How are you using Workflow Automation?


Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Tell us about your use cases or grab some ideas form this thread!


12 replies

Userlevel 4
Badge +1

We one that takes an opportunity that was won in the sales pipeline and then moves it to the design services/deliverable pipeline. Pretty handy because the design team gets all the info and email/meeting history from the sales team without having to do anything.

Userlevel 3

We use it to assign tasks for every time an opp moves from one stage to another. So when we move into demo stage there’s a task for prep demo environment. We used the dateadd function to make the due date the day after the opp was moved.

Userlevel 2

I have one that takes the commission percent (custom field), multiplies it by the deal value, and stores the result in a Commission Takehome field (custom field). Very handy for reps to see how much a deal is worth to them.

Userlevel 2

We have created a workflow that automatically creates a ship date for our product based on the close date (which can change frequently in our industry).  This provides better visibility, forecasting and machine capacity for our Operations and Construction divisions.

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Opportunity Name Formatting

I've been using it for forcing consistent Opportunity name formatting.

So for example, when an opportunity is created, we have it take the short name of a client (e.g. NRC for Northtowns Remodeling Corp) and the drop-down field of the service they are interested in purchasing (e.g. Complete Package/Premier Partner) and have it put together, so you have the following consistent opportunity names:

NRC - Complete Package

CL - Premier Partner

PMR - Complete Package

 

Calculating Value (One-Time + MRR)

With our Premier Partner tier, there's usually an implementation cost and a monthly recurring cost, so we also have it set up so if an opportunity is created and the Value = 0 or blank, it triggers the following math:

- Implementation Cost $ Field + (MRR Cost $ x 12) to get the total value for the opportunity

 

Enforcing Processes

One final bit that we do is use it for forcing processes, for example, if you move an opportunity to the "onboarding" stage and a certain custom field doesn't exist, it moves the opportunity back a stage and creates a task for the opportunity owner saying "please set XYZ custom field before moving opportunity to the Onboarding stage". We do this often because we have automations trigger upon stage change (e.g. QuickBooks Online invoice creating), but it errors out if the "Value" field is blank, so we often use Workflow Automation to not allow opportunities to move through the process unless all the required custom fields are filled out.

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

We have created a workflow that automatically creates a ship date for our product based on the close date (which can change frequently in our industry).  This provides better visibility, forecasting and machine capacity for our Operations and Construction divisions.

@Matt Horton that makes sense! So your ship date is X number of days after the close date?

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Opportunity Name Formatting

I've been using it for forcing consistent Opportunity name formatting.

So for example, when an opportunity is created, we have it take the short name of a client (e.g. NRC for Northtowns Remodeling Corp) and the drop-down field of the service they are interested in purchasing (e.g. Complete Package/Premier Partner) and have it put together, so you have the following consistent opportunity names:

NRC - Complete Package

CL - Premier Partner

PMR - Complete Package

@alex Haven’t seen this particular use case before, but I love it! Are you storing the client’s short name in a custom field?

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Opportunity Name Formatting

I've been using it for forcing consistent Opportunity name formatting.

So for example, when an opportunity is created, we have it take the short name of a client (e.g. NRC for Northtowns Remodeling Corp) and the drop-down field of the service they are interested in purchasing (e.g. Complete Package/Premier Partner) and have it put together, so you have the following consistent opportunity names:

NRC - Complete Package

CL - Premier Partner

PMR - Complete Package

@alex Haven’t seen this particular use case before, but I love it! Are you storing the client’s short name in a custom field?

 

Yep! You got it 👌 I actually have a Zapier automation trigger when an opportunity is created (lead converted) which creates the "Short Name" if our team doesn't manually create it. It takes the first Capitalized letter or each letter after a space in a company name.

Northtowns Remodeling Corp = NRC

ABC Corp = ABCC

I usually just have the Short Name on the Lead & Company, but because Workflow Automation can't reference related fields (I don't think, e.g. Opportunity's Primary Contact's Company's Short Name), I have "Short Name" also added to the opportunity (as somewhat of a throwaway field just for automations) and I use the following JavaScript code snippet to calculate the short name within Zapier automatically:

const shortName = inputData.companyName

 .split(/([A-Z])/)

 .filter((w) => w.length === 1)

 .join("");

output = [{ shortName }];

 

Userlevel 2

We have created a workflow that automatically creates a ship date for our product based on the close date (which can change frequently in our industry).  This provides better visibility, forecasting and machine capacity for our Operations and Construction divisions.

@Matt Horton that makes sense! So your ship date is X number of days after the close date?

@Michelle from Copper Yes ma’am, that’s correct

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

We one that takes an opportunity that was won in the sales pipeline and then moves it to the design services/deliverable pipeline. Pretty handy because the design team gets all the info and email/meeting history from the sales team without having to do anything.

Love using this one! Curious, how does your team handle passing over multi-select drop-down values in this instance? Always feels like a bit of a struggle 😅

 

Passing Along All Custom Fields/Notes/Connections

What we've done in some instances (for clients that want that duplicated opportunity to have all of the data-points, notes logged directly to the opportunity, PandaDoc connected agreement, etc.), is that we actually treat that opportunity as the main opportunity and move it to the Deliverable pipeline and then use Workflow Automation to do exactly what you're doing, but in reverse, for creating an "archived" sales opportunity (actually creating a "Won" opportunity within the Sales pipeline in the stage that the old opportunity was in when it was marked as "Won", so it has a few less details)

There's positives/negatives to doing it this way, but sometimes it's preferred due to the process the opportunity is being brought through.

 

Enhancement Idea (Connect Fields)

I like to also connect the two opportunities together in a related way so you can easily jump between them (e.g. under the “Deliverable/Projects” pipeline you can jump into the related opportunity, and vice-versa), here’s what it’d look like:

 

Automating It (Advanced)

If you're open to using Zapier and comfortable using the Webhook functionality, I also like to have a Connect Field created which links together the "Sales" opportunity and the "Deliverable" opportunity so you can easily jump between them. Here's the Webhook data you'd use to connect the two opportunities (you just need to swap out the Custom Field Definition ID with the ID in your account):

 

Hi, we have a sales team with specific zones they tend to (i.e. Asia, NorthAmericas, Europe) I´m trying to figure of I can automatically link a new lead/oportunity/company to a specific owner depending on the zone (cutom field we made) or the country, can any of you help me out with this? thanks in advance!!

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Hey @DanielVT,

You’d have to do something like this for each entity type and division:

We recommend using the “When a specific field is updated on XYZ entity” as the trigger as it will only trigger this automation to run when the division is changed on a record. The other option of “whenever XYZ entity is created/updated” will trigger a ton of automations to run unnecessarily and slow things down quite a bit.

Hope this helps!

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