Automations
Automate lead intake: from enquiry email to CRM deal in under a minute
Enquiries arrive by email, web form and forwarded messages, and someone types them into the CRM when they have time. Claude reads each one, creates or updates the contact and deal, and alerts the right person.
Tools: ClaudeGmail or OutlookHubSpot or PipedriveSlack
The manual process today
Leads arrive from several places: a web form that sends an email, a shared info@ inbox, messages forwarded by colleagues, replies to campaigns. Someone has to read each one, decide whether it is a real lead, check whether the contact already exists in the CRM, create the contact and deal, fill in company, source and what they asked for, and tell the right salesperson.
In practice this happens in batches, when someone has a gap. Leads wait hours or days. Fields are left empty, duplicates multiply and pipeline reports reflect who had time for data entry, not actual demand. For a small sales team handling 200 to 400 enquiries a month, intake alone can take 15 to 25 hours a month.
How the automation works, step by step
- Capture. All lead sources are pointed at one place: a dedicated inbox or the form webhook. Nothing changes for the people filling in the form.
- Reading. Claude reads the message and extracts name, company, email, phone, country, what they need and any volume or budget mentioned.
- Qualification. Using your criteria (company size, sector, location, type of request), it classifies the enquiry: qualified lead, needs more information, existing customer, supplier, job application or spam.
- CRM update. It searches the CRM for the contact and company. If they exist, it updates them and logs the enquiry as an activity; if not, it creates contact, company and deal in the right pipeline stage, with the source recorded.
- Assignment and alert. Based on your rules (territory, product, account owner), it assigns the deal and sends the salesperson a Slack message with a three-line summary and a link.
- Draft reply. Optionally, it prepares a first reply in your tone for the salesperson to review and send.
What you need
- Access to the inbox or form where leads arrive.
- HubSpot, Pipedrive or another CRM with an API, and a dedicated integration user.
- Your qualification criteria and assignment rules, even if they are simple.
- A Claude API account in your company’s name.
Limits and human review
The workflow handles intake, not selling. Qualification is a first filter: anything borderline is marked for review rather than discarded. Existing customers are never treated as new leads, and messages that look like complaints are routed to support instead of sales. All CRM changes are logged with the original message, so you can trace any record back to its source.
Typical timeline
A first version with one or two lead sources is usually live in 2 weeks. Adding more sources, draft replies and tuning qualification takes another 1 to 2 weeks. This is a typical AI implementation project. The same reading-and-extraction approach is behind the distributor that stopped retyping email orders, where order review dropped from 12 minutes to 2.