CRM Agency Sydney | Marketing Automation

CRM & Marketing Automation

Generating a lead is only useful if the business can do something with it.

CRM and marketing automation deal with what happens next: who owns an enquiry, how quickly somebody responds, what happens after a missed call, when follow-up should continue and when a real person needs to take over.

This is where fairly simple operational problems can become expensive. A lead arrives on Friday evening, sits in a shared inbox until Monday, gets one reply and then disappears. The marketing may have worked perfectly; the process around it did not.

We usually work out that process before deciding what to automate or which system should handle it. HighLevel and HubSpot are common choices, but the software comes after the workflow.

The work is led by founder Nico Pustilnick, with Pulse’s automation and tracking specialists doing the build. You deal with the people who set the system up.

Talk to Pulse about your CRM

Where good leads get lost

When we map how a business handles its enquiries, the same gaps keep showing up:

No one clearly owns a lead once it arrives
Calls go to voicemail and never get returned
Leads arrive through the website, Facebook forms, phone and email, and live in four different places
One follow-up attempt, then nothing
Nobody can see how many leads are sitting at each stage, or for how long
Nobody can say which campaign produced last month’s clients

Getting the enquiry is only half the job. What happens in the next hour, and the next week, usually decides whether it becomes business.

Why a marketing agency builds your CRM

CRM consultants and software implementers know the platforms well, but they usually don’t run the campaigns that produce the leads. Plenty of marketing agencies stop at the form.

Because we also run Google Ads, Meta Ads and SEO, we understand how those leads are generated, what tracking should travel with them and what information is useful once they reach the CRM. The system gets built around that.

Then the information flows back the other way: which leads became clients, which went nowhere, and which sources deserve more budget. That loop is the centre of how we approach lead generation.

Who we work with

Mostly Sydney and Australian service businesses where one enquiry is worth real money and speed matters: building and property inspections, trades, law firms, NDIS and health providers, education providers and professional services.

Common reasons people get in touch:

Follow-up depends on who remembers
They pay for a CRM that nobody uses properly
Sales says the leads are poor, marketing says they’re fine, and there’s no data to settle it
Leads are still managed in spreadsheets and email folders
Automations were set up years ago and nobody knows exactly what they send

Results

These results came from wider campaigns, not from CRM work alone. They show the lead-qualification and reporting side of what we do:

Tyrrells Property Inspections: alongside SEO, Google Ads and Facebook ads, we used customer intelligence dashboards to qualify leads and measure how well sales calls turned into jobs. Calls rose 50% year on year and sales from leads 15% (2021). Read the Tyrrells case study.
UTS FEIT: SEO, Google Ads and social campaigns, with a course acquisition dashboard so the faculty could follow results as they came in. Cost per lead fell 18% and lead volume grew about 2.8 times.
Call tracking: for La Panchina, CallRail recorded every call during a Facebook campaign, so we could see which days the ads drove phone enquiries.

We offer the following

CRM setup

We work in HighLevel and HubSpot. If you don’t have a CRM yet, we can provide a HighLevel account through Pulse and set it up. If your existing CRM does the job, we’d rather configure it properly than move you for the sake of it.

Setup usually covers:

Contacts and fields your team actually needs: service, suburb, budget, lead source
Pipeline stages that follow your real process, for example New → Contacted → Quote sent → Booked → Won or Lost
Users and permissions, so each person sees the leads they’re responsible for
Calls, SMS and email on the contact record. In HighLevel, calls and SMS run through Twilio and email through Mailgun
Clear naming, so in a year someone can still tell what each field and stage is for

A few fields and stages that people actually update are worth more than a perfect setup nobody touches.

Lead capture and routing

Every way a lead can arrive should end up in the same place:

Website forms, with hidden fields that record the page and campaign
Phone calls through tracked numbers, using CallRail or the CRM’s own numbers
Meta Lead Ads forms, sent straight into the CRM instead of sitting inside Facebook
SMS, web chat or booking forms, where they suit the business

Then routing. The lead goes to the right person by service, location, rotation or a single owner, depending on how your team works. They get a notification and a task with a due time. If it isn’t picked up, a reminder goes to them or to a manager.

Follow-up automation

Not every business needs every automation. We start from how your sales process actually works and automate the steps that keep getting missed:

An SMS within a minute of an enquiry, so the person knows it’s been received
Email follow-up for people who don’t answer the first call
Missed-call text back
Appointment confirmations and reminders to cut no-shows
Online booking connected to your calendar
Review requests once a job is marked complete
A check-in on quotes that have gone quiet

Example (how we might set it up for a building inspection business, not a client result):

A form is submitted from a Google Ads landing page. The contact is created with its source attached.
Within a minute, an SMS confirms the enquiry and offers a booking link. The inspector on duty gets a task: call within 15 minutes.
No answer: an email that afternoon, one more SMS two days later, then the lead moves to “No response”.
Booked: a confirmation, a reminder the day before, and the stage moves to “Booked”.
Job done: a review request goes out.

Any reply from the customer stops the automated messages.

AI-assisted CRM workflows

We use ChatGPT and Claude in our own work, and some of the same uses fit inside a CRM:

Summarising a long enquiry before the salesperson calls
Tagging leads by service, urgency or location
Pulling details such as suburb or timeframe out of free-text messages
Drafting follow-up messages for someone to check and send
Flagging leads that haven’t had a reply
Documenting workflows so the team knows what each one does

AI takes care of repetitive admin. People still set the rules, review the messages and decide which leads matter.

Lead source and tracking

Source data is what lets you spend the marketing budget sensibly:

UTM tags captured by your forms and saved on the contact
GA4 and Google Tag Manager counting form submissions and calls once
CallRail tying each phone call to the campaign or page behind it
Lead outcomes sent back to Google Ads and Meta where the platforms support it, so campaigns learn from real clients rather than form fills

Where two systems don’t connect directly, we use Zapier, Make or webhooks, for example to send Meta lead forms into HubSpot.

Attribution is never perfect. People see an ad on their phone and call from the office. The aim is data good enough to make budget decisions with.

Dashboards and reporting

The reports we set up answer practical questions:

How many leads came in, and from which sources?
How quickly did someone respond?
How many leads reached each pipeline stage?
Which sources produced booked jobs or sales?
Which leads were poor quality, and why?

Sales outcomes rely on the team updating the pipeline, so we keep the stages simple. For a wider view of sales and marketing numbers, see our marketing dashboards.

How we work

Interviews. We talk to whoever answers enquiries and whoever runs the marketing, to see how leads arrive and what happens to them now.
Map the current process. Every touchpoint, including the informal ones, like “someone checks the inbox after lunch”.
Design the flow. Stages, rules, messages and notifications, written up in plain English for your team and in technical detail for whoever maintains it.
Build. In HighLevel, HubSpot or your existing CRM, with the integrations it needs.
Test with real enquiries. Test forms and calls first, then live leads, checking every message, notification and stage change.
Document it. What each automation does, what triggers it and what to change when your process changes.

CRM and automation FAQ

Do I need a new CRM, or can you work with mine?
Often you don’t need a new one. If your current CRM handles contacts, pipelines and automation, we’ll configure it properly. If it can’t do what you need, we’ll tell you.

Which CRMs do you work with?
Mainly HighLevel and HubSpot. We can provide and set up a HighLevel account through Pulse, or configure HubSpot pipelines, forms and workflows. If you use something else, ask and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help.

Can the CRM connect to Google Ads and Meta leads?
In most cases, yes. Meta Lead Ads can go straight into the CRM, website leads keep their source, and where the platforms support it we send lead outcomes back to Google Ads and Meta.

Can you automate SMS and email follow-up?
Yes. What goes out, and when, depends on your sales process. Three automated steps your team trusts are better than twenty nobody understands.

How do you use AI in CRM automation?
For the admin around leads: summaries, tagging, pulling out details and drafting follow-ups for a person to check. People still make the decisions.

Who owns the account and the data?
If the CRM is in your name, the account and data are yours. If we provide a HighLevel account through Pulse, we’ll explain how access and data exports work before you start.

Talk to Pulse about CRM and automation

Leads coming in, but not sure what happens to them after that? Book a call. We’ll look at how enquiries reach your team today and tell you what we’d fix first.

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