Setting up sales automation from scratch is like building a house without blueprints. You know what you want, but figuring out every detail takes forever. That’s where workflow templates come in. Think of them as proven blueprints that you can copy, customize, and deploy in hours instead of weeks.
The templates below aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re based on workflows we’ve built for dozens of sales teams, from scrappy startups to enterprise revenue orgs. Each one tackles a specific problem that real sales teams face every day: leads falling through the cracks, deals going stale, reps forgetting to follow up, managers flying blind on pipeline health.
You won’t use all of these. Pick the ones that solve your biggest pain points, customize them for your process, and get them running. Once you see the impact, you’ll know which ones to build next.
How to Use These Templates
Here’s the honest truth about workflow templates: they’re not plug-and-play. Every sales team has different fields, different processes, different terminology. But starting with a proven template is 10x faster than starting from zero.
Here’s how to implement these effectively. First, pick a template that matches a problem you’re actively trying to solve. Don’t build automations just because they sound cool. Build them because your team is currently doing something manually that shouldn’t be manual.
Next, map the template to your CRM. The logic stays the same, but field names change. Where the template says “company size,” your CRM might call it “number of employees” or “employee count.” Where it says “lead status,” you might have “lifecycle stage.” Make a list of these mappings before you start building.
Then adjust the thresholds and values. If a template flags deals as at-risk after 10 days of inactivity, but your sales cycle is 90 days, that threshold makes no sense. Change it to something realistic for your business. Templates give you the structure, but you need to tune them to your reality.
Test with sample data before going live. Create a test lead or test deal and watch it flow through your workflow. Does it get assigned to the right person? Do the notifications fire? Do the tasks get created? Fix any issues in testing, not in production.
Finally, deploy gradually and monitor closely. Don’t turn on 10 workflows at once. Start with one, make sure it works, then add the next. Watch for errors, listen to user feedback, and refine as you go.
Lead Management Templates
Inbound Lead Routing
The problem: An inbound demo request comes in at 2 PM. It sits in a queue. By the time someone notices it at 4 PM, the prospect has already talked to two competitors. You lose the deal before you even knew you were in the race.
Speed to lead matters more than almost anything else in inbound sales. Research shows that responding within 5 minutes makes you 21x more likely to qualify the lead compared to waiting 30 minutes. But relying on reps to manually check for new leads is a recipe for delays.
Here’s what automatic inbound lead routing looks like in practice. When a new lead comes in from any inbound source—web form, chatbot, demo request, content download—the workflow kicks off immediately. It checks the lead’s properties to determine which team should handle it.
For enterprise leads, usually companies over 500 employees, the workflow assigns to the enterprise team using round-robin distribution to keep things fair. It sets the priority to high, creates a task due in 5 minutes for initial outreach, and sends a Slack notification to both the assigned rep and a dedicated inbound leads channel. That rep gets everything they need: contact name, company, phone, email, and what the prospect is interested in.
Mid-market leads, typically 100 to 500 employees, go to the mid-market team with medium priority. SMB leads, under 100 employees, route to the SMB team with standard priority. Each segment gets appropriate SLAs based on deal size potential.
The notification includes all the context the rep needs to make a smart first touch: the prospect’s name, company size, source, what they’re interested in, and their contact info. No hunting through fields or clicking around. Everything in one place.
Beyond just assigning the lead, the workflow can automatically enroll them in the appropriate follow-up sequence. Enterprise leads might get a more consultative sequence, while SMB leads get a faster-moving, product-led sequence. The automation adapts to the segment.
One critical implementation note: set up a fallback assignment rule. If round-robin fails for any reason—maybe everyone on the team is out, or the team is at capacity—the lead should go somewhere. A sales ops queue, a manager, anyone. Never let a lead hit a dead end.
Also, monitor response times religiously. The whole point of this automation is speed. If reps aren’t hitting those SLAs, the routing doesn’t matter. Track it, report on it, and hold people accountable.
Lead Scoring and Status Updates
Not all leads are created equal. A VP of Sales at a 500-person company who visits your pricing page three times is probably more valuable than a marketing intern at a 20-person company who downloaded one ebook. Lead scoring helps you identify the hot leads so your reps focus their energy on the right prospects.
Here’s how automated lead scoring works. The workflow triggers whenever a lead’s properties change or when they log an activity. It then applies scoring rules across two dimensions: fit and engagement.
Fit scoring evaluates how well the lead matches your ideal customer profile. If their title contains VP, Director, or C-level, add 20 points. If they work at a company with 200 to 1,000 employees, add 15 points. If they’re in one of your target industries like SaaS, fintech, or healthcare, add 10 points. These scores reflect qualification, not interest.
Engagement scoring tracks behavior that indicates interest. Visiting the pricing page is a strong signal, worth 15 points. Downloading a case study or whitepaper shows research intent, worth 10 points. Opening an email gets 2 points, clicking a link gets 5 points, and actually replying to an email gets 20 points because that’s active engagement.
As the score accumulates, the workflow takes action at key thresholds. When a lead crosses 100 points, they’re hot. The workflow updates their status, creates an urgent task for the owner, and sends a notification. This is a qualified prospect showing serious intent. Someone needs to call them today.
Leads between 60 and 100 points are warm. They get added to active outreach sequences. They’re worth pursuing, but they’re not dropping everything urgent.
Leads below 30 points are cold. The workflow moves them to nurture campaigns. Maybe they’ll warm up over time, but they’re not ready for high-touch sales effort yet.
The key to good lead scoring is starting simple and getting more sophisticated over time. Begin with 5 to 10 scoring rules based on your most important signals. Run it for a quarter, then compare scores against actual conversions. If high-scoring leads aren’t converting, your scoring model is wrong. Adjust the weights and thresholds until the correlation between score and conversion gets strong.
Also, plan to review and update scoring rules quarterly. What mattered six months ago might not matter today. Your ICP evolves, your product changes, your market shifts. Keep the scoring model current.
Lead Lifecycle Progression
Leads should move through clear stages from first touch to closed deal. But in most CRMs, those stage changes happen manually. Reps forget to update them, or they batch update once a week, and your reporting is always stale. Automated lifecycle progression keeps things current.
The workflow monitors activities and automatically advances leads through stages based on real actions. When a rep logs the first activity with a new lead—an email sent, a call made, a LinkedIn message—the lead moves from “New” to “Contacted.” A timer starts tracking how long they’ve been in each stage.
When the lead responds or a meeting gets scheduled, they advance to “Engaged.” The workflow notifies the owner and updates the lead’s status in your marketing automation platform so marketing knows to adjust nurture campaigns.
After the discovery call happens, the lead becomes qualified and moves from MQL to SQL. At this point, the workflow creates an opportunity record if one doesn’t exist yet, associates all the key contacts and notes, and notifies the account executive who’ll take it from here. Attribution gets logged so you can track which marketing channels are driving real pipeline.
When the deal closes and you win, the contact moves to “Customer” status. The workflow triggers onboarding, removes them from all sales sequences, and enrolls them in customer success sequences. The handoff is clean and automatic.
If at any stage the lead gets disqualified, either manually by a rep or through automated criteria, the workflow updates their status, logs the disqualification reason, removes them from active sequences, and optionally adds them to long-term nurture if they might be a fit later.
The most important part of lifecycle automation is defining clear criteria for each stage transition. “Contacted” means what exactly? First touch? Or do they need to acknowledge receipt? “Qualified” means they had a discovery call, or that they meet specific BANT criteria? Get crisp on these definitions before you build the automation.
Also make sure your CRM and marketing automation platform stay in sync. If a lead becomes an SQL in Salesforce but still shows as MQL in HubSpot, your marketing team will keep nurturing them with content meant for cold leads. Bi-directional sync matters.
Opportunity Management Templates
Deal Stage Automation
Every time a deal moves to a new stage, certain actions should happen. Demo scheduled? The rep should prep the demo and send a calendar invite. Proposal sent? There should be a follow-up task in 3 days. Deal closed? Customer success needs to get looped in. Most of this happens inconsistently or not at all when it’s manual.
Automated deal stage workflows ensure nothing gets missed. When a new opportunity gets created in Discovery stage, the workflow creates a task for the rep to complete discovery, adds the deal to forecast reporting, and starts a clock tracking how long it stays in each stage.
When the deal moves to Demo stage, the workflow creates a prep task, schedules a reminder before the demo, and updates marketing attribution so you know which campaigns contributed to this opportunity. If the demo is with a high-value prospect, it might also alert the sales manager.
In Proposal stage, the workflow creates a task to send the proposal and automatically schedules a follow-up task 3 days later. If the deal is over a certain threshold like $50K, it notifies the sales manager so they can stay engaged on high-value deals.
Negotiation stage triggers tasks to address any concerns that came up, adds the deal to commit forecast for more accurate revenue prediction, and alerts leadership if it’s a major deal over $100K. The visibility ensures senior folks can jump in to help if needed.
When a deal closes won, several things happen in rapid succession. The workflow sends win notifications to the team and posts in a Slack wins channel to celebrate. It updates all associated contacts to “Customer” status. It triggers the customer success handoff workflow, creating onboarding tasks and assigning a CS owner. It removes the contacts from all sales sequences so they don’t keep getting prospecting emails after they bought.
Closed lost deals get special treatment too. The workflow requires the rep to log a loss reason—no skipping this step. It sends a feedback request to the prospect to learn why you lost. It moves contacts to a long-term nurture campaign because many lost deals can be revived in 6 to 12 months. And it alerts the manager to review the loss, especially on deals that got deep into the pipeline.
One critical implementation note: make loss reasons required. You can’t improve your close rate if you don’t know why you’re losing. Force reps to categorize every loss so you can spot patterns.
Another tip: include manager approval steps for large deals before they move to certain stages. If a rep tries to mark a $200K deal as closed won, it should trigger an approval workflow. Prevents premature celebration and keeps forecast accuracy high.
At-Risk Deal Management
Here’s a painful truth: most deals are lost before the rep admits they’re lost. The prospect goes dark, the close date passes, there’s no next step defined, but the deal sits in the pipeline inflating your forecast. By the time the rep finally marks it closed lost, everyone already knew it was dead.
At-risk deal automation catches these problems early when you can still save them. The workflow monitors all open opportunities for warning signs and flags them before they’re too far gone.
The first risk trigger is inactivity. If there’s been no logged activity on a deal for 10 or more days, and the close date is within the next 45 days, something’s wrong. Either the rep isn’t working it, or the prospect has mentally moved on. The workflow flags it as at-risk, creates an urgent task for the owner to re-engage, and adds it to an at-risk report.
The second trigger is an overdue close date. If today’s date is past the close date and the deal is still in an open stage, it’s stale. The close date was clearly wrong, or the deal slipped. Either way, the rep needs to update it or close it.
The third trigger is a missing next step. If a deal has progressed past Discovery stage but has no defined next step, the rep doesn’t actually know how to move it forward. That’s a red flag. The workflow creates a task to define clear next steps and update the deal.
When any of these triggers fire, the workflow takes immediate action. It sets a risk flag on the opportunity record so it shows up in pipeline reviews. It creates an urgent task for the owner to address the issue. It sends a notification explaining what triggered the risk flag. And it adds the deal to a manager’s at-risk dashboard.
If the rep doesn’t take action within 3 days, the workflow escalates. It notifies the sales manager directly, adds the deal to their dashboard, and can even schedule a deal review meeting to force the conversation.
The at-risk notification gives the rep all the context: the deal name and amount, current stage, close date, what triggered the risk flag, how many days since last activity, and a direct link to the deal record. Everything they need to take action.
Implementation tips: adjust the days-inactive threshold based on your sales cycle. If you sell enterprise software with 6-month cycles, 10 days of silence might be normal. If you sell SMB with 2-week cycles, 3 days might be too long. Tune it to your reality.
Also, review the at-risk list in every pipeline review meeting. Make it a standing agenda item. And track your save rate on at-risk deals. When a deal gets flagged as at-risk, what percentage do you end up closing? If your save rate is low, maybe you’re catching them too late. Flag them earlier.
Deal Handoff Workflows
Deals move between people throughout the sales process. SDRs hand qualified leads to AEs. AEs hand closed deals to customer success. These handoffs are where context gets lost, tasks get dropped, and customers have terrible first impressions.
Automated handoff workflows make these transitions smooth. When an SDR completes a discovery call and qualifies a lead, the handoff to an AE should be seamless. The workflow creates an opportunity record if one doesn’t exist yet, associates all the relevant contacts, and copies over critical information from the lead record to the opportunity: discovery notes, pain points, timeline, budget information, decision-making process.
It assigns the opportunity to the right AE based on territory or round-robin rules. It creates a task for the AE to review the handoff notes. It sends a detailed Slack notification to the AE with everything they need: company name, primary contact and their title, deal value, discovery summary, pain points, timeline, and budget.
The AE gets full context without having to track down the SDR and ask what happened on the call. They can jump right into next steps. The workflow also logs SDR credit for attribution and comp purposes.
When a deal closes and moves from AE to customer success, the handoff workflow kicks in again. It updates the deal status, creates a customer record in your CS system, assigns a CS owner based on company size or industry, creates onboarding tasks with due dates, and schedules a kickoff meeting.
It sends all the customer information to the CS team: contract details, implementation timeline, key stakeholders, any custom requirements or promises made during the sales process. CS doesn’t have to hunt through Slack threads or email to figure out what was sold. Everything is documented and handed over cleanly.
One key implementation point: require certain fields to be filled out before a handoff can happen. Don’t let an SDR hand off a lead if they didn’t log pain points or timeline. Make those fields required or the workflow won’t complete. This ensures handoff quality stays high.
Also track handoff quality through feedback. Ask AEs to rate the quality of SDR handoffs on a simple scale. If handoff quality is low, you know you need better training or better required fields. Track time from handoff to first action. If AEs are taking days to follow up after an SDR handoff, that’s a process problem.
Activity and Follow-Up Templates
Meeting Follow-Up Automation
Here’s a scenario that happens constantly: a rep has a great call with a prospect. They promise to send a follow-up email with next steps and resources. They get pulled into another meeting. Then another. By the time they get back to their desk, it’s 6 PM and they’ve forgotten half of what was discussed. They send a generic follow-up or, worse, no follow-up at all.
Meeting follow-up automation ensures that never happens. When a rep logs a meeting activity in the CRM, especially external meetings with prospects or customers, the workflow triggers immediately. It creates a high-priority task due the same day: “Send follow-up email.” It creates another task: “Update CRM notes with discussion points.”
If it was a discovery call, the workflow creates a task to send a meeting summary. If it was a demo, it creates a task to send the demo recording and any relevant resources discussed. The tasks are specific to the meeting type.
The workflow also logs the meeting to your marketing automation platform so marketing knows this lead is engaged and active. Engagement scoring updates. Nurture sequences pause if needed.
Here’s the key part: if the rep doesn’t complete the follow-up task within 24 hours, the workflow sends a reminder notification. If 48 hours pass with no action, it escalates to the rep’s manager. Accountability is built in.
The follow-up email template the rep uses follows a consistent structure: thank the prospect for their time, summarize what you discussed, list out clear next steps with owners assigned to each, and attach any resources mentioned on the call. It’s professional, thorough, and fast to send because the structure is already there.
Implementation notes: integrate the workflow with your calendar system so it picks up all external meetings automatically. Reps shouldn’t have to manually log every call. If they have a meeting on their calendar with an external email domain, the workflow should trigger.
Track follow-up compliance rates. What percentage of meetings get followed up within 24 hours? If compliance is low, the workflow isn’t the problem. Training and accountability are.
Sequence Enrollment Automation
Manually enrolling contacts in email sequences is tedious and error-prone. A new lead comes in, the rep is supposed to add them to the cold outbound sequence, but they forget. Or they add them to the wrong sequence. Or they add them twice to different sequences and the prospect gets spammed.
Automated sequence enrollment fixes this. Based on specific triggers and conditions, contacts get enrolled in the right sequence at the right time without any manual work.
When a new outbound lead gets added to your CRM with a source of “Outbound” and status of “New,” the workflow automatically enrolls them in your cold outbound sequence. That might be a 7-touch sequence over 14 days with emails, calls, and LinkedIn touches.
When an inbound inquiry comes in, maybe from a contact form or content download, but they haven’t booked a meeting yet, the workflow enrolls them in an inbound follow-up sequence. This is warmer and faster-moving than cold outbound because they already showed interest.
Event attendees get special treatment. If someone attended your webinar or trade show booth, the workflow enrolls them in an event follow-up sequence that references the event and offers next steps related to what they learned.
For re-engagement, the workflow looks for contacts that were once qualified but have gone dormant. If the last activity was more than 60 days ago, their status is still “Qualified,” and they’re not currently in any active sequence, the workflow enrolls them in a re-engagement sequence. Something like “Haven’t heard from you in a while, wanted to check in.”
Before enrolling, the workflow checks important conditions. Is the contact already in a sequence? Don’t enroll them again. Do they have an active deal? Don’t spam them with prospecting emails. Have they unsubscribed? Obviously, don’t enroll them.
The workflow also defines clear exit conditions. If the contact replies to an email, remove them from the sequence immediately. If they book a meeting, take them out. If they unsubscribe or opt out, remove them and flag them as do-not-contact. If the sequence completes without engagement, update their status accordingly.
Implementation tips: dedupe aggressively before enrollment. Check if the contact or their company is already being worked by another rep. Respect all opt-outs and unsubscribes religiously. Not only is it legally required, it’s basic respect for people’s inboxes. And track where enrollments are coming from so you know which sources are feeding which sequences.
Reporting and Management Templates
Activity Compliance Monitoring
Sales is a numbers game. Reps need to hit activity minimums to create enough pipeline to hit quota. But tracking activity manually is a nightmare. Managers don’t want to be the activity police, and reps don’t want to be micromanaged. Automation removes the friction.
The activity compliance workflow runs daily, usually at the end of the business day like 6 PM. It checks each rep’s activity for that day against predefined minimums. Maybe your standards are 40 calls, 50 emails, and 10 LinkedIn touches per day. The workflow counts what each rep actually did.
If a rep is below threshold on any activity, they get a notification: “Activity check: You’re at 28 calls versus the 40 goal today.” It’s not punitive, it’s informational. The rep knows where they stand and can course-correct tomorrow.
The workflow logs compliance status every day. Over time, you can see trends. Is a rep consistently below on calls but crushing it on emails? Maybe they need call coaching. Are they above minimums but not generating pipeline? Maybe it’s a quality issue, not a quantity issue.
If a rep is below threshold for 3 or more consecutive days, the workflow escalates to the manager. This isn’t about getting the rep in trouble. It’s about identifying problems early. Maybe they’re struggling and need help. Maybe they’re working bad data. Whatever it is, catching it on day 3 is better than catching it at month end when they’ve already missed quota.
The workflow also feeds a weekly compliance report that summarizes activity across the whole team. Managers can see who’s hitting standards, who’s struggling, and where coaching is needed.
Implementation notes: adjust activity thresholds to match your sales motion. If you sell enterprise with long research cycles, 40 calls a day might be unrealistic. If you sell transactional SMB, 40 calls might be low. Set standards based on what top performers actually do.
Also consider ramping schedules for new reps. A rep in week 1 shouldn’t be held to the same standard as someone in month 6. Build ramping thresholds into the workflow.
Finally, focus on trends, not just daily snapshots. One bad day happens. A bad week is a pattern. A bad month is a serious problem. Give the data context.
Pipeline Health Checks
Most pipeline reviews happen once a week in a meeting where managers ask reps about deals. The rep says everything is great, the manager hopes they’re right, and nobody has real data. Automated pipeline health checks give you real data.
The workflow runs weekly, typically Monday morning at 7 AM before the week starts. It runs a series of health checks on every open opportunity in the pipeline and flags issues.
First check: stale deals. Any opportunity with no logged activity in the past 14 days and still in an open stage gets flagged. The workflow notifies the owner and adds it to a stale deals report. Fourteen days of silence means the deal is dead or the rep isn’t working it. Either way, it needs attention.
Second check: overdue deals. Any opportunity where the close date has passed but the stage is still open gets flagged for forecast review. The rep needs to either update the close date or close the deal. Keeping overdue deals in the pipeline inflates your forecast and creates false confidence.
Third check: missing next steps. Any opportunity past Discovery stage without a defined next step gets flagged. The workflow creates a task for the rep to update it. If you don’t know the next step, you don’t control the deal.
Fourth check: pipeline coverage. For each rep, the workflow calculates total pipeline value versus quota. If pipeline is less than 3x their quarterly quota, the workflow alerts the manager. The rep doesn’t have enough pipeline to hit their number. They need to prospect more or something is seriously wrong.
The workflow generates a weekly pipeline health report that summarizes all these issues: total pipeline value, coverage ratio, count of stale deals, count of overdue deals, count of deals missing next steps, and a list of at-risk deals with specific reasons why each one is at risk.
This report becomes the foundation for your Monday pipeline review meeting. Instead of asking vague questions like “How’s your pipeline?” you ask specific questions like “You have 8 stale deals with no activity in 14 days. What’s going on with the ABC Corp deal?”
Implementation tips: review the health report in every pipeline review meeting. Make it a standing agenda item. Track your pipeline health score over time. Set improvement targets. Maybe this month 15% of deals are stale. Next month, get it down to 10%.
Also calibrate the health checks to your business. A 14-day stale threshold works for most inside sales teams. If you sell enterprise with 6-month cycles, maybe stale is 30 days. If you sell transactional with 1-week cycles, stale might be 3 days. Adjust to your reality.
Making Templates Work for You
Here’s what most teams get wrong with workflow templates: they try to implement too many at once. They get excited, they build 10 automations in a week, they turn them all on, and chaos ensues. Notifications everywhere, tasks piling up, reps confused, managers overwhelmed.
Start small. Pick 2 or 3 high-impact workflows. Lead routing is usually a good first choice because speed to lead matters so much. Meeting follow-up is another great one because it’s high-frequency and consistency matters. At-risk deal alerts protect your pipeline from silent erosion.
Build them in a test environment first. Every CRM has a sandbox or test mode. Use it. Create sample leads and deals, run them through the workflows, watch what happens. Fix issues before they impact real prospects.
Get user feedback early. Show the workflow to the reps who’ll be affected. Walk them through what it does, what notifications they’ll get, what tasks will be created. Get their buy-in. If they hate it, they’ll ignore it or route around it.
Document everything. When you customize a template, write down what you changed and why. Six months from now when the workflow breaks and you forgot how it works, you’ll thank yourself. Include the purpose of the workflow, the logic, who owns it, and when it was last updated.
Monitor religiously in the first week. Check error logs daily. Make sure notifications are going to the right people. Confirm that tasks are being created correctly. Small issues compound fast if you don’t catch them early.
Then iterate. No workflow is perfect on the first try. As you use it, you’ll discover edge cases, see where the logic breaks, find better ways to do things. Treat workflows as living things that evolve with your business.
Key Takeaways
Workflow templates give you a massive head start on sales automation. Instead of figuring out every detail from scratch, you start with proven logic that other teams have battle-tested. You customize it to your process, deploy it, and start seeing results within days instead of months.
The most important templates to start with are lead routing for speed to lead, meeting follow-up for consistency, and at-risk deal alerts to protect your pipeline. These three alone will have measurable impact on conversion rates and deal velocity.
Remember that templates are starting points, not final products. Every sales team has unique processes, different CRM fields, specific terminology. Map the template logic to your reality. Adjust thresholds and triggers to match your sales cycle. Test thoroughly before going live.
Don’t try to implement everything at once. Pick 2 or 3 workflows, build them properly, get them working, then add more. Automation should reduce chaos, not create it. Start small, prove value, expand gradually.
Finally, assign ownership to every workflow. Someone needs to be responsible for monitoring it, maintaining it, and updating it when your process changes. Unmaintained workflows break silently and cause more problems than they solve.
The teams that win with automation are the ones that treat it as a system, not a set of isolated hacks. Build thoughtfully, document thoroughly, and maintain continuously.
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