How B2B Media Sales Teams Are Using Make to Automate Their Sales Operations

Every Sales Director at a B2B media company knows the feeling. The CRM is full of deals that should have moved on days ago. A rep forgot to log a call. A prospect visited the website twice this week and nobody has followed up. A new contact came in through Apollo and has been sitting in a spreadsheet waiting for someone to add it to HubSpot. None of this is the fault of the salespeople. It is the fault of a process that relies on people to do things that a machine should be doing.

This is not a motivation problem or a talent problem. It is a systems problem. The tools exist. HubSpot handles your CRM. Apollo finds and sequences prospects. Leadfeeder shows you who is visiting your site. Fathom records and summarises your calls. Instantly runs your cold outreach. These are strong, well-built tools. But they do not talk to each other by default, and that means your team is the connective tissue: copying data, triggering tasks, chasing updates, and doing admin that eats the hours they should be spending on revenue.

Make changes that. It is an automation platform purpose-built for connecting the tools that already exist in your stack, removing the human steps that should never have been human steps in the first place, and giving your team back the time they should be spending on conversations and deals.

What Make Actually Is

Make (formerly Integromat) is a no-code automation platform. It is not a CRM, not a sales tool, and not a reporting system. It is the layer that sits between your tools and makes them work together. In Make, you build scenarios: visual workflows that trigger on an event in one system and perform actions in others. When this happens, do that. When a contact is created in Apollo, add it to HubSpot. When a call ends in Fathom, log the summary to the right contact record. When a deal is marked won, send a Slack notification to the team and kick off the onboarding sequence.

For B2B media sales teams, Make fills the gap that every tool vendor glosses over: the integration gap. You can have the best tools in the market and still end up with a fractured, manual operation if nothing is wired together. Make is what does the wiring.

It connects to hundreds of platforms through pre-built modules, which means you do not need developers or custom code to build most of the automations your team needs. A Sales Director who understands their own process can map out a scenario in Make in an afternoon. The scenarios run automatically, twenty-four hours a day, without anyone needing to think about them.

The pricing model is consumption-based: you pay per operation rather than per seat, which makes it accessible for teams that are not running thousands of records per day. For most B2B media sales teams, the cost of Make is negligible compared to the time it saves.

The Three Automations That Make the Most Difference

Most B2B media sales teams using Make start with three core scenarios. These are not the flashiest automations, but they are the ones that remove the most friction from a typical sales day. Each one addresses a specific failure point in the manual process, and each one delivers a measurable improvement in data quality and rep efficiency from day one.

Understanding which three to build first requires an honest look at where time is currently being wasted. In most B2B media sales operations, the same three failure points appear: lead data is not making it into the CRM reliably, call notes are patchy, and post-sale handoffs are inconsistent. These are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a stack that is not connected.

The first is automatic lead creation from Apollo or Leadfeeder into HubSpot. When a new prospect is identified in Apollo, or when Leadfeeder flags a company visiting your website for the second time in a week, that contact needs to be in HubSpot immediately: assigned to the right rep, tagged with the correct source, and placed at the right deal stage. Without automation, this happens when someone gets round to it, which is often too late or not at all. With a Make scenario, it happens the moment the trigger fires. The rep sees the new contact in their CRM queue before they have even opened Apollo.

Automatic Call Logging

The second is automatic call logging from Fathom to HubSpot. Fathom generates a call summary after every meeting: the key points discussed, the agreed next steps, and a full transcript if needed. That information is gold for any sales manager reviewing deal progression, and for any rep picking up a call with a contact someone else has spoken to. But if logging that summary to HubSpot depends on a human copying and pasting it, it will be missed around thirty percent of the time. A Make scenario catches the Fathom webhook after every call and writes the summary directly to the HubSpot contact record. It takes no rep time at all.

Deal-Won Trigger

The third is the deal-won trigger. When a deal is marked closed-won in HubSpot, several things should happen: the account manager should be notified, the team should see a Slack message, and the onboarding sequence in Instantly should start. Without automation, someone has to remember to do all of that. With a Make scenario, it is instant and it never gets forgotten. For a sales team operating at pace, the reliability of that handoff matters.

Why Most Automation Projects Fail

The most common reason B2B media sales teams fail to get value from Make is not the platform. It is the approach. Teams see the potential, try to automate everything at once, build three or four scenarios simultaneously, run into edge cases, and end up with a system that half-works and causes more confusion than it solves.

The right approach is sequential. Start with one scenario. Pick the highest-friction manual task in your current process, build the automation for it, test it properly, and run it live for two weeks before you touch anything else. Get one thing working perfectly, then build the next. The discipline of doing this in sequence means that when something breaks, you know exactly where to look.

Make has a free tier that is more than sufficient for the first two or three scenarios. You pay for operations, not for access, and the early automations in a media sales team typically run within the free allowance. This means you can validate the approach before committing any budget, which is how every implementation should start.

The other failure mode is building automations that do not match the actual sales process. Automation is only as good as the process it is automating. If your deal stages in HubSpot do not reflect how your team actually works, automating them will just make the mess faster. Before you build a single scenario, map the process as it actually runs today, not as it is supposed to run on paper.

A good implementation also accounts for error handling. What happens when a contact already exists in HubSpot and Make tries to create a duplicate? What happens when a Fathom call does not match any existing contact? These edge cases need to be considered before the scenario goes live. Ignoring them is how you end up with messy data that is harder to clean than the manual process it replaced.

Done properly, Make automation becomes invisible. Nobody notices it is running because everything just works. Leads appear in the CRM. Notes are logged. Deals trigger the right actions. The team stops thinking about process and starts thinking about pipeline.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Consider a B2B media company with a twelve-person sales team selling digital sponsorship and content packages. The team uses Apollo to identify new brands entering their sector, Leadfeeder to monitor which companies are visiting the website, HubSpot as the CRM, Fathom for call recording, and Instantly for cold outreach sequences. Before automation, the workflow looked like this: a rep would check Apollo in the morning, copy contacts into a spreadsheet, paste them into HubSpot manually, forget to tag the source half the time, and miss half the Leadfeeder alerts because nobody had a clear process for acting on them.

After implementing Make, the process runs differently. Every morning, Apollo contacts matching the target criteria are automatically pushed into HubSpot with the correct owner, source tag, and deal stage. Every Leadfeeder alert for a company that has visited the site more than once triggers a HubSpot contact creation and a Slack notification to the assigned rep. Every call recorded in Fathom generates a summary that is logged to the HubSpot contact within minutes of the call ending. Every deal marked won triggers a Slack notification to the team and enrolls the new client in the Instantly onboarding sequence.

The rep starts the day knowing exactly who to call and why. The CRM reflects reality. The call notes are always there. The onboarding never slips. Nothing depends on someone remembering to do something.

This is not a theoretical vision of what automation could look like. It is what a well-configured Make stack delivers for a media sales team within the first few weeks of implementation. The tools were already in place. Make just connected them.

The difference in how the sales day feels is significant. Before automation, reps start the morning by spending the first forty-five minutes on admin: checking multiple tools, copying data, logging notes from the previous day. After automation, they open HubSpot and the work is done. The contacts are there, the notes are there, the next steps are clear. They start calling forty-five minutes earlier than they would have otherwise.

The Stack Is Only as Strong as Its Connections

There is a tendency in sales technology to evaluate tools in isolation: how good is this CRM, how good is this sequencing platform, how good is this data provider. That framing misses the point. The tools your team uses are only as valuable as how well they work together. A world-class CRM that receives data two days late is not doing its job. A call-recording tool that generates great summaries nobody reads is not creating value.

For B2B media sales teams in the five to thirty million pound revenue range, the challenge is rarely that the tools are bad. It is that nobody has taken the time to connect them properly. The result is a sales operation that runs slower than it should, where reps are doing admin that adds nothing and managers are making decisions with incomplete information.

Make is the practical answer to that problem. It is not expensive, it does not require developers, and it can be built incrementally so that the team sees value quickly without committing to a large implementation project.

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About the author: David is the founder of AI Sales Stack. Senior sales leader with 23+ years driving multimillion-pound growth across B2B media and events. Pioneered AI-enabled sales operations at Terrapinn and Clarion Events, integrating tools across prospecting, outreach, CRM automation, and proposal generation to shorten sales cycles and increase conversion. Currently Commercial Director at Ocean Media Group, where his brief includes embedding AI tools across the commercial function. Writes here about what is actually working in AI-enabled B2B sales, and what is being oversold.