This post will show you the top 10 alerts every sales team should use to optimize their sales workflow and close more deals.
What is a Salesforce Alert?
A Salesforce alert is a custom notification you can create in Salesforce that triggers a simple email to specific stakeholders whenever a certain condition is met. These triggers are typically changes inside a Salesforce record, such as field updates, or in some cases, a lack of change, such as no updates to the status of a deal for a certain amount of time.
And let’s be honest, no one wants to be checking Salesforce all day and combing through each record in their pipeline to find updates or missing information. Alerts are a great way to ensure best practices are followed without compounding your team’s workload. They also allow you to regularly bring attention to time-sensitive changes that require immediate action within the sales process, giving your team extra time to gather data and take action as necessary.
We’ve compiled some of the most useful alerts for sales development representatives, account executives, and sales managers so you can build alerts based on your team's most pressing needs.
Salesforce Alerts for SDRs
1. New Lead Alerts
We all know the stats around how important speed to lead is. This alert ensures you cut down on lead response time as much as possible. Pushing new lead alerts directly to your reps allows them to act within that critical first-hour window and ensures new leads don’t go unnoticed.
2. Missed SLA for Lead
You can set up custom alerts that trigger when certain SLA goals are not met for a particular lead. This is a great way to improve accountability within your sales team and ensure that SLA goals are consistently met without having to constantly follow up with reps manually.
3. Missing Lead Source
While marketing automation tools can help automatically fill in lead source data that comes in through the marketing site, there are still self-sourced and other types of leads where lead source info will need to be input manually. The missing lead source alert will notify team members when a lead’s source is missing so they can ensure your CRM has good data.
Salesforce Alerts for AE's
4. Opportunity Assignment Alert
This alert can notify your account managers when a new opportunity has been assigned to them, making sure they get context on the account and can see what next steps are. If you use Salesforce for marketing automation, you can also set an opportunity assignment alert for new opportunities sourced from a specific campaign to be assigned to certain reps.
5. Intent Alerts
Creating intent alerts allows you to react to changes in a prospect's intent score in real-time. This gives your sales team a chance to engage with their opportunities while they’re engaged with your company. You can set this alert to notify you if a prospect goes above or below a certain threshold or simply any time the score changes.
6. Close Date Overdue
In a busy team, things can easily fall through the cracks, especially with an account that may not be as responsive or has gone back and forth with an AE for some time. Creating an alert that triggers when a projected close date is overdue is a great failsafe to bring attention to a deal that may have stalled out and give you an opportunity to get it back on track. It can also help you better predict pipeline, as reps may need to move the opportunity to closed-lost.
7. Missing MEDDIC Fields
If your team follows the MEDDIC methodology to qualify your leads, you can create custom alerts that ping reps and managers when MEDDIC fields are missing or incomplete on a record, helping you improve data hygiene and ensure you’re gathering the necessary data to give your team the greatest chance of closing.
Salesforce Alerts for Sales Managers
8. Won Opportunity Alerts
Setting up automatic alerts that celebrate wins, big or small, allows you to provide your team with consistent positive reinforcement that can help boost motivation and morale. This is actually one of the top features our customers appreciate about Rattle, especially for sales teams that work remotely.
9. Deal Approvals
Approvals can be one of the biggest bottlenecks in the sales process, which makes direct approval alerts handy for both reps and managers. Creating an actionable alert that pushes directly to the manager that needs to sign off on the request can help remove this bottleneck in the approval process. You want to keep this time-sensitive information out of the black hole that is most inboxes.
10. Lost Opportunity
Understanding how and when an opportunity is lost is critical to refining your sales process. Creating an alert that pings you when a deal is lost allows you to follow up with the rep in charge and analyze what happens while the information is still fresh. In some cases, there may even still be a window of opportunity to re-approach the prospect if the problem is correctable and found quickly, which is why real-time alerts are so helpful.
Expand Your Alerts With Rattle
The native alert-building feature inside of Salesforce is where most people start building their alerts, but quickly find that it has some significant drawbacks.
The interface to build Salesforce alerts is not intuitive and requires significant training to learn. Once you do build the alerts, they still run the risk of being buried in the overflowing inboxes of your team, making them easy to miss.
If you really want to create an alert system that pushes directly to your team without any interference, you need to try Rattle.
Rattle is bi-directionally connects Slack or Teams with Salesforce, allowing you to build custom alerts for anything you can dream of as it relates to Salesforce. Even better, your reps can take action on those alerts from within their messaging app.
This means reps don’t need to be constantly checking Salesforce or their inbox, saving your team admin time and allowing them more opportunities to focus on their accounts.
Rattle is first and foremost designed for simplicity. It’s easy to set up, so you can begin creating custom alerts right away. And because it pushes directly to Slack, your team can get alerts whether they’re on their desktop, phone, or tablet, so they’ll never miss an update.
In fact, Rattle has quickly become such a crucial integration that most of our customers already can’t imagine their workflows without it:
Building an automated alert workflow with Rattle can help your team reclaim valuable sales time. In fact, one of our users saved as much as 4 hours per rep per week by implementing Rattle into their workflow. It can also help improve your response time, giving your team the extra edge to proactively solve problems and take action on opportunities in real-time.
Key Takeaways
Whether it’s celebrating more wins or helping your reps jump on leads faster, alerts are a really effective way of helping your sales team reach their goals without piling on extra admin work. With alerts, your team can stay focused on their clients while ensuring the little things don’t slip through the cracks, giving you more opportunities to close deals and hit your targets.
