Get the technology stack of new leads to your Slack instantly
Lead qualification can be a long process with many steps. Save time by automating research into your clients' current technical stack. So when a client wants your help in updating their website, you'll instantly know what CMS or framework they are using without having to ask the client first. In this article, we'll explain how to set up an automation that sends a Slack message containing the technology stack used on a lead's website, when they filled out a form. We'll use the following tools:
- Make to set up the workflow
- Typeform for lead capture
- Wappalyzer to fetch the technology stack of your lead's website
- Slack to send your team a message whenever a new lead has filled out the form, containing the URL and webstack
You can replace Typeform or Slack with your favourite form creation or team communication tool like Google Forms or Basecamp.
What is Make?
Make is a workflow automation tool similar to the more well-known Zapier and IFTTT. The important distinctive features of Make are its competitive pricing and its advanced features. Make is very flexible when creating automations. You don't need a paid subscription to use this workflow. The generous free plan offers up to 1,000 operations per month. Enough to run this automation 200 times!
What you'll be automating
When finished, your automation will consist of 4 steps:
- Trigger the flow whenever a new lead has submitted a Typeform
- Parse the URL the new lead has entered in the form to Wappalyzer
- Extract the technology stack from the information Wappalyzer sends back
- Send the extracted information to a Slack channel
Connect Make to Typeform
Let's imagine we're a webdev agency. We have a contact form on our website that website visitors can use to request a quote. This Typeform contains questions like what service they want, their contact info, and a URL to their website. We'll assume you've already set up such a form, and that it is published. Please make sure you've used a 'Website' question type in Typeform.
New leads are asked to fill in their website
Create a new scenario in Make. Select 'Typeform' and click Continue. Select the instant version of 'Watch responses'.
Connect Make to your Typeform account. Select the lead capture form, and leave the rest of the settings as-is.
Connect Typeform to Wappalyzer
Make will now automatically know which URL new leads have filled into your form. Let's hand this information over to Wappalyzer and let it find out all kinds of useful things about your lead's website. Before you can use Wappalyzer in Make, you first need to create an API key on your Wappalyzer account. Go to account settings in Wappalyzer, select the API Key tab and click on Create key.
Connect a Wappalyzer module to the Typeform module in Make and paste the API key. For 'Website URL', select 'URL' under the Answers toggle.
Extract the technology stack
You're well on your way now: Wappalyzer will automatically gather all kinds of useful info on your lead's website when they fill out the form! Now it's time to extract which technologies your new lead is using to run their website. Under tools → Flow control add the Iterator module.
For the 'Array' field, select 'Technologies'. This will enable us to get the name of each tool in the technology stack, no matter how many are being used.
Add the 'Text aggregator' module.
Select the Iterator from the previous step as the Source Module. For the text, select the Name property from the Iterator and then type in "newline". This will ensure that all the tools in the stack sent in your Slack message will be organized in a single neat list, instead of separate messages.
Send a message to Slack
You've let Wappalyzer inspect your lead's website. Now it's time to send that information to the relevant channel in Slack. Add the Slack module in Make, connect to your Slack account and click Create a Message. Select the channel type and name for your message. We've already created a new channel in Slack and gave it the original and inspiring name 'New leads', and suggest you do something similar. For the text, you can use something like the following:
Make sure to select 'URL' from the Typeform connection, and 'text' from the Text aggregator.
When finished, test it out by typing luhhu.com in your form and compare it to our results in Slack:
Congratulations! You’re saving valuable time by making lead qualification easier and faster. Now every time a new lead fills out a form, your team will instantly get notified of the technology stack they use for their website.
