Learning objective
By the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to automatically create Salesforce opportunities when leads hit key milestones in your lemlist campaigns — so qualified prospects flow straight into your pipeline without any manual entry.
Why this matters
Creating opportunities manually is one of the most common sources of pipeline gaps. When a lead replies or gets marked as interested, that's a real buying signal — and it should immediately become a trackable opportunity in Salesforce. Automating this step ensures every qualified lead is captured, attributed to the right rep, and visible in your pipeline from the moment intent shows.
Prerequisites
Your Salesforce integration is connected in lemlist (see How to connect lemlist to Salesforce)
You have an active lemlist campaign with leads running through it
Your connected Salesforce user has Create permission on the Opportunity object
Phase 1: Configure opportunity triggers
Step 1: Open campaign CRM settings
Opportunity creation is configured at the campaign level, not in the global integration settings. This gives you precise control over which campaigns should create pipeline — a top-of-funnel awareness campaign probably shouldn't create opportunities, but a targeted account-based campaign should.
Open your campaign → Campaign Settings → CRM Integration.
Step 2: Select your triggers
Choose which lead actions should create a Salesforce opportunity. This is the most important decision in this setup: over-triggering creates junk opportunities and pollutes your pipeline. Under-triggering means qualified leads aren't tracked.
Reply received: creates an opportunity when the lead responds to any step. Good for high-intent campaigns where any reply signals interest
Marked as interested: creates an opportunity only when a rep manually qualifies the lead. The safest choice — requires human judgment before pipeline is created
Avoid triggering on low-intent signals like email opens or link clicks. These create noise in Salesforce and make pipeline forecasting unreliable.
Phase 2: Validate in Salesforce
Step 3: Test with a known lead
Before rolling out to live campaigns, test the setup by triggering the condition manually. Mark a test lead as interested in lemlist, then check Salesforce to confirm the opportunity was created with the correct owner, stage, and associated contact or lead.
Practical example
A sales team sets the trigger to Marked as interested only. When an SDR qualifies a lead after a positive reply, they mark them as interested in lemlist — which instantly creates a Salesforce opportunity assigned to that SDR. The AE pipeline stays clean: only genuinely qualified leads appear as opportunities, and nothing gets created by an automated signal no one reviewed.
Troubleshooting
Opportunities not being created in Salesforce
Root cause: The trigger may not be enabled, or the connected Salesforce user may not have permission to create Opportunity records.
Open Campaign Settings → CRM Integration and confirm the trigger is active
Check the Logs tab in the Salesforce integration for errors related to opportunity creation
Confirm your connected Salesforce user has Create permission on the Opportunity object
Duplicate opportunities being created
Root cause: The same lead is passing through multiple campaigns that all have opportunity creation enabled, or the same trigger fires more than once.
Audit which campaigns have opportunity creation enabled and disable it where it's not needed
Switch to Marked as interested — it requires a manual action and prevents accidental duplicates