Post every hot lead to a Slack channel

Why an automation tool sits between Yirlo and Slack

Slack's own incoming webhooks expect a message in Slack's format, a JSON body with fields such as text or blocks. Yirlo's webhook sends the lead's data in its own structure: email, name, company, campaign and the reply text. The two do not line up on their own.

Zapier, n8n and Make solve this in the middle. Each one gives you a URL that receives the Yirlo event, lets you map its fields, and then runs a Slack step that builds the message and picks the channel. You never write a payload by hand, and you can change the wording later without touching Yirlo.

A listed Yirlo app inside Zapier, n8n and Make is coming soon. Until then, the webhook trigger in each tool takes about ten minutes to set up.

What you need before you start

Decide where the alerts will land as well. Plenty of teams set up a separate channel for this, for example #hot-leads, so that interested replies stand out.

Yirlo offers two events. hot_lead.received fires when an interested reply arrives. reply.received fires for every real reply, including not now and out of office answers once they are labeled. For a Slack channel, start with hot_lead.received. Add the second event later if you want a quieter log channel.

Steps in Zapier

Create a new Zap and choose Webhooks by Zapier as the trigger, with the event Catch Hook. Zapier shows a custom webhook URL. Copy it.

In Yirlo, open Integrations, add a webhook, paste the URL and select the hot_lead.received event. Press Send test event. Back in Zapier, click Test trigger and the sample lead appears with all its fields.

Add Slack as the action and choose Send Channel Message. Connect your workspace, pick the channel, and build the message text by inserting the fields from the sample. Test the step, check the post in Slack, then publish the Zap.

Steps in n8n

Add a Webhook node as the trigger and set the method to POST. Copy the test URL into Yirlo's webhook settings, choose the hot_lead.received event and press Send test event. n8n captures the sample and shows the fields as data you can drag into later nodes.

Add a Slack node, connect your credentials, choose the operation that sends a message to a channel, and select the channel. Write the text using expressions that point at the webhook fields. When the flow works, switch the Yirlo webhook to the production URL and activate the workflow.

Each webhook from Yirlo carries a signature, an HMAC-SHA256 hash placed in the X-Yirlo-Signature header. If you work in n8n, add a check before the Slack step that recomputes the hash and compares the two. This is worth doing whenever the production webhook URL is shared widely.

Steps in Make

In Make, start a new scenario and drop in the Webhooks module, choosing the Custom webhook option. Make gives you a URL. Enter that URL in Yirlo, choose the hot-lead event, and click Send test event, which lets Make read the shape of the data.

Add the Slack module Create a Message, pick the channel, and fill the text field with the mapped values from the webhook. Run the scenario once, confirm the post, then turn scheduling on so it listens for every new hot lead.

A good message layout

A hot lead message has one job: let a teammate decide in five seconds whether to jump in. Put the name and company in the first line, the campaign on the second, and the reply quoted below. The email address goes last so it can be copied for a follow-up.

A template that works in all three tools looks like this, with each placeholder replaced by the mapped field: :fire: Hot lead: {{name}} at {{company}} then a new line with Campaign: {{campaign}} then a quoted line with {{reply}} then Email: {{email}}. The field names in your tool will match the sample that Send test event delivers.

Some small habits keep the channel useful:

• Keep the reply text in full. A short answer like "Send me pricing" tells the team more than any summary.
• Put the campaign name in every post, so the team sees which audience is responding.
• Use one emoji at the start of the line so hot leads stand out when scrolling.
• Mention a person or a Slack user group in the Slack step if one owner handles all hot leads.
• Leave the reply in a thread style layout only if your team prefers it, since the first line should already carry the lead's identity.

Who this helps and what the posts look like

Small sales teams and founders who sell B2B get the most from this. A company selling payroll software to HR directors at 50 to 200 person firms might see a reply from a head of people asking whether the tool handles multi-state tax filing. A logistics software vendor emailing operations managers at regional distributors might get "Can you show this on Thursday?". Both arrive in Slack with the campaign name, so the right rep picks up the thread.

The first emails behind these replies are written per person about their own company, and each campaign takes its own angle: a cost angle for finance buyers, a speed angle for operations buyers, a compliance angle for regulated industries. The Slack post shows which angle brought the answer, because the campaign name travels with the lead.

Objections show up here too. A reply like "We just signed with someone else" or "Try me next quarter" is labeled by Yirlo and still reaches the reply.received event, so you can send those to a quieter channel and keep #hot-leads for interest only.

Keeping the setup reliable

Use Send test event whenever you change the Slack step, so you can see the live layout without waiting for a real reply. If the message ever stops arriving, check that the automation is switched on and that the webhook in Yirlo still points at the current URL.

Yirlo also emails each interested reply to you as a hot lead, so the email arrives even if the Slack step is paused. Teams that want to pull leads on a schedule instead of reacting to events can read hot leads and the inbox through the Yirlo API with an API key, and post a digest to Slack from there.

Each lead can be opened in the Yirlo inbox, where the full conversation lives and where you can reply or add a note. Slack becomes the alert, and the inbox stays the place where the conversation is handled.

Questions

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