Auto Lead Followups & Invoicing with Zapier, Hubspot and QuickBooks

The company was spending significant manual effort on tracking new leads from estimates sent via email, following up with potential clients, and generating invoices.

This process was time-consuming and prone to delays and missed opportunities, with each lead requiring manual input, and operations spread across 3 different software systems, with estimate-sending application inability to integrate with other systems.

Based on the analyzed processes, an automated workflow was designed and implemented using several integrated tools:

• Email Monitoring & Data Extraction (Zapier & OpenAI): The system was set up to monitor an inbox for specific emails containing estimates in PDF format. Upon receiving such an email, Zapier would trigger a process to retrieve and transform the PDF and pass it to OpenAI's API, which was used to accurately extract key information, such as the estimated number and amount.
• CRM Integration (HubSpot):The extracted customer email was used to search for an existing deal in HubSpot.
• If a deal existed, the extracted amount was added, and the deal was moved to a "sent estimate" stage.
• If no deal was found, a new deal was automatically created in HubSpot with the extracted amount and moved to the appropriate stage.
• Automated Follow-ups (Zapier & Email): If a deal remained in the "sent estimate" stage for three days without any change, an automated reminder email, including the original estimate, was sent to the potential client.
• If, after another three days, the deal status still hadn't changed, a needed person was notified to contact the lead.
• Automated Invoicing (QuickBooks Online):When a deal in HubSpot was moved to the "closed won" stage, the system retrieved the total deal amount and searched for the customer in QuickBooks Online (or created a new customer entry if one didn't exist).
• An initial invoice for 30% of the total amount was automatically generated in QuickBooks Online and sent to the customer.
• Upon project completion (signified by a deal stage update), the system would again retrieve the deal data, find the customer in QuickBooks Online, and create and send a final invoice for the remaining amount of 70%.
• Managing Lost Deals (Mailchimp): If a deal was moved to a "closed lost" stage in HubSpot, the system updated the deal information and automatically added the contact to a specific Mailchimp tag for potential future re-engagement.