If you’re in B2B sales, you know the drill: leads come in, and half the time, they fall through the cracks before you even get a chance to follow up. Manual data entry eats up your day, and by the time you send a follow-up email, your competitor’s already booked the call. This guide is for small-to-midsize sales teams who want a no-nonsense way to use Paperform to automate lead capture and follow-up—without duct-taping together a dozen apps or needing a developer.
Let’s get your pipeline moving and your follow-ups on autopilot.
Why Automate Lead Capture and Follow Up?
Before we dig into the how-to, here’s the honest truth: automation isn’t magic. But if you set it up right, it’ll save you hours, prevent embarrassing dropped leads, and make everyone on your team look more professional. The trick is to keep it simple—don’t build a Rube Goldberg machine that nobody wants to maintain.
What works:
- Capturing leads instantly, so nothing sits in someone’s inbox.
- Automatic, personalized follow-up emails within minutes.
- Routing leads to the right person or team, based on what the lead needs.
What doesn’t:
- Overcomplicating with too many form fields (people hate long forms).
- Spamming leads with generic follow-ups.
- Relying on someone to “remember” to do anything.
Let’s get your basics sorted first. Here’s how.
Step 1: Set Up Your Lead Capture Form
This is where most teams get it wrong—they ask for too much, or too little. Here’s how to make a B2B lead form that actually gets filled out and gives you what you need.
Build a Form That Converts
- Keep it short. Name, business email, company, phone, and a “How can we help?” field. That’s 90% of what you actually use.
- Make questions clear. “What problem are you trying to solve?” beats “Comments.”
- Use logic. With Paperform, you can show or hide questions based on answers. Example: If someone selects “I want a demo,” ask them for best times to meet.
Pro-tip: Test your form with a real prospect or someone outside your team. If they get stuck, so will your leads.
Set Up Notifications
- Under “After Submission,” tell Paperform to send you (or your team) an instant email or Slack message when someone fills out the form.
- Don’t just rely on email—if your team lives in Slack, use that.
Step 2: Automate Lead Routing
If you’re a small team, maybe all leads go to one inbox. But as you grow, you want leads routed by territory, company size, or interest—automatically.
Use Conditional Logic
- In Paperform, set up rules: If “Company size” is over 100, notify your enterprise team. If under, route to SMB rep.
- You can send form responses to different emails, Slack channels, or even different CRMs (if you use more than one).
What to skip: Don’t try to get too fancy with lead scoring right away. Just get leads to the right person, fast.
Step 3: Integrate With Your CRM
If you’re not getting leads into your CRM automatically, you’re leaving money on the table. Manual entry is where leads go to die.
How to Do It
- Paperform supports direct integrations with CRMs like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce (and others via Zapier).
- In your form’s “Integrations & Webhooks” tab, connect your CRM account.
- Map fields: Make sure “Name” in Paperform matches “Contact Name” in your CRM, etc. Don’t skip this or you’ll get a mess of blank fields.
Pro-tip: If you’re stuck between using Zapier or native integration, start with native (less to break). Only use Zapier if you need to connect to something Paperform doesn’t support directly.
Don’t Overthink It
- You don’t need to sync every field—just the basics you actually use in sales follow-up.
- Test it with a fake lead and make sure it shows up in your CRM as expected.
Step 4: Set Up Automated, Personalized Follow-Up
This is where most “automation” falls flat—blasting out a generic “Thanks, we’ll be in touch.” You can do better.
Make It Immediate and Human
- In Paperform, set up an automatic email response under “After Submission.”
- Personalize it: Use the prospect’s name and mention what they asked about. (Paperform lets you use answer piping to insert their answers.)
- Set the sender as your actual rep or team inbox—don’t use a “noreply@” address unless you want to look like a robot.
Sample follow-up template:
Hi {{ Name }},
Thanks for reaching out about {{ Service Need }}. We’ll review your info and get back to you within one business day.
If you’d like to book a call sooner, grab a spot here: [Your Calendly Link]
Talk soon, The [Your Company] Sales Team
Go Further: Trigger Additional Actions
- Schedule a task in your CRM for a rep to call the lead.
- Send a Slack DM to the assigned rep.
- Add the lead to a specific email nurture sequence (if you’re using Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.).
What to avoid: Don’t dump leads into a generic newsletter list unless they opt in. You’ll get flagged as spam and lose trust.
Step 5: Track What’s Working (and What Isn’t)
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Paperform gives you basic analytics, but you’ll want more visibility if you’re serious about B2B sales.
What to Track
- Form completion rate: Are people starting but not finishing? Simplify the form.
- Lead response time: How long from form submit to first real follow-up?
- Conversion rate: How many leads become real opportunities?
How to Set It Up
- Use Paperform’s built-in analytics for basic numbers.
- Push data into your CRM or a Google Sheet for deeper analysis.
- If you want to get fancy, connect to Google Analytics or use UTM parameters to see where your leads are coming from.
Don’t chase vanity metrics: Page views and impressions mean nothing if you’re not closing deals.
Step 6: Keep It Legal and Respectful
B2B or not, you need to play by the rules—especially with email follow-up.
- Add a consent checkbox if you’re adding people to any marketing list.
- Privacy policy: Link to it in your form footer.
- Don’t buy lists or add people who didn’t ask to hear from you. It’s not just annoying, it’s illegal in many places.
What to Ignore (For Now)
There’s a lot of noise out there about AI, chatbots, and “hyper-personalization.” Here’s what you can skip until you’ve nailed the basics:
- Chatbots on your lead form: Most B2B buyers just want to fill out a form and move on.
- Automated SMS follow-up: Unless your prospects have specifically opted in, this can feel intrusive.
- Complex lead scoring: Unless you have real volume, just get leads to a human fast.
Focus on the essentials: capture, route, follow up, track.
Wrapping Up: Start Simple, Iterate Often
Automating lead capture and follow-up in Paperform isn’t about building the fanciest system—it’s about making sure no lead slips through the cracks and your team can focus on real conversations. Get the basics running, test with real leads, and tweak as you go. Resist the urge to overcomplicate. A simple, well-oiled system will beat a “smart” but clunky one every time.
Start small, fix what’s broken, and your sales team will thank you.