A guide to using Lead APIs (with examples from Pipedrive)

While it depends on the type of product you offer, building API integrations between your product and your clients' CRM solutions often makes both platforms more valuable.

Here are just a few examples: getting accurate, up-to-date leads into your platform can help you create more robust, actionable reports; enriching newly-added leads in the CRM via existing data in your product can help your reps engage prospects more intelligently; and adding leads to your platform when they reach a certain stage in your CRM can ensure your team nurtures them effectively.

To help you sync lead data between your product and CRM solutions, we’ll break down common API calls you can make and reference specific examples from Pipedrive to make them more tangible. 

But to start, let’s align on the definition of a lead API. 

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What is a lead API?

It’s any API endpoint that allows you to create, read, update, or delete a lead object—along with predefined fields—in a given application. You can perform these operations on one lead, all of them, and anything in between.

Related: What is CRM API integration?

Lead API examples

Here’s how you can work with lead APIs:

GET leads

To add lead data into your product, you can call the API endpoint https://api.pipedrive.com/v1/leads using a GET request. Also, instead of just retrieving all leads at once, you can be intentional about the leads you collect by adding query parameters to your API calls. For instance, you can use owner_id to retrieve leads that are managed by a specific sales rep(s) or organization_id to retrieve leads that belong to a specific organization(s).  

GET lead

In addition to gathering leads in bulk, you can obtain them individually.

To do so, you would add ID as a parameter, leaving you with the endpoint https://api.pipedrive.com/v1/leads/{id} (where id corresponds to a specific lead’s ID in Pipedrive).

Related: A guide to implementing product integrations

PATCH a lead

To edit existing leads based on relevant information in your product, you can use the PATCH request method to the same endpoint above (https://api.pipedrive.com/v1/leads/{id}). You can also control what’s patched via the body parameters included in your API call. This can be anything from title (name of the lead) to the expected_close_date to the value (which indicates the anticipated dollar value of the lead if closed won). 

POST a lead

You can add leads from your product to Pipedrive via a POST method and with the endpoint https://api.pipedrive.com/v1/leads. The title (i.e. the name of the lead) is the only required body parameter. To add more details on the lead, you can use the body parameters owner_id, organization_id, expected_close_date, among others.  

DELETE a lead

Finally, you can delete leads in Pipedrive when any is deleted in your application by using the DELETE method and the endpoint https://api.pipedrive.com/v1/leads/{id}. All of the fields associated with the lead will be deleted.

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Related: What is a CRM API?

Sync leads between your product and CRMs at scale with Merge

The process of building to and maintaining connections with Pipedrive’s lead API endpoints—via custom code—may not be daunting in and of itself. But considering that you likely need to integrate with several other CRMs, your engineers will eventually become overwhelmed.

That’s where Merge, the leading unified API platform, can help. 

Using Merge, you only need to build to the CRM Unified API once to get access to 20+ CRM platforms. 

Merge also lets you access a broad range of lead data across your integrations through the Leads common model; sync additional objects and fields from your CRM, whether it’s opportunities, users, or accounts; oversee integration activities and help clients troubleshoot any issues through our platform’s suite of Integrations Management features—and much, much more. 

‍Learn more about building CRM integrations with Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.