Automate Smartlead Manual Steps in Salesforce with OutboundSync & Make

When running scaled outbound, reps need more than just automated email touches—they need structured manual steps like phone calls and LinkedIn outreach. This guide shows how to use OutboundSync, Smartlead, and Make.com to dynamically create Salesforce tasks for these actions, ensuring that reps take the right steps at the right time.

Transcript

00:00 Hey there, my name is Harris Kenny. I’m the founder of OutboundSync, and I want to walk through a question that we got from a user, which is showing how to include manual steps from your Smartlead sequences, including those as tasks inside of Salesforce for your sales team.

00:20 So, what’s really powerful about this is that it’s going to allow your team to take advantage of scaled outbound and deliverability that you’re getting from Smartlead, syncing that data continuously over to Salesforce through OutboundSync .

00:34 So that OutboundSync is taking care of creating the accounts and contacts and logging those continuous tasks. But we’re also going to give you a configurable way to use make.com to create those custom tasks that might change over time.

00:48 So inside of this example, I’m going to show you how to do a phone call task, but there are more.

00:52 For example, you could very easily include something like a LinkedIn step or research task or something else. Now we’ve already built this entire thing, so let’s just jump in and I’m going to show you how it works.

01:03 Now starting with smart lead, we open the settings and go to the webhook menu. Here we’re going to create a webhook.

01:10 Now, I’m going to jump ahead to make and we’ll come back to this later. Using make.com, the first thing we want to do is in our scenario, we want to create a step where we have a webhook receiver.

01:25 This is what Smartlead is going to send the data to. This destination is where Smartlead is going to send those manual step events as they occur.

01:34 Once you’ve done you create this step and you activate the webhook, you can send a test payload from that URL in Smartlead using the send test to webhook button.

01:46 Now make sure that you have the manual step reached event type selected because that’s the event that we want to send over.

01:54 Once that’s received, Smartlead payload is going to be mapped by make.com and you’ll be able to reference these variables in the bundle later on in our make scenario.

02:04 The next thing we need to do is we need to find that lead inside of Salesforce. Now this is where OutboundSync helps because I can tell you the first version of our product two years ago, we built it, started using make.com and over time it gets really, really difficult to do the kind of things that

02:26 we are doing now in a full application. But if you want to just do simpler, shorter steps like a single lookup and a single task creation and then have OutboundSync writing that underlying core activity and making sure that the accounts and the contacts and those relations are consistently set correctly

02:42 , handling all the formatting of the JSON and other things like that. So, doing that within Salesforce’s API limits and with a secure app, all those things, all those things are where I think that, um, where we’re adding a lot of value and making life easier.

02:55 But that doesn’t mean you can’t use any automation like this. And in fact, as I’m showing you today, I think this is a really valuable thing for sales teams.

03:01 So, you have OutboundSync running in the background, so that when Make does this search, that does this lookup, it’s a lot easier.

03:09 Because you know that the data is already in there. Because you’ve already had your, uh, OutboundSync automation happen in these earlier steps inside of your Smartlead Sequence.

03:17 And that removes a lot of complexity. So, we do our lookup, we take the lead email that we got from that Smartlead Bundle, in this case, Dinesh at gmail.com.

03:26 We do that lookup. We only need one, because we’re just going to create a single. This is where we don’t want to have dupes, duplicates, and things like that.

03:35 But, of course, we’re gonna get a whole set. A set of fields related to that record. So we’re using the search records SOQL node in our make scenario.

03:49 I added a little step here, which is that I want to filter. I want to only create a call task if I have a phone number to call.

03:57 And so, you know, the workflow here, what this would really look like is if you want to think about the whole thing end to end, is that step one, you build a list and you import it into Salesforce using something like a clay, then you add any enrichment data, anything you might need like phone numbers

04:12 , job titles, industry, anything else you might want to include. OutboundSync is running in the background, syncing activities as they run, as the campaign executes.

04:21 And then you get to a manual step. and this is where we’re going to look. Make sure we have a phone number for that contact in Salesforce.

04:28 And if we do, we’re going to proceed. Now you can imagine that there are other things you could do here.

04:32 You could say if there’s no phone number, do something else. Similarly, you could have automation and include LinkedIn. So there’s a lot, a lot you can do here, but I just kind of wanted to build a basic end to end, uh, scenario that I thought would get the job done.

04:44 Finally we want to create our task. So we’re actually going to use the create record module. And I went ahead and pre-populated this with some things.

04:53 So we are filling in some of the fields from the earlier search bundle, which is the contact ID, the account ID.

05:00 I’ve hard-coded what I want to call this task, the subject line. I’ve set a due date and just normal priority.

05:09 I left the status as not started because we haven’t started the step yet. Set the owner ID to be of the task to be the owner of the contact from that we found in the previous step.

05:20 And then I’m pulling that description over from Smartlead, which is going to have potentially some more information about what to mention during the call or details about the campaign, things like that.

05:28 Now because OutboundSync is going to be syncing activities, you’re also going to have emails logged on this record and you’re going to have the campaign name and other details about the campaign, which will be really helpful.

05:37 Context when you jump on the phone, obviously we’re logging this as an outbound call. I set a reminder and that’s it.

05:47 So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to run this whole thing, sending a test payload and we’re going to see how it works.

05:52 So this is running now. This is waiting for a payload. So let’s, Let’s do this one more time. Okay, cool.

05:58 So that payload was just received in smart lead, uh, from Smartlead. Excuse me. We did our lookup. So here we are.

06:03 We have our Dinesh Smartlead is the lead name. This is the email address. And we’re going to use that email address as our unique identifier.

06:09 Here we can see that we found the Dinesh smart lead contact. And just to give you, if you look at this account record, it ends in AAG.

06:19 And here we are in this smart lead account. In Salesforce, you can see ending in AAG. And then here is our Dinesh.

06:25 Okay, great. So now we’ve got our contact created ending in AAT. And here you can see this is the same contact ID and you can see our manual step call task right here.

06:39 And we’ve got the comments, the description came, got pulled in from smart lead. We’ve got all the details that we referenced earlier.

06:45 And what I’ve done here is I’ve also included that naming convention that OutboundSync is using for when it’s logging email so that you can have reporting that’s going to include these manual steps alongside other reports based on tasks inside of Salesforce.

07:01 So you can see our phone filter worked and this was our created record and this is our create a task.

07:06 If you look at the end here. Record ID ending in EAA, record ID ending in EAA. This is our task that we’ve created.

07:16 Let’s, let’s just work through how we might solve some little edge cases that might come up on our own. Let’s take a new contact. We’ve got Jane Dough and let’s just run this search only.

07:27 So I’m right-clicking and I’m going to run this module and I’m going to search for the Jane Dough contact. Here you can see we found her.

07:35 Contact ended. Ending in AAU. This is the same record. Now let’s just imagine we want to test something different. So I’m going to run the last module here, which is create a record.

07:46 I’m going to skip over this phone filter, uhm, and so in order to do this, I’ve saved the account contact and some of the other identifying information that we’re going to need to actually run just this because.

07:59 Creating a record has a couple of dependencies here. It has these variables that we’re referencing. So we’ve also got the owner and the description.

08:05 And so I’m going to run this, but in order to run it, I’m going to pull over some of those variables.

08:12 So I’ve got the account ID here. I’ve got the contact ID here, and then lastly, the owner ID. And I’m just going to put this in this is a manual test for the internet.

08:30 Ohai. Okay. We’re going to run that. And here we are just testing the very, very end of our make scenario. 08:36 Here you can see, it looks like it was successful. We’ve got a task created ending in E A Q. So let’s just give a refresh here.

08:42 Give a refresh here. All right. And we’ve got it. So this was, this is the one that we just created and you can tell this difference because it has a different description than the one that we created before.

08:52 Um, so this is a different example of just again, finding a specific record that already exists, running this test through, seeing how it works.

08:59 So pretty cool. Um, going back here, I’ll just show you really quick. So this is that naming convention I referenced earlier.

09:04 So if you wanted to have reporting that would show all smart lead related activity that includes both the emails themselves as well as manual steps, because we included in the task subject, this naming convention from OutboundSync, we’ve got that bracket smart lead.

09:18 We can, we can build reports off of that and then we can branch that off and say, okay, show me tasks where it’s email sent.

09:24 Show me tasks where instead this includes manual step. Now we also have OS here for outbound sync in brackets, uh, at the beginning of the task subject, but you know, this could be SL specifically.

09:35 Smartlead for like a smart lead direct task, or you know, you could put OutboundSync for there as well. This is, this is going to be really where the Salesforce admin or whoever’s in charge of making sure that your, um, you know, account is working well, like Salesforce admin by, by title or by, by role

09:52 . Um, they’re going to want, you’re going to want to really want to focus on these naming conventions because if this is your foundation for your data or your context layer, and then later as you start looking at agentic workflows using agent force and other things, and even just basic reporting, naming

10:04 conventions are going to be the key. They’re going to be the key to laying a good foundation. So really, really think about that, but that, that’s a kind of a conversation for another day.

10:12 Um, so anyway, I hope you find this helpful. Um, I hope you try it out. Uh, this is something we’re going to be doing a lot more figuring out how we can do deeper support for workflows and automation for sales teams in Salesforce using agentic using outbound sync.

10:24 Um, but hopefully this is a little help, helpful, um, set of tips that you can use. And by combining these additional steps, we’ve found that teams are much more successful using phones, using LinkedIn, even using things like direct mail through platforms like Sendoso or Grove cookie company.

10:40 These extra steps, uh, in addition to just any one channel is where we’re finding people are getting really amazing results.

10:47 So anyway, thanks for watching. Have a great day and we’ll see you on the next one.