Matt Pliszka | Pipedrive Partner​,​ CRM Configuration​/​Integration

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This guide is a part of the below ultimate guides:
An Ultimate Guide to Integrating Your CRM to Grow Sales and Automate Work

A data properly structured in your CRM system is a good first step to an effective CRM implementation. Proper data structure and data filtering are crucial to allow the team an effective CRM use.

But your upload/excel files are not the only sources of data for your business.

After you launch a CRM in your company, your business will need to keep operating on a recurring basis. That’s when a CRM comes into play supporting you and your team in sales and marketing activities.

Why connect lead sources to your CRM?

Any record in a CRM can be inputted manually but after all, it’s not the goal of the CRM implementation. You want to make sure you reduce the manual work as much as possible.

Automating these activities can not only save you and your team’s time spent on manual data entry. It can also make sure your team focuses on the right leads and can help you grow your conversion rates.

Let’s look at how to automate your lead identification processes and automate data entry to your CRM from different sources, including:

• Website
• Facebook Ads/Google Ads
• Mailing campaigns
• Phone calls
• Referrals
• Customer service
• Meetings/conferences
• Social media

Connecting to website

There are a few ways to connect your website to the CRM system. After all, visitors might either only be visiting your website, may decide to leave their contact details or even engage in a conversation with you when browsing through your offer.

• Collecting the information from your visitors by using web forms

One of the ways for your visitors to express interest in your product or service is by leaving contact details on your contact page.

Having a CRM in place, it’s important to make sure that this information lands straight in your CRM pipeline.

One of the ways is to integrate your website with a CRM system is to embed a proper web form, pushing the information to your CRM.
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An alternative way to do it is to use a 3rd party web form solution like Typeform or Jotform and connect/integrate it using Zapier. This is a good option if you’re looking for ways to monetize on your content marketing (e.g. by displaying a pop-up message, leading to the Typeform).

After the lead lands in your CRM system, it’s recommended to set up an automated response but this will require another integration/setup.

• Connecting with your meeting scheduling software

Another way to collect leads for your business is to allow your potential leads to schedule a meeting with you at their convenience.

It’s recommended to use an external solution like Calendly to make it work in your business and connect it with your CRM activities.

Alternatively, you can use your CRM’s built-in scheduling solution to make it work right and don’t worry about additional integration options.

• Detecting leads visiting your website

Last but not least, you can try to detect your website’s visitors even if they don’t actually decide to leave their contact details.

With technology like Leadfeeder or Leadworx, you can use IP addresses to match the visitors’ details with their company’s name and identify decision-makers in these businesses. Also, these leads can appear automatically, growing your sales or marketing team’s pipeline. Still, you should rather be looking for ways to filter out only the most probable leads (e.g. visiting your website more than a few times).
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Afterward, you can either enrich this data and launch an email marketing campaign to the potential leads or use social media to connect with the right decision-makers.

Connecting to paid marketing campaigns

Most probably one of the popular sources of leads in your business is paid campaigns within Google or Facebook.

You can automate lead identification and CRM integration from both of these sources, using a proper Zapier integration.
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Use it connected with a separate pipeline to manage your company’s deals and sales coming through paid channels.

Connecting to mailing campaigns

There are a couple of different mailing campaigns you might be running at your business:

• newsletter campaigns
• outreach campaigns
• simple individual communication

Each of them can be an actual source of the leads for your business and the proper connection of your email campaigns can actually affect the sales of your business.
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When working with customers we always recommend integrating email campaigns on click or replies, which means that the potential sales deal is created once a recipient clicks or replies to an email.

Connect with a phone calling system

If your business is still among the ones doing a lot of outreach or follow-up calls, it’s likely that you’re in touch with many potential leads.

While a built-in CRM’s calling system can be a decent solution if your team is small, you will likely need to use a separate calling system like Cloudtalk if your team is larger and does a lot of phone calls.
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Integrate your calling system with a CRM and make sure your team can mark potential phone calls as leads in your calling software or handle calls from your CRM system.

Connect with customer referrals

One of the ways to manage customer referrals is to offer your customers/promoters a commission for promoting your products or services. You’d also need a system to monitor for customer referrals among your partners.

A good way to set it up would be to start a dedicated website, where you could allow your promoters to submit referrals online.
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You could use a landing page solution like Landingi or Webflow, connected with a web form collecting proper information and inputting in a CRM system under referrals.

Integrate with customer service

You likely provide customer service support to your current or potential customers.

Among those customer queries, it’s very likely there are leads who might become your customers again (cross-selling/up-selling).
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Integrate your live chat or helpdesk support with a CRM and identify leads who might be interested in your product or service, e.g. by setting up a proper Zapier connection.

Ensure automated upload after meetings/conferences

If you’re selling to enterprise segment or to businesses within an offline segment, conferences are likely one of your major lead sources.

In today’s world connecting on LinkedIn takes no more than a few seconds thanks to QR codes’ technology (greetings to Awork team I had a chance to connect with using a LinkedIn QR code during the recent deGUT conference in Berlin, a really promising project management tool). Still, most of us still use physical business cards.

Using a solution like Business Card Reader you can automate the contacts’ upload process into your CRM, saving time on manual cards’ entry after conferences. Another good solution is setting up a CRM-integrated Google spreadsheet.

Integrate with social media communication

Engaging with prospects on social media has become more and more important these days. But can these activities be managed straight from your CRM system?

Actually the CRM systems’ integration with social media channels is still quite limited. Pipedrive will automatically identify the person’s LinkedIn profile based on the provided email address but will not let you manage communication straight within a CRM.
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As a result, you’d still need to manage/progress the leads manually, switching between 2 tabs (social media & CRM). It would be great to see a CRM with built-in social media messaging and automated social media engagement detection someday in the future.
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A temporary alternative to this might be setting up a Zapier button in your Chrome browser to create a lead while talking to customers/prospects on LinkedIn.

Connecting lead sources as the next step to successful CRM implementation

Having a properly structured data in your CRM and incoming lead sources connected is a great start to an effective CRM use.

Now CRM is the only place you can manage data flow within your business, without excel spreadsheets or paper cards needed.

It’s a great and necessary start of the successful CRM integration, leading your team to handle leads within a CRM, growing your sales pipeline and saving time on manual data input.