Twenty CRM Automations Worth Building, in Order

Build these before anything else. They close the largest leaks and none of them requires complex logic.

One. Trigger: a new enquiry arrives on any channel. Condition: none. Action: create a record, set the source automatically, and assign an owner by the routing rule.

Two. Trigger: a record is created. Condition: outside working hours. Action: send an acknowledgement stating when a person will respond, and create a task at the start of the next working day.

Three. Trigger: a call to the published number is missed. Condition: no record exists for that number. Action: create a record and a callback task assigned to whoever is available.

Four. Trigger: a record has no contact attempt logged. Condition: thirty minutes have passed during working hours. Action: notify the owner, and after a further thirty minutes escalate to a second person.

Five. Trigger: a record is created. Condition: none. Action: attach the standard follow-up sequence for that source, with dates calculated from the enquiry timestamp.

Six. Trigger: a deal moves to a new stage. Condition: no next action date is set. Action: prompt the owner to set one before the change is saved.

Seven. Trigger: nightly check. Condition: a deal has been in its current stage longer than the stage limit. Action: flag it for the pipeline review and notify the owner.

Eight. Trigger: nightly check. Condition: an open deal has no owner. Action: assign it to the fallback owner and notify the manager.

Nine. Trigger: a deal is marked closed lost. Condition: no reason is selected. Action: require a reason from the fixed list before the change saves.

Ten. Trigger: a deal is marked closed won. Condition: none. Action: create the onboarding or delivery task list and notify whoever owns fulfilment.

Eleven. Trigger: an appointment is booked. Condition: none. Action: send a confirmation with time, place and what to bring, and schedule a reminder for the evening before.

Twelve. Trigger: an appointment time passes. Condition: attendance not marked. Action: create a task to mark the outcome, and if marked as a no-show, send a message offering two alternative slots.

Thirteen. Trigger: a quotation is sent. Condition: none. Action: create a follow-up task on the date promised in the quotation, and a second one a week later.

Fourteen. Trigger: a renewal or expiry date approaches. Condition: a defined number of days remain. Action: create a renewal task and send an early notification message.

Fifteen. Trigger: any inbound message or call from the customer. Condition: an automated sequence is running. Action: pause the sequence immediately and notify the owner.

Sixteen. Trigger: a record goes without interaction for a set period. Condition: still open. Action: change status to dormant and remove it from active pipeline counts.

Seventeen. Trigger: a new record is created. Condition: the phone number matches an existing record. Action: flag as a possible duplicate for review rather than merging automatically.

Eighteen. Trigger: weekly schedule. Condition: none. Action: send each salesperson their own coverage summary, including records with no next action.

Nineteen. Trigger: a deal value exceeds a threshold. Condition: none. Action: notify the manager and add an approval step before the quotation is sent.

Twenty. Trigger: a customer completes a purchase. Condition: it is their first. Action: schedule a check-in call for two weeks later and a satisfaction message for one month later.

One at a time, a week apart, each tested with a real record before it goes live. Log every automated action on the record so the team can see what happened and why. Give each rule an owner and a review date, and hold an annual review where anything nobody can explain gets switched off.

The final discipline is arithmetic. Before switching anything on, estimate how many messages or tasks it will generate per week. As an illustrative example, a sequence of five messages attached to every enquiry, in a business taking forty enquiries a week, is two hundred messages a week once it is running at full pace. That may be exactly right, but it should be a decision rather than a surprise arriving on a bill.

Related reading: sales automation, WhatsApp CRM, the dialer, lead management software, features, and AI CRM.