The 6 best zaps to supercharge your sales process

Customers need to be identified, introduced to your brand, educated on your product or service, and then — finally! — converted. It’s a very involved process at the best of times.

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The sales process in six steps:

Put simply, a sales process is a set of steps that take a prospect from a lead to a happy, loyal customer.

The individual steps in this process will depend on your particular industry and target customers, but the average sales process looks something like this:

1. Prospecting: The process of finding new leads to add to your sales pipeline. You might find prospects at industry events, through networking, or online.
2. Connecting and Qualifying: This stage involves reaching out to your leads to gather information and determine whether they’re the right fit.
3. Researching: Use this stage to learn more about your leads and how your product or service could help them solve a problem.
4. Presenting: At this point, the salesperson arranges a presentation or demonstration of your product. As this is so time-consuming, prospects who reach this stage should be interested and ready to buy.
5. Handling Objections: A presentation rarely leads directly to a sale. Prospects will have questions and concerns to be addressed
6. Closing: The final step is closing the deal. This might mean sending contracts, delivering a proposal, or activating a user account.
   

Establishing a process like this will help you and your team to close more deals and convert more leads. But there’s a significant issue: each of these stages requires time-consuming admin and repetitive work.

Thankfully, Zapier’s collection of sales automation tools can help. As Zapier Certified experts, we've figured out the best Zaps to automate key steps of the sales process — saving you time that would be better spent growing your business.

Faster prospecting with Zapier 🚀 

When prospecting, you need to find and process a lot of data from a wide range of sources as quickly as possible. If you work inefficiently here, you'll slow your entire sales process down.

Keep track of event attendees 📅

One of the best ways to find prospects is to run an event — either in person or online. This could be some free training, a compelling sales presentation, or a guest speaker event.

To manage attendees, you'll probably use Eventbrite or Meetup, the two biggest event communities online. But you don't want all that lovely prospect information to stay on those platforms. You need it in your prospecting list, so you can move onto the next stage of the sales process.

With Zapier, you can build a Zap that sends event attendees’ information to a Google Sheet:

1. Click this link to see a pre-configured Zap that adds attendees from Eventbrite to a Google Sheet. 
2. If you use Meetup, use this link to automatically add your group members to a Google Sheet.
3. You'll be asked to log into the relevant accounts.
4. Pick your shared prospecting spreadsheet and select what information should be copied.
   

All your leads in one place 🖇️

You can get prospects from Facebook, your newsletter, Twitter, events, webinars, and so many other places, but when they’re all spread out, you won’t be able to process them efficiently. 

The next step is to collate them so you can start qualifying. Stop copy-pasting and start using Zapier:

1. Find your lead source in the Zapier app directory.
2. Choose the trigger option that represents a new lead.
3. Select Google Sheets as the destination app.
4. Choose the “create new row” action.
   

Qualifying leads automatically with Zapier 💰

You've completed your prospecting, so now you need to trim your options down — removing, say, any lead representing a company with less than $5M in revenue. Usually, this would take hours, but with a clever Zap, it can be done instantly with just an email address.

With Clearbit you can turn an email address into a full customer profile, including their name, job, and location. You can also search for their email domain and get revenue information, employee count, company type, and more — instantly.

With one Zap, you can then filter all of your prospects from the previous step according to whatever criteria you choose:

1. Click this link to set up a pre-configured Zap connecting Clearbit and Google Sheets. This Zap can also work with HubSpot, Intercom, and Zendesk Sell. 
2. Get the Zap running. When you add a new email address to your spreadsheet, public information about the company will be automatically added to the same row.
   

Next, use the filter view in Google Sheets to make a new view just for your qualifying leads. In this case, you’d choose to only show prospects from companies with more than $5M in revenue. 

With this information in hand, all you need to do is get in touch with your potential client. Keeping this part of the process personalised is key - no use for automation here! Make sure to use a catchy subject, and use the information gleaned from your qualifying consumer research to get their attention.

Perfect presentations with Zapier 🍿

For a presentation to be effective, it must be tailored to the individual prospect. This takes time, so get a jump-start with Zapier.

Make presentations automatically 🤖

With Zapier, you can build a Zap that automatically creates a Google Slides presentation based on the information in a Google Sheet.

1. Click here to see our pre-configured Zap that connects Google Sheets and Google Slides.
2. Create a new Google Sheet that contains all presentation-ready prospects.
3. Create a Google Slides template that contains placeholder variables, such as {{name}}, {{email}}, {{company}} or {{company_size}}. This can be tricky, so get in touch if you need help.
4. When you add a new row, a slideshow will be created that fills in the variables you defined. 
   

With all the basic information added, you can now tweak the presentation to suit your lead.

Make Video Conferences Flexible 😄

Without powerful sales automation tools, a prospect rescheduling could upturn your whole week. Not only is the meeting off, but you’ll need to call and email everyone involved to find another convenient time.

By connecting Calendly and Zoom with Zapier, you'll make it easy for your attendees to reschedule for a time that works with you and your team.

1. Create a Calendly account and set up your event types and availability.
2. Log into your Zapier account and see Calendly integrations.
3. Choose a trigger (new event) and an action (create Zoom meeting) from the dropdown lists.
4. Ask your prospects to book and reschedule all meetings through your Calendly link.
   

Closing deals with Zapier 📈

Ah, the final step of the sales process. Congratulations for making it this far, but we're not done just yet. Zapier allows you to save time while still making sure that the sale is closed properly.

Getting documents signed by all parties can be one of the most time-consuming parts of the entire sales process. By using Signaturit, you can speed up the process of sealing contracts, using a single dashboard. 

But let’s take it a step further. By adding Zapier alongside Signaturit, you can automate signature requests, save signed documents, and keep everyone in the loop automatically.

First, let's get signatures from all stakeholders:

1. Create a Google Sheet with the email addresses of all signatories.
2. Click here to create a Zap that will automatically send a signature request to everyone in the Google Sheet.
   

Next, make sure you keep your signed documents safe, in case you need to refer to the contract in the future. Click here to create a Zap that saves all your signed contracts to Google Drive.

Finally, connect Signaturit to Slack to automatically send a notification when a new contract is signed, so celebrations can begin without a moment’s delay.

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