10+ CRM Automation Examples and the Best Tools to Try

Your CRM is one of the most valuable data sources your company has. It’s got every email, every task, every internal note. In theory, it knows what makes a qualified lead, how long it takes to close, who mentions a competitor, and which customers might be ready for an upsell.

But for CRM data to be useful, you have to actually do something with it. And some teams are still struggling.

According to HubSpot’s recent State of Marketing Report, just 20% of marketers are using AI for workflow automation – letting valuable data sit idle rather than power high-converting campaigns.

And it’s not just marketing. When Chili Piper and Navattic submitted demo requests to 100 top B2B SaaS companies, 16% didn't reply at all, a sign that even high-intent prospects are not getting responses fast enough, impacting revenue.

It’s not that teams don’t care, it’s that they can’t keep up. CRM automation is the answer. By automating the tasks that move, enrich, and act on your CRM data, your teams can focus their full attention on selling and scaling.

In this guide, we’ll break down:

• What CRM automation is
• Real CRM automation examples used by top sales and marketing teams
• The difference between marketing and sales automation
• The best tools to help your GTM teams be as productive as they can be

What is CRM Automation?

CRM automation turns manual, repetitive tasks (think: creating contacts, updating opportunities, swarming on deals) into automated workflows. Typically, automated CRM flows:

• Begin with a trigger, such as a new lead coming in from an ad campaign.
• End with an action (or multiple actions), such as asking AI agents to:
  
  • Read emails and automatically change the status of leads to closed, stopping further emails
  • Listen in on discovery calls and send coaching notes afterwards
  • Look at what leads are asking for after a sales conversation and instantly generate custom content like PDFs and PowerPoint slides

Automating even a fraction of these multi-step processes can free up hours every week, giving GTM teams more time to focus on revenue generating activities. 

Why Ops Teams Are Prioritizing Sales Automation

Today’s buyers expect the same level of responsiveness from B2B companies as from B2C – instant replies, seamless communication, and personalized service. But delivering that kind of experience is tough when headcount is shrinking and teams are stretched thin.

Rather than accepting slower cycles and overlooked opportunities, operations leaders are turning to CRM automation, designing workflows that make sure:

• AEs know which emails to prioritize and reply within minutes rather than be delayed by hours
• Reps don’t rush or miss key steps in the sales process – they follow a documented SOP.
• Forecasts stay accurate without rep-subjectivity and last-minute cleanup.
• Reps reengage cold leads or renewal opportunities at the perfect time.

The 3 Most Common Examples of CRM Tasks to Automate

Example 1: Capture and Enrich Leads

If a prospect fills out a “Contact Us” form, signs up for a webinar, engages with your chatbot, or drops their business card at your trade show booth, the last thing you want is for that data to sit in a random Google Sheet.

With CRM automation, those leads can flow directly into your CRM, tagged and categorized based on source, channel, and campaign.

Many teams also layer on enrichment tools to automatically fill in missing fields like company size, job title, and LinkedIn URL. That additional context helps sales prioritize the highest quality leads and multi-thread accounts.

Benefits

• Faster (and more personalized) outreach
• Better segmentation for future campaigns

Example 2: Personalize Email Sequences

CRM automation makes it easy to send the right message at the right time. Say a prospect explored an interactive demo but doesn’t end up booking a call with sales. Instead of letting that lead go cold, you can automatically trigger a follow-up with a case study tailored to their industry or use case.

There are so many flavors of this kind of automation:

• A lead visits your pricing page twice in one week → send an FAQ one-pager or offer to hop on a call.
• A prospect clicks on a product feature in your newsletter → enroll them in a short drip highlighting use cases for that feature.
• Someone downloads a gated whitepaper → invite them to join an upcoming webinar that dives deeper into each trend.

Benefits

• Always-on lead nurturing, even when your team is offline
• More relevant messages = higher open and reply rates
• Fewer leads slipping through the cracks, especially during busy times of year

Example 3: Continuously Improve CRM Hygiene

Keeping your CRM clean isn’t a glamorous job, but it’s a critical one. Without accurate data, you risk misrouting leads, sending the wrong message to the wrong person, and making decisions on outdated information.

To avoid those situations, many companies build CRM automations that periodically:

• Standardize country/region fields
• Remove or merge duplicate records
• Update contact information (phone numbers, job titles, email addresses)
• Auto-reassign dormant leads or deals

Benefits

• Better data integrity, which means better targeting and outreach
• More reliable reporting and forecasting

3 Less Common (But Highly Impactful) CRM Automation Examples

Example 1: Summarize CRM Data for Daily Meeting Prep

Reps shouldn’t have to dig through email threads, Slack messages, CRM notes, and past call recordings just to prep for a meeting. With CRM automation, they can start each day with a personalized briefing.

Motion's AI agents, for example, send reps an email every morning with a list of all their upcoming calls, complete with a summary of activities and internal notes tied to each contact.

After every call, Motion’s agents make a to-do list and automatically slot each task directly into the rep’s calendar – based on their current schedule and preferred deep work time. Agents can even draft follow-up emails based on call transcripts, saving reps the time (and mental load) of writing from scratch.

Benefits

• Reps are prepared for every meeting
• Quick, consistent follow-up
• Less context-switching and cognitive overload

Example 2: Auto-Generate Campaign Ideas From Customer Calls

Sales and customer success calls are packed with insights that don’t always make it back into your messaging and positioning. CRM automation can change that. Using an AI agent automation platform, you can design a workflow that:

1. Scans CRM notes and call transcripts.
2. Analyzes themes, objections, and competitive intel.
3. Comes up with hyper-relevant campaign ideas with potential pull quotes from real customers.
4. Grabs similar G2 quotes or Reddit threads to enrich your campaigns with social proof and buyer language.

You can even create another workflow to audit your existing campaigns and suggest tweaks using customer keywords, fresh testimonials, or new hooks generated from recent calls.

Benefit

• 24/7 voice-of-customer analysis
• An automated pipeline of organic and paid content ideas

Example 3: Proactive Deal Rescue

There are usually subtle clues that a deal is headed in the wrong direction, but it’s hard to pick up on them if a rep is spread across multiple territories or is scrambling to close deals EOQ.

AI agents can continuously monitor your CRM, inbox, calendar, and support tools, and agents can detect when a deal is starting to slip and act before it’s too late.

For instance:

• If a prospect’s sentiment has changed in Gong or a prospect hasn’t responded quickly to several emails in a row, an AI agent can create a check-in task, suggest the right kind of nudge based on past interactions, and slot it into the rep’s calendar so they don’t forget.
• If an opportunity stage changes in your CRM but no activity is logged, an AI agent can send a Slack alert to the AE with a list of potential next steps.
• If a CSAT score drops below 7 for a renewal-stage account, AI agents can review recent support tickets from Zendesk or Intercom and suggest an outreach strategy for the AE and CSM, tailored to the issue and customer.

Benefits

• Fewer surprise losses
• Higher win rates

CRM Marketing Automation vs. CRM Sales Automation

3 CRM Marketing Automation Examples

CRM marketing automation focuses on driving awareness, nurturing leads, and handing off the most qualified prospects to sales – without manual coordination.

These types of automations are typically triggered by changes to CRM records and synced with email and paid ad channels.

Examples of CRM marketing automation include:

• Audience segmentation. Automatically bucket contacts into audiences (by industry or lifecycle stage) for more personalized campaign targeting.
• Attribution tracking. Connect marketing touchpoints (ads, emails, webinars) to CRM contacts and opportunities, then automatically calculate how much revenue each campaign influenced.
• Syncing ad audiences. Push CRM lists directly into paid ad platforms, like Google, Meta, or LinkedIn, for retargeting or lookalike campaigns.

3 CRM Sales Automation Examples

CRM sales automation is about helping reps stay organized, respond faster, and move deals forward.

Examples of CRM sales automation include:

• Next-step triggers. Post call or email, automatically create tasks to remind reps to send a proposal or schedule another meeting.
• Auto-quoting. When a deal reaches a certain stage, create a draft proposal or quote with relevant deal and contact data.
• CRM handoffs. Send new customers a welcome email and Slack the assigned CSM with a link to the customer account record (which has all the marketing and sales history).

What to Look for In a CRM Automation Tool

The first step is to list out all the automations you’d like to do – and you know will save you and your team a lot of time – but can’t accomplish with your current tech stack. Then, do some research to find tools that:

Match Your Use Cases

Use Google, Reddit, or your favorite AI search engine to look for software that can help you automate what you want to automate.

Always request a customized demo. It would be a shame if you went through the whole sales process only to find out that they’re missing a key integration or other aspect of the workflows you want to run. 

Are Easy to Use

You need a tool that can help you create conditional logic, field updates, and task sequencing without touching any code. If you can, sign up for a free trial or freemium plan to get a sense of their platform’s look and feel firsthand.

Drag-and-drop workflow builders and prebuilt triggers from CRM events (such as form fills or stage changes) are all positive signs.

Are Flexible

Other problems will crop up (they always do), and you want to be able to tackle those without having to scour the internet for solutions and go through the whole evaluation process all over again.

With Motion, for instance, you get access to multiple prebuilt AI agents that can tackle hundreds of sales and marketing automation processes out of the box. You can customize them without engineering help or even create your own agents that do exactly what you want them to do.

Are Secure

There are strict data privacy rules around leads, and you don’t want your private sales notes getting exposed to bad actors. Look for tools that have successfully completed a SOC 2 Type II audit and abide by GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations.

4 CRM Automation Tools to Try

Most popular CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho have some automation functionality baked into their products.

But sometimes, that’s not enough – particularly if you have really specific workflows that you want to create or you’re working across tools that don’t natively talk to each other. These automation platforms can help you bridge the gaps:

Zapier

An easy-to-use platform that can connect your CRM to 8,000+ tools with simple logic.

Best for: SMBs who want to automate fast without coding.

Pros

• Huge library of apps. Zapier has native integrations with 8,000+ apps and counting. Their integration directory is easy to search and filter to find what you need.
• Ample support. Zapier has a robust Getting Started Guide, learning site, University, on-demand webinars, and plenty of templates for common CRM tasks, plus it's got a helpful, friendly Community.
• Simple setup. With so many integrations, it’s really easy to move data from one app to another. You can also describe what you need and have a Zapier’s AI Agent* create a workflow for you or build a preview in Canvas*.

*According to their website, these features are still in beta.

Cons

• Not ideal for high volume complex processes. Pricing scales with the number of tasks (“an action your automated workflow successfully completes”) that you automate.
• Zapier can’t respond to webhooks. “When [External Service] sends an http request to hooks.zapier.com/(your url), Zapier automatically responds to that request with a {status: 200} response. I would like to run some zap stuff and then choose what goes in that response.” (Reddit)
• Starts to get clunky with advanced logic, branching conditions, and custom code. Some users also report that error handling can feel cumbersome, and that sometimes Zaps fail without a clear explanation – you have to dig into the task history. (G2, G2, G2)

Pricing

Their “best for teams” plan starts at $69 per month for 25 users for 2,000 tasks. On this plan, users can build and edit multi-step Zaps, share Zaps and folders, gain access to premium apps, use SAML SSO, use webhooks, and get premier support.

If you want to use Zapier’s AI Agents (in beta), you need to buy an additional plan. The Pro plan will cost you another $50 per month. It gets you 1,500 activities (every action an agent takes, like searching the web or reviewing data), live data sources, and the Chrome extension.

Make

A platform with more advanced automation capabilities than Zapier, like multi-step routing, data transformation, and error handling. 

Best for: Ops teams managing more complex workflows between their CRM, marketing, and other back-office tools.

Pros

• Really flexible workflows. For example, one Redditor used Make to scrape leads from Google Maps or social media platforms using Apify, send them to their CRM, and organize them.
• Make’s “Grid” feature* centralizes all of your automations in one place. This can surface potential cross-collaboration opportunities and reduce duplicative work – if someone’s already figured out how to automate something, you or your team can adopt that workflow instead of building it yourself.

*According to their website, this is still in beta

Cons

• Pricing is based on the number of operations you run. If you don’t have a huge budget, this might mean you have to sacrifice creating certain flows over others.
• Lack of support. Users say things like: “After a scenario unexpectedly consumed our entire startup plan quota in two days, our requests for help were largely ignored,” and “Wish there was a library with training available to take care of basic workflows. Most of what I learned was through influencers.” (G2, G2)
• You have to build AI agents yourself. If you don’t know exactly what prompt or model to use, you’re going to have to go through a lot of trial and error to get Make to do what you want. And it’s not that intuitive. According to one Redditor: “Make.com takes some getting used to b/c building scenarios is different, and the way you might solve a specific problem requires another approach. I think Zapier is better at guiding you along.”

Pricing

Their recommended plan, Pro, starts at $16 per month for 10,000 ops per month.

It includes a no-code workflow builder, access to 2,000+ apps, priority scenario execution, Make API access, custom variables, and full-text execution log search.

Workato

A low-code automation platform built for enterprise use.

Best for: Enterprise companies with complex CRM workflows and are willing to spend a good chunk of their budget on a tool and services to automate them.

Pros 

• Advanced features. Has conditional logic, loops, and custom connectors so you can create really customized automations. Workato ONE, Workato’s version of an AI copilot, can help you build, map, and launch automations and agents.
• Built for the enterprise. Workato puts a heavy emphasis on security and compliance. It’s got JIT provisioning, 2FA, SSO/SAML-based authentication, SCIM user management, and is SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 1 Type 2, and HIPAA certified. Some Redditors say they also do custom MSAs and security reviews, if needed.
• Active community. Redditors say things like, “The community of citizen integrators who have shared millions of recipes, making it significantly faster to implement an automation solution,” and “The community recipes are also a great starting point, and I often find myself tweaking them to fit specific use cases.” (Reddit, Reddit)

Cons

• Steep learning curve. Many users suggest working closely with your CSM to minimize task consumption (G2, G2, Reddit). Troubleshooting can be tough because of the way Workato’s job logs are displayed (Reddit).
• GTM doesn’t seem to be their primary use case. Most of the subreddits where Workato shows up tend to be in r/dataengineering, r/ITmanagers, r/SAP, or something similar, and G2 reviewers seem to be developers or business analysts. Even their solutions page lists IT, finance, support, and HR ahead of marketing and sales.
• Price. Per their pricing page, Workato charges based on “platform and usage.” But one Redditor points out, “When you start to exceed your monthly limits, they tell you to do them in batch, then you have rewrite all your recipes in a horrible way and you lose the benefits of the nice GUI step-based tool. They also charge you extra to use the batch processing module.”

Pricing

Does not make pricing publicly available. According to Vendr, the median buyer pays a whopping $50,927 per year.

Motion: The Easiest Way to Add Automations to Your CRM

Motion is an AI agent platform that automates busywork across your entire go-to-market team (and beyond). 

Motion’s AI employees proactively scan your CRM, calendar, emails, meetings, and documents to follow up, brainstorm ideas, draft content, generate reports, and record and update data in other systems – just like a real direct report would.

Best for: Companies that want to scale their CRM workflows across every team, without recruiting, hiring, or training more people.

Pros

• Access to 7 agents built and tested specifically for: sales (Chip), marketing (Suki), support (Clide), project management (Millie), executive assistant (Alfred), recruiting (Dot), and research (Spec).
• Customize each AI agent’s behavior in plain English. Use the skills editor to adjust timing, add or remove steps, change prompts, or pull/send data from other tools – without the trial and error of configuring a workflow builder like you’d have to use with Make or n8n.
• Motion’s project management features (Gantt charts, capacity planning, task prioritization, knowledge management, project deadline estimation) come included and work seamlessly with your AI agents.
• Integrates with popular GTM tools, like ActiveCampaign, Apollo, Asana, Google Ads, Gong, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Salesforce, and Slack, so agents can fetch and send data across your entire stack. No engineering support required.

Cons

• There aren’t AI agents for every department or use case quite yet. However, you do have the ability to create and customize your own with the help of a forward-deployed engineer on the Enterprise plan.
• Requires upfront setup time to define workflows and permissions across tools.

Pricing

Motion’s recommended plan, AI Employees, starts at $29 per user per month.

It comes with a full work management suite (AI projects, AI docs management, AI meeting notetaker, reporting, cross-device apps, priority support) – plus AI employees that can help with hundreds of manual, time-intensive tasks.