The money leaks out of most businesses between 'someone enquired' and 'someone replied'. CRM automation closes that gap: the web form creates the lead, scores it, assigns it, and starts the follow-up sequence — with the conversation logged so the next person sees the whole story.
The failure mode is automating a broken process faster: dedupe rules, consent tracking and a human override matter more than the pipeline diagram. An automation that spams a lead who already bought is worse than no automation.
Related terms
Workflow automation
Making a repeated business process run itself — a trigger starts it, steps move the data between systems, and exceptions reach a human.
Webhook
A URL one system calls to tell another that something happened — the mechanism that lets automations react in seconds instead of polling.
n8n
An open-source workflow-automation tool that connects apps, APIs and AI models into repeatable pipelines — self-hostable, so data can stay on your own infrastructure.
The bench this belongs to
AI automationThe repetitive half of your week, handed to software that does not get bored. Inbox triage, follow-ups, reporting, data entry between tools that were never meant to talk.
