything like name, email address, phone numbers, and whatnot. Click ‘add your first question’ and then enter the details you want your leads to provide.

In our case, we are going for First Name, Last Name, Email, and their Phone Number.

Once you do that hit ‘Publish’ on the top right of the page.

After hitting publish, you’ll have the URL (a shareable link) that can be used on your website, landing page, or wherever you want to collect the information from.

Now that we’re all set up with Typeform, we need to send the information from our form to AirTable. We will use Zapier to bridge this information. To do this, login to Zapier and click on New Zap. Just type ‘type’ in the box and select ‘Typeform’ from the dropdown.

Click continue. It will now ask us to sign in to Typeform so that our Zap can fetch the information from there. Once you do that, it will ask you to select the form you want the information to be extracted from. Click continue and it will take you to the next step where you could test your Zap.

Click on ‘Test Trigger’ to check your integration.

Sending to AirTable

The next phase is to send the information we have collected to AirTable.

It’s easy!

In the ‘Do This’ box type ‘AirTable’ and select it from the dropdown.

Next, in the ‘Choose Action Box’, select ‘Create Record’ and ‘continue’. At this point, it’s going to ask you to sign in into your AirTable. Unlike TypeForm, the AirTable will ask you to enter an API key. To do this, go to your ‘Account Page’ and create a new API key.

In the account settings page on AirTable, you will see a box for an API key. Click ‘regenerate’ or ‘generate API’. Select the API form the box, copy it and paste it into the Zapier popup.

Once you’ve done this, select the CRM you created on AirTable and click continue. Here you will be asked to select the table and loads of other boxes to fill in the information. Just the ones relevant and hit continue.

Great, so we have set up our Zap, and now is the time to move forward to step II.

Step II – Connecting AirTable To Callingly

What we need is the ability for our CRM leads on AirTable to now transfer to Callingly every time someone fills and submits a form through Typeform. In order to do this, let’s create a new Zap.

In the ‘Choose app and event’ box select AirTable. Select ‘New record’ in the ‘choose trigger event’ box and hit continue.

Select the appropriate tables in the next few boxes and click test to check if everything is exactly the way you want it.

In the Do This box, select callingly from the dropdown and choose an action event, which is our case would be ‘call the lead’

Here, you need to sign in to your callingly account. Make sure you do that from the same browser and allow Zapier access to Callingly.

Next, a screen will pop up allowing you to customize the calling options. Here you can select the team you want the new information to be passed on to, the agent name, email, phone number, and whatnot.

After doing this, you can now Test whether you’re receiving updates on new leads.

Click on Test and Continue and you will have a small pop up on every new lead gathered on Callingly and your Callingly leads section will highlight the new lead.

Step III: Updating The CRM With The Status Of The Call

In this section, we’ll talk about how to update the status in the AirTable with the current status of the call. The way we’re going to do this is by creating a new Zap, which is listening to Callingly whenever the status of the lead is updated. And that status is then updated to that particular lead in AirTable.

So, create a new Zap and in the ‘When this happens’ window, type in and select Callingly. In the ‘Trigger Even’ box, select Lead Updated or Tagged. Hit continue. It will ask you to select the Callingly account and then an option to customize the field. In the updated field box, select ‘Status’.

Hit Continue and then ‘Test Trigger’.

Click on continue and in the ‘Do This’ box that appears select AirTable. This is because we want to update the record in our CRM with the latest call results from the Callingly.

Now, in the ‘choose an action event’ box select File Record and click Continue. Customize the field by selecting the right table and then in the ‘search by’ field, select email. In the ‘search value’ box select the email from the AirTable and hit Continue.

We have found the lead, now we need to update it. To do that, click the ‘+’ icon below ‘Find Record In AirTable’ as shown in the screenshot.

Select AirTable app again, but this time we’re going to select ‘Update Record’ in the Choose Action Field. In the customization window, select the same AirTable Account. In the record field, select Custom, and then click on ID.

Now in the fields that are available, we will scroll down to status and select status. Hit Continue and then Test. You will see that the status in the CRM has changed to Called.

That’s it! You have created a fully functional Sales Automation Process using no-code tools like Zapier.

Curious to see another no-code write up and video like this one? Shoot us a message on live-chat letting us know what you’d like us to build!