When you are looking to automate your business processes, you have a few different options to consider. We at Relay highly suggest a custom solution to ensure that your apps are talking to each other in the exact manner in which you envision. But we understand there are times when you may have a smaller, less critical need to connect your apps. That's where a solution such as Zapier can revamp the way your company operates.

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What is Zapier?

Usually, if you were looking to connect two apps, you would need a developer to sift through the application's APIs and code a custom program. But Zapier brings this ability to everyone, connecting thousands of apps using a no-code interface. This means that a team member in Marketing could build an automation for their department or another colleague in HR can build one for their department. This not only frees up your developers, but it allows everyone to get creative with automations that serve their business needs.

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How does Zapier Work?

So say you want to find a way to celebrate your sales team's success in Salesforce and announce it to everyone within Slack. Using Zapier, this can be done within a matter of minutes. Once you have connected both your Salesforce and Slack accounts, you can start creating your first "zap."

Each "zap" starts with a trigger step. This is what initiates the automation. For this case, our trigger step would be updating an opportunity's stage field to "Closed Won"

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We select the Object (Opportunity), Field (Stage), and then input what we want the field to be updated to continue (Closed Won) Finally, we can test the trigger to make sure it brings in the correct records.

Once Zapier finds the right record, we can create our action step; which in this case will be Slack. Choose Slack and then we can choose the action event we want to occur. For this scenario, this would be "Send a Channel Message" since we want everyone to see a new deal has been closed.
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Choose your channel and then let's build the message to be sent to the team. Here is where we will want to format it well to make sure your team only sees the details that are relevant to them.

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Let's include the company name and the sales amount. You can choose whether to send the message as a bot, which we will in this scenario and if you want to give the bot a name. Fill in any relevant fields that are important to your organization and then click continue. Here is where you can send a test message to your selected Slack channel. Send a test to make sure it looks right to you and then you're nearly there.
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Turn on your Zap and sit back and wait. Next time your sales rep marks an opportunity as "Closed Won", your whole team should get a message automatically.

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The Power of Zapier

What we just did was build the simplest of Zapier scenarios, but you can see how easy and powerful it can be where the only limits are your imagination. There are filter steps, A/B paths, formatting and so much more that you can do within Zapier to make your automation scenarios as unique as your business needs.

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For your more complex business needs and automations, feel free to reach out to the team at Relay where will tailor your apps to do everything you need and nothing you don't.