Module 03Workflow automation
Sales workflow automation where every rule has a named owner.
Lead routing setup, task sequences, stale-deal alerts and discount approvals, built inside the CRM you already pay for. $450 to $900 per workflow. Each one is written down with its trigger, condition, action and owner before we switch it on, so your admin can read it in a year and know why it fires.
Price basis
Priced per workflow, and a workflow is one trigger with everything it sets off.
"New inbound lead gets routed, gets a first task, and the owner gets a notification" is one workflow, not three. The band moves with the number of branches and whether the rule has to touch another system through an integration.
When automation is part of a full setup, the estimator treats it as a depth multiplier on the build subtotal: Basic, Standard or Advanced. Bought on its own, the per-workflow band applies. Both are estimate bands, not quotes. We quote in writing after a 45-minute scoping call.
Lead routing setup
Three routing models. Most teams need one, and the wrong one costs a week of reps arguing.
Lead routing decides who owns a new record in the first minute. The model has to match how your team is actually paid. We pick it with your sales manager on paper, against the compensation plan, before a single assignment rule exists.
| Model | How it assigns | Suits | Failure we see most |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round-robin | Next rep in a rotating queue, weighted if you want seniors to take 1.5x | Inbound-heavy teams of 3 to 15 reps selling one product | Reps on leave keep receiving leads. We tie the queue to an availability field, not a calendar someone forgets to update |
| Territory | By state, ZIP prefix, country or industry code on the incoming record | Field and regional teams, anyone paid on geography | Blank or messy state values fall through. Every territory rule gets a catch-all owner who reviews orphans daily |
| Owner by account | New contact inherits the owner of the matching account, by email domain | Account-based and expansion selling | Gmail and Outlook addresses match nothing. Free-mail domains fall back to round-robin by rule, in writing |
Hybrid is common: owner by account first, territory if no account matches, round-robin inside the territory. That is still one workflow in our pricing, because it has one trigger. The routing logic is drawn as a decision table in the admin guide so nobody has to reverse-engineer it from the rule builder.
The rule card
Every rule documented with trigger, condition, action and owner.
An undocumented automation is a bug waiting for a new admin. We have inherited CRMs with 60 active rules, a third of which fought each other: one reassigned a lead, another reassigned it back. Nobody knew who had built either. The rule card stops that. It lives in the admin guide and in the rule's own description field.
- Rule
- STALE-01, stale deal alert
- Trigger
- Daily check at 07:00 Pacific
- Condition
- Open deal, stage Qualified or later, no logged activity for 14 days
- Action
- Task and push notification to deal owner. At day 21, manager is added to the task
- Owner
- Sales manager decides the threshold. Admin maintains the rule
- Off switch
- Deal marked "Waiting on buyer" with a dated next step
Your forecast is only as honest as the close date. So we make the close date mandatory at Proposal and nowhere before.
Stage sheet, rule 05
What we automate
Four workflow types cover nearly every sales team we see.
Assignment by the model above, plus a speed-to-lead task due within one business hour. If the task is still open at two hours, it moves to the next rep in the queue and the first rep sees why.
Entering a stage creates the tasks its exit rule needs. Discovery creates "confirm budget holder" and "book technical call", due in 3 and 7 days. Tasks, not emails: we do not send automated outreach from the rep's name.
14 days without activity by default. Teams with 90-day cycles often move it to 21. One alert per deal, never a daily nag, because reps mute nagging within a week and then miss the alerts that matter.
Any discount over a set percentage, say 15%, locks the quote and routes it to the manager. Over a second threshold, say 25%, it goes to whoever owns margin. You set the numbers. The deal cannot move to Proposal while approval is pending.
How it runs
From rule card to live rule in four steps.
Inside a full engagement automation is built in weeks 2 to 4, after the stage definition sheet is signed and the data is clean from migration. The process page shows the full calendar.
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01Inventory
We export every existing rule, workflow and trigger in your CRM and list what each one does today. Conflicts and dead rules are marked.
You decide which to retire. We retire nothing without a signature.
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02Rule cards
Each new workflow is written as a rule card. Your sales manager signs the thresholds: stale days, discount percentages, routing weights.
Usually one 60-minute session and a round of comments.
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03Build and test
Built in a sandbox, then run against ten test records per branch. Every branch of the rule card has to fire once, on purpose, before go-live.
Test log attached to the rule card.
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04Live and watched
Switched on in production with an audit report for the first two weeks: how many times each rule fired and on which records.
Inside the 30-day fix window in our terms.
Objections
Before you automate anything, the questions worth asking.
See every service and its scope on the services page.
Can you automate our outbound email sequences?
No. Marketing automation and bulk outbound are out of scope. We automate what happens inside the sales pipeline: ownership, tasks, alerts and approvals. If you run a sequencing tool, we can connect it through an integration so its activity lands on the right record.
Our CRM plan limits how many workflows we can run.
Common on lower tiers. We check the limit at the inventory step and design within it, usually by merging rules that share a trigger. If the plan truly cannot do what you need, we say so before you spend money on either us or an upgrade.
What if the pipeline itself is the problem?
Then automating it makes the problem faster. Rules hang off stage entry and exit, so a pipeline with eleven stages nobody can tell apart produces eleven sets of wrong tasks. Start with CRM setup and pipeline design; automation comes after.
Who is this not for?
A team of two or three reps who all know every deal by heart. A weekly pipeline review does what a stale-deal alert does, for free. Routing starts paying for itself around five reps.
Next step
Send us the rules you wish you had.
Plain words are fine: "leads from the West Coast go to Dana", "flag anything quiet for two weeks". We turn them into rule cards on the scoping call and reply during business hours, Pacific time.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94105