Automate even more of your workflows with huge upgrade to Zapier integration

Having to work across many different systems is a necessary evil in the real estate business.

Whether it’s using the software mandated by our brokerage for transactions, trying to test and embrace many different lead sources, or managing your business accounting, many different systems is a reality we all need to deal with.

The biggest challenge with this is it often comes with the duplication of efforts around one of the lowest-value tasks in your business...data entry.

By handling data entry between systems, not only are you having to spend the very limited, and often very expensive resources of your key team members, you’re also putting these at a much higher risk of embarrassing and costly mistakes happening when they’re the responsibility of a busy team member.

And that’s where Zapier comes in.

What is Zapier?

Best described by my friend Barry Jenkins as his ‘Digital Duct Tape’, Zapier is what’s referred to as ‘Middleware’ which is fancy speak for a system designed to connect 2 systems together.

So while Follow Up Boss has a huge list of direct integrations to other platforms you’re using, Zapier opens your options up to thousands of more tools who are also integrated with Zapier.

The goal of implementing Zapier in your business is to free your key people up, like your sales agents for example, to focus their limited time (and attention spans 😜) on the highest value, revenue-generating activities for the business.

It’s also to completely cut the mistakes that get made in the manual data entry process.

Getting Started

To get you started right away and have you creating your very first Zap and automating a workflow within the next 10 minutes, here are a couple of the most common ways Follow Up Boss customers are using Zapier, and the recent enhancements we made to our integration with them, to make their business more efficient.

First, here’s a list of all the ‘Triggers’ and 'Actions' you can use in your workflows:

Triggers (fires when things happen in Follow Up Boss)

• New contact
  

• New deal
  

• Tag added to contact
  

• Person stage updated
  

• New appointment
  

• Deal stage updated
  

Actions (create/update items in Follow Up Boss)

• New inquiry or website event
  

• Create or update contact without triggering action plans
  

• Create note
  

• Apply action plan to contact
  

• Pause action plan
  

• Add tags to a contact
  

• Reassign agent
  

• Log call
  

• Create deal
  

• Create task
  

• Add collaborators
  

• Change stage of contact
  

Search (find something in Follow Up Boss to do something with)

• Find a contact by phone, email, or id
  

We've even added support for Custom Fields so now you can automate the updating of your custom fields to save more time and give you more options for filtering and prioritizing your contacts.

And here are some automations the recent improvements can help you do

• Create a Deal in Follow Up Boss when a new file is opened in your transaction management system
  

• Have calls made in a separate business phone system log in Follow Up Boss
  

• Capture more information from website forms to update a custom field or show in an event in Follow Up Boss
  

• If a lead was assigned to an admin and then they ended up booking an appointment with one of your agents through your ISA service, then Zapier could reassign the lead to that agent.
  

• Add a tag to a contact to trigger the sending of a postcard to them
  

And this is scratching the surface. Once you’ve started to create your first Zap or two, you’ll see the options are endless!

You can even automate other workflows within Follow Up Boss.

• Automate a new action plan to run when you update the stage of a contact
  

• Reassign the contact when the stage is changed - this would be awesome if agents do the initial follow up, but then you have an ISA or service doing the long-term nurture for you.
  

• Update stage and trigger an action plan when a new appointment is created in Follow Up Boss
  

• Assign your transaction coordinator as a collaborator when the stage is updated to one where they need to start working with the client
  

So if you’re not already, I’d recommend you start automating some of your repetitive workflows with Zapier.

If you’re like a more step-by-step rundown on setting up your first Zap, our support team has recently updated our Zapier article, and you can see a list of the most common products customers are integrating with.

If you need a hand setting any of this up, as always, just let us know!