Automating Lead Management: A Case Study on Outbrain's Transformation

Outbrain is a content and product discovery feed that helps publishers and advertisers create recommendations. Founded in 2006, Outbrain aims to replicate the experience of turning the page and finding the next article or product to pay attention to. With an emphasis on native advertising, Outbrain brings relevant content front and center. The company works with clients that include publishers and advertisers like CNN and Vox. For Outbrain, maintaining privacy and data integrity is a key element of their offerings.

Outbrain, a content and product discovery feed, was facing challenges in managing leads efficiently. The company wanted to enable their sales team to reach out to leads as quickly as possible. The process of manually managing leads was tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming. The company was also looking for ways to add more information to the leads before sending them to Salesforce. The challenge was to find a tool that could automate the lead management process, reduce errors, and save time.

Outbrain found a solution in Zapier, an app automation tool. Yaniv Nava, a senior online acquisition manager at Outbrain, started using Zapier's leads ads integrations from the main acquisition platforms and pushed the leads directly into Salesforce's sellers queues. This automated workflow, known as Zaps, significantly reduced the amount of work and headaches for the team. With Zapier, they could now add information to the leads, with an app like Clearbit, before sending them on to Salesforce. They could also add the new lead to an email marketing campaign simultaneously. The use of Zapier soon spread beyond the marketing team to customer support, IT, and throughout the rest of the company. Outbrain now uses Zapier's Company plan, which provides shared folders and extra security with SAML authentication.

• The adoption of Zapier transformed Outbrain's operations. What began as a means to automatically create leads quickly became a way for the wider Outbrain team to work more effectively. They integrated their live chat solution with Salesforce, their registration with webinars, landing page solutions, with Zoom, with an email life-cycle tool, building complex processes. With Zapier, Outbrain was able to automate mundane tasks, allowing the team to focus on more important work. The tool also provided the necessary security measures, ensuring data integrity and privacy, which are key elements of Outbrain's offerings.

• Significant reduction in time spent on managing leads

• Automation of lead management process, reducing errors

• Efficient use of resources as the tool was adopted by multiple teams across the company