For a salesperson, time is literally money. That means I want to use Instabot to gather and manage my leads as quickly as possible without manually integrating with other technical partners. In this series, I’ll walk you through different ways I use Instabot for lead generation/sales, and Zapier to pull the data into my CRM.

Our leads are crucial. Any delay in delivering to the right sales person, or any error in inputting the lead is a huge drag to our team and large cost to our company. When a prospect interacts with our bot, we want to get them into our CRM without any manual input, and deliver it to the right person immediately. The steps below will work for any CRM that Zapier supports and we have prebuilt templates to help you input the right information! (Remember: we also have an API that can be used for a custom integration for internal or niche CRMs.)

Here’s how to set it up:

A.      Decide which information you want to capture

Depending on how your bot is structured, you may be interested in different data points. Remember: the more questions you ask, the lower your completion rates will likely be, so be smart in how many of these you select. The key pieces of information our clients usually ask for are: email address, name, company website, and job role. (You can also ask nuanced information such as: How much knowledge do you have in this subject? What alternative solutions are you looking at?, etc.)  
 

B.      Build your bot!

If you already know how to do this, great! If not, you can check out our helpful guide here! Make sure to save all your bot responses as a custom property, and use the same name as is in your CRM system. For example, if your CRM uses the term “Geography”, make sure to use save the custom property with the same name so it will be a breeze to map.  Please note: do not start your bot asking for an email address – it’s a sure fire way to torpedo your engagement.  Build trust first, then ask for information.

C.      Build your Zap

Check out our templates for Zapier "Zaps" here.  You can leverage the templates we have built to sync the data from your Instabot into your CRM (or Google Docs, MailChimp, etc.). Simply, fill in each field in the template. Currently, we have our leads funnel into our CRM and our Slack channel. Don’t see your CRM? You can either build your own Zap or contact the Instabot team and we’ll be happy to create one for you!

When setting up your Zap, on the “Action” section, you’ll be able to select any custom properties you’ve saved as a part of your template.

Now you’re all set! Anyone who interacts with your bot will automatically have a record created for them.

D.      Optional: Filter out incomplete results

Depending on how much information you want to capture in your CRM, you probably want to filter out anyone who talks to your bot but doesn’t complete all of the fields (e.g., email).

Fortunately, Zapier has an awesome solution for this!

When setting up your Zap, add in a filter and instruct the Zap to only proceed if the bot has acquired certain information (e.g., email)

Since I (and other Instabot-ers) often demo the bot on our website, I also want to make sure certain email addresses are filtered out. To do that, I’ll instruct the bot to only proceed if the user’s email doesn’t match mine:

If you have any other questions about optimizing your lead capture with Instabot and Zapier,  email me directly at [email protected] and stay tuned for more posts on how we help marketing and lead capture!