Build a lead-to-CRM automation with Make in an afternoon

By the end of this build you will have leads flowing from a form straight into your CRM automatically. A new lead from a web form or a lead ad lands, gets cleaned and tagged by where it came from, drops into your CRM as a contact, and triggers an instant text and email back to that person. The stack is Make as the glue and GoHighLevel as the CRM that sends the follow-up. Budget an afternoon to set it up, then it runs on its own.

Speed is the whole game here. A lead who hears back in the first few minutes is far more likely to book than one who waits an hour. Most small teams lose that window because someone has to notice the lead, open the CRM, and type a reply. This build removes the human from that loop.

What you'll build

One scenario in Make and one workflow in GoHighLevel that hand off to each other:

• A webhook that catches every new lead the moment it submits.
• A cleaning and tagging step in Make, so a phone number from a Facebook lead ad and one from your site form both arrive in the same shape, labeled by source.
• A push into GoHighLevel that creates or updates the contact.
• A follow-up workflow that fires an SMS and an email back to the lead within seconds.

The source can be anything that sends data: a website contact form, a landing page, a Facebook or Instagram lead ad, a Typeform. As long as it can send the submission to a URL, Make can catch it. For where these high-intent leads come from in the first place, the branded-demand build covers the capture moment.

Stack

Three tools. You build on the first two, and the third is an interchangeable alternative for the glue layer.

The stack

Makecatches the lead, cleans and tags it, pushes it onward

GoHighLevelstores the contact and fires the instant SMS plus email

Zapierthe swap-in alternative if your form lives somewhere odd

• Make is the automation glue. You build a visual scenario that runs every time a lead arrives. It prices by operations, which changes how cost scales as volume climbs.
• GoHighLevel is the CRM and the follow-up engine. It holds the contact record, the tags, and the workflow that sends the text and email.
• Zapier is an alternative for the glue layer if you would rather build there. The shape of the build is identical.

You need an account on both Make and GoHighLevel. Plan pricing on each moves often, so check the current rate on the provider's own pricing page before you commit. Checked June 2026.

Steps

Build the GoHighLevel side first, because you need its webhook URL before the Make scenario has anywhere to send the lead.

Once both sides are live, point your real forms and lead ads at the Make webhook URL. Where you paste it depends on the source: a form builder has a webhook or integration field, a Facebook lead ad needs the URL added through a connector, and a landing page form can POST to it directly.

The part that breaks

The order is the trap. People try to map the contact fields in GoHighLevel before any data has reached it, so the dropdowns are blank. The same thing happens in Make if you skip Re-determine data structure and the webhook has never received a payload. Both tools are reactive. They learn the shape of a lead by catching one, not by you describing it.

So the working order is always the same. Open the listener (the GoHighLevel webhook trigger and the Make webhook module), send a single real submission through, then go back and map the fields once they appear. If a field still shows up empty, the test payload did not include it, so send another with that field filled.

The second thing that breaks budgets is firing on junk. A blank or bot submission still triggers the whole chain and still sends a text. Add a filter in Make right after the webhook that only continues when an email or phone exists. It costs nothing and stops your follow-up going out to garbage.

Copy this

A sample JSON body for the HTTP > Make a request module that pushes the cleaned lead into GoHighLevel. Replace the values in braces with your mapped Make variables:

{
  "first_name": "{{name}}",
  "email": "{{email_lowercased}}",
  "phone": "{{phone_trimmed}}",
  "source": "{{lead_source}}",
  "tags": ["new-lead", "{{lead_source}}"],
  "consent": true
}

Keep the field names consistent with what you map inside the GoHighLevel trigger. The "source" value is what lets your follow-up read differently for a paid lead ad versus an organic form fill. The "consent" flag matters: only text and email people who agreed to hear from you, or your messages land in spam and your sender reputation suffers. The email deliverability build covers why that reputation is worth protecting.

Upgrade path

Once the core loop runs, layer on:

• A second follow-up step in GoHighLevel that waits an hour, checks if the lead replied, and sends a nudge if not. Speed wins the first reply. Persistence wins the booking.
• Enrichment in Make before the push, so a lead arrives with their company or location already attached. Add an HTTP call to a lookup service between the cleaning step and the GoHighLevel push.
• Routing by source, so a lead from a paid ad goes to one workflow and an organic form fill to another. The "source" tag you set already makes this a single branch away.

If your forms live in an unusual place that Make struggles to catch, Zapier covers more obscure apps and follows the same pattern. For the paid-traffic side that feeds this build, the Meta Advantage+ build shows how to keep lead ads sending you qualified people, and the automation hub tracks the rest of the no-code stack.

For the next build, the AI recommendations build shows how to turn those follow-ups and reviews into the signal that gets you recommended by the assistants people now ask first.