Pipedrive integration: hot leads and replies as people, deals and notes

What Yirlo sends to Pipedrive

Yirlo posts to an endpoint you provide when one of two things happens.

Every payload carries the sender's email and name, the company they work for, which campaign reached out to them, and the text of their message. That is plenty to build a clean Pipedrive record right away, with no extra lookup step.

Zapier, n8n and Make each offer a webhook trigger, so one setup pattern covers all three. Ready-made Yirlo apps for those platforms are coming soon. For now the webhook route connects them, and configuring it takes a few minutes.

The Pipedrive result you are building

For a hot lead, the automation creates three things in Pipedrive: a person with the lead's name and email, a deal linked to that person and placed in the first stage of your pipeline, and a note on the deal holding the reply text. When you open the deal, you see what the prospect actually wrote and can answer in context.

For an ordinary reply that is not a hot lead, a lighter flow works well: find the person by email and add the reply as a note. That keeps the history on the person without opening a deal for every out of office or a polite refusal.

Step by step with Zapier

1. In Zapier, create a fresh Zap. For the trigger, choose the Webhooks by Zapier app and select Catch Hook as the event. Zapier will display a custom webhook URL. Copy it.

2. Over in Yirlo, go to Integrations, create a webhook with that address and tick hot_lead.received. Hit the Send test event button. Zapier receives a sample payload and lists its fields so you can map them.

3. Add a Pipedrive action, Create Person. Map the name field to Name and the email field to Email. If you want the company on the person, add a Create Organization step first and link it.

4. Add a second action, Create Deal. Give it a title such as the company name plus the campaign name, link the person you just created, and choose your pipeline and its first stage.

5. Add a third action, Create Note. Attach it to the deal and map the reply text into the content. Turn the Zap on.

Step by step with n8n

1. Drop a Webhook node onto the canvas, switch its HTTP method to POST and copy the production URL it shows. Register that address in Yirlo as a hot_lead.received webhook, then fire Send test event so the node records a sample payload.

2. Connect a Pipedrive node set to the Person resource and the Create operation. Use expressions such as {{ $json.body.email }} to fill the fields. The exact path depends on how your Webhook node outputs the body, so check it against the test event.

3. Add a Pipedrive node for Deal, Create, and pass in the person ID returned by the previous node plus the pipeline and stage.

4. Add a last Pipedrive node for Note, Create, linked to the deal, with the reply text as the content. Activate the workflow.

n8n is a good fit when you want extra logic between steps, such as a check that skips people who already exist in Pipedrive.

Step by step with Make

1. Create a scenario and add a Custom webhook module as the trigger. Create the webhook, copy its address and paste it into Yirlo for the hot_lead.received event.

2. Press Send test event in Yirlo. Make learns the data structure from the sample, and every field shows up as a mappable item in the next modules.

3. Add the Pipedrive modules Create a Person, Create a Deal and Create a Note in that order. Map the person ID into the deal, and the deal ID into the note.

4. Switch the scenario on. A second scenario listening for reply.received can find the person by email and add the reply as a note.

Fields available for mapping

These are the values every event gives you. Map them to the matching Pipedrive fields, or to custom fields you create for sources and campaigns.

Many teams create two custom fields on the deal, one for the campaign and one for the lead source, so reports show which Yirlo campaign produces pipeline.

• Email: the person's email in Pipedrive, and the key for finding an existing person.
• Name: the person's name.
• Company: the Pipedrive organization, or part of the deal title.
• Campaign: a custom deal field, a label, or part of the deal title.
• Reply text: the content of the note on the deal or person.
• Event type: reply.received or hot_lead.received, useful if one workflow handles both and routes with a filter.

Avoiding duplicates and keeping history clean

Add a search step before Create Person: look up the email in Pipedrive, and only create a person when nothing comes back. Zapier has a Find Person action, n8n has a Person Search operation, and Make has a Search Persons module. If the person exists, attach the deal and note to the existing record.

Route the two events separately. Hot leads create a deal. Plain replies only write a note. A prospect who first says not now and later shows interest then ends up with one person, one deal and a note trail in order.

Each company receives emails to one decision maker, so duplicates inside a single company are rare. Duplicates usually come from people already in your Pipedrive from earlier work, which the search step handles.

Who gets the most from this setup

Pipedrive tends to suit small and mid-size sales teams, founder-led sales and agencies that live in the pipeline view every morning. For them, the useful moment is when an interested reply becomes a deal without anyone copying text between tabs.

Picture a payroll tool for restaurant groups. Yirlo might aim a campaign at operations directors of multi-location restaurant companies, with a first email about how the company handles shift pay across sites. An interested answer lands in Pipedrive as a deal in stage one with the reply attached, and your rep opens it knowing exactly which campaign and which angle worked.

Or an agency selling outbound video production to B2B software firms. A campaign could target heads of marketing at software companies and open with a line about the company's product pages. Setting a custom campaign field on the deal lets you compare which audience turns into proposals later in the pipeline.

Pricing is roughly 5 cents per message sent, paid from a balance you top up beforehand. A daily budget you choose caps the volume, so new Pipedrive records arrive at a rate you decide.

Testing and verifying the connection

Use Send test event in Yirlo after each change. It sends a sample so you can confirm that the person, deal and note appear in Pipedrive with the right fields. Delete the test records afterward.

Anyone running a custom receiver instead of a no-code tool should verify each request. Calculate an HMAC-SHA256 over the raw body using your signing secret, and check that it matches the X-Yirlo-Signature value before processing the payload.

Another route is the Yirlo API, which lets a scheduled job pull hot leads and inbox conversations. That fits teams who like a nightly batch better than instant triggers. Full docs live at yirlo.com/api-docs. For a one-off load, the lead export file (a CSV with 16 columns, including email, name, company, campaign, status and deal status) can be uploaded into Pipedrive by hand.

Questions

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