Do your leads or opportunities require approval before marking them as converted/closed?

A lot of organisations require a sign-off from a senior member of the team to convert a lead within salesforce or even mark an opportunity as closed won. This ensures the records that are going to be processed are in a fit state to add value to the business and are not obsolete data.

This process can become quite timely and unorganised very quickly as the only way for a sales rep to notify the approver would be to send a personal message on another platform (e.g., Slack) or use the chatter and activity component in salesforce to send them a notification. This can become difficult for the approver to manage their approval workload as it can become increasingly confusing what and where records are that need approval as each record has its own chatter/activity component, and messaging platforms such as Slack can become extremely busy with constant messages from anyone about anything within the business.

Due to this confusion, it only decreases the approver’s productivity as the more approval requests that keep coming in the more time they are spending on finding the correct record, checking the data, and then marking it at the correct stage. The time taken to complete this task is prolonged because the approver must keep moving from record to record as opposed to all requests being in one place.

This can also create frustration for the approvers as they could be getting on with other items but instead, they are trying to remember what needs approving and then searching through the system trying to find the correct record that their colleague has mentioned them in, and even though all requests would be detailed within the notifications of the users’ salesforce, the notifications would also include anything else that they have been mentioned in, which as a senior member of an organisation they most likely have a lot of notifications on a regular basis which would enhance the chance of missing an approval.

The repercussions of missing an approval can become quite crucial and impact the business negatively as this could be a hot lead who’s ready to engage in business with your organisation or an opportunity due to start the invoicing process. As a result of this, your lead would become tired of waiting to hear from you and move on to a competitor and your opportunity may collapse due to a loss of respect from the client on how their business has been handled.

How can a managed service with Ignyto help with this?

Managed service packages (MSP) are a bucket of hours that you can purchase from Ignyto and use up monthly. This means that Ignyto would be on hand to assist with anything salesforce related within your business that can be completed within the agreed time. Whilst working with clients via an MSP, Ignyto consultants will be actively looking for ways that the salesforce instance could be enhanced and improved to increase user productivity so that you are getting the most out of your system. In this use case, Ignyto would immediately address this manual approval process by recommending that there be an official automated approval process implemented.

What is an automated approval process?

An automated approval process is a process that can be implemented into a salesforce org to decrease the time it takes for specified approvers to approve certain records within salesforce. This is set up via criteria-based rules so that it is only certain records that meet certain requirements upon save that will be sent for approval. These criteria settings can be customised to meet the needs of your business so that whenever a user tries to save down a record that meets the criteria for approval, it will be sent directly to the necessary approver. This allows the approver to see all their approval requests in one place so there is no need for moving between pages, they can simply go to their approval requests list view, click into each one and approve or disapprove. It is also possible to set up multiple approvers either as a hierarchy (once approved by one the record moves up the hierarchy to be approved again) or as a group of approvers (only one of the group of approvers need to approve record).