Send people to CRM · Activation · Accepts people
Pushes people to your connected CRM as contacts. In Salesforce, people become contacts, or leads if Lead creation is on. This is an end step — records finish here.
When to use it
Use it as the finish line of a people workflow: find and enrich contacts, then create or update them in your CRM.
What it does
For each person, it creates or updates a contact in your CRM using your field mappings. Existing contacts are updated, not duplicated. For existing records, the write rule of each field decides what changes: Always overwrite, Write if empty or Never write. You set write rules in the integration setup, and they apply here too.
In Salesforce, Ocean matches people to existing records like this:
Lead creation off: a contact is matched by email. If a person has no email, Ocean looks for a contact with the same LinkedIn URL (only if you mapped LinkedIn URL to a contact field), then for a contact with the same first and last name under the same account.
Lead creation on: a lead is matched by email, and Ocean also looks in Salesforce itself for leads it hasn't synced yet. Converted leads are skipped. A person without an email always gets a new lead.
Configure it
CRM — which connected CRM to send to. If you have only one connected, it's chosen for you.
Custom fields — pick the CRM contact fields to set, then pick the step output that fills each one.
Also create the company: off by default. Switch it on to also create the person's company in your CRM. In Salesforce that is an account. With Lead creation on, no accounts are created. When it is off, the contact goes under an account that already exists for the company's website. If there is none, the contact has no account.
Deal: switch on Deal creation to also create a deal for each person, then pick a Pipeline. For Salesforce the switch is called Lead creation, and Salesforce creates leads instead of contacts. This section is hidden when Lead creation is off in your integration setup.
Campaign: Salesforce only. Optional. Adds the people to a Salesforce campaign. Pick a campaign, then a Member status. The list shows your 500 newest active campaigns. People who aren't in Salesforce yet are created first, then added. If a campaign can't be used, the person is still sent to your CRM.
Owner: who the record is assigned to in the CRM. See the owner options below.
Owner options
Leave unassigned: Ocean doesn't send an owner. This is the default.
A rep from your CRM: every record goes to that person.
Rotate between reps: new records go to each rep in turn, picking up where the last run stopped. Every record the step sends takes a turn, even a record that is already in your CRM.
Assign by rules: each record goes to the first rule it matches. A rule with several reps rotates between them. Under Otherwise you can pick reps for the records no rule matches.
Same owner as the company: each person gets the owner of their company from an earlier Send companies to CRM step. This only shows if the workflow has that step.
Records that are already in your CRM keep their owner. To change it, tick Reassign records already in the CRM.
Cost
See Credits in workflows.
Gotchas
Connect the CRM first in Settings → Integrations. See Connect your tools.
Works on people. Add a Find people at company or People search step before it, and usually Enrich email and phone so contacts have an email.
To add people to a Salesforce campaign, the connected Salesforce user needs the Marketing User setting and edit access to Campaigns. Without them, the people are still sent to your CRM, but they aren't added to the campaign.
If an owner can't be found among your synced CRM users, that record fails and isn't sent.
If this step failing shouldn't stop the record, open the step's settings, find If this step fails, and switch on Continue anyway. See Troubleshooting workflows.