Sales operations automation
The seven workflows we are asked for most in sales teams, with what each involves and what it costs. The theme throughout: a salesperson's time should go on conversations, not on being the integration layer between a form and a CRM.
1. Lead capture, dedupe and routing — $8,000 to $11,000
What happens now: an enquiry arrives via web form or shared inbox. Someone checks a few times a day, searches HubSpot or Salesforce for an existing company, creates or updates the record, works out who owns the territory, assigns it, pastes the enquiry into a note, and sends a holding reply. Around nine minutes per lead, with an average response delay measured in hours.
What we build: the form posts directly into a workflow that matches on company domain (not name — names are unreliable), creates or updates the record, applies your routing rules, assigns the owner, posts to the sales channel, and sends the acknowledgement. Anything the rules cannot classify goes to a human rather than being guessed at.
The part that matters: the labour saving is secondary. Acknowledgement inside sixty seconds including overnight and weekends is what changes inbound conversion, and duplicate records stop accumulating because the match runs every single time rather than when someone has a spare moment.
2. Quote and proposal generation — $9,000 to $14,000
What happens now: someone copies last month's proposal, changes the client name, updates the pricing table, exports a PDF, and hopes they caught every instance of the previous client's name.
What we build: an intake form populates a document from a maintained template, pulls pricing from one source of truth, logs the opportunity, and routes for e-signature. Signature then triggers the handoff workflow below.
Cost driver: whether pricing involves genuine calculation. Flat rate cards sit at the bottom of the range; tiered pricing with volume breaks, multi-currency or configurable options sits at the top.
3. Sales-to-delivery handoff — $9,000 to $15,000
What happens now: a deal closes and a mental checklist begins. Create the project, set up the folder, brief the delivery team, change the CRM stage, raise the first invoice, schedule kickoff. Done slightly differently each time, by whoever is free.
What we build: signature triggers project creation from the right template, folder structure, CRM stage change, first invoice, channel setup, and a pre-drafted welcome message queued for a human to send.
Why we recommend this one early: the before-and-after is visible to everyone within a fortnight. First automations have to earn trust as well as save time, and this one does both.
4. Pipeline and forecast reporting — $8,000 to $13,000
What happens now: exports from the CRM, a pivot table, and forty minutes of formatting to produce numbers that were already in the system — and are stale by the time the meeting starts.
What we build: a live dashboard, or a scheduled summary delivered to Slack or email already readable. Weighted pipeline, stage movement week over week, deals with no activity in fourteen days, and forecast against target.
Worth asking first: does anyone read the current report? A meaningful share of recurring reports are produced for nobody. Turn it off for a month before paying to automate it — see what should not be automated.
5. CRM hygiene and enrichment — $8,000 to $13,000
What happens now: duplicates accumulate, company data goes stale, required fields sit empty, and reporting quietly becomes unreliable. Then someone spends a week cleaning it and the cycle restarts.
What we build: continuous deduplication on domain and tax ID, enrichment on creation, stale-record flagging, and normalisation of the fields your reporting depends on.
If records are dirty because three people enter data three ways, fix that first. Paying monthly to clean up after a process you could change for free is the most common waste we see in sales operations.
6. Activity logging and follow-up chasing — $8,000 to $12,000
What happens now: salespeople are asked to log calls and emails, and do so inconsistently, which makes pipeline data untrustworthy and creates a management conversation nobody enjoys.
What we build: automatic logging of email and calendar activity against the right record, plus nudges on deals with no contact in a defined window. The nudge goes to the owner, not to their manager — the goal is a working pipeline, not a surveillance tool. We do not build activity-scoring or monitoring systems; see what we refuse to automate.
7. Commission calculation — $9,000 to $16,000
What happens now: a monthly spreadsheet that one person maintains, that everyone depends on, and that nobody else fully understands. Disputes take days to resolve because the working is hard to follow.
What we build: calculation from closed-won data against your plan rules, with a statement per rep showing the working, and exceptions routed for approval rather than silently applied.
Cost driver: plan complexity. Flat percentage is simple. Accelerators, clawbacks, split credit and team overlays each add branches — this is an exception logic project more than a calculation one.
What we would do first
In a sales team under about fifty people, the usual sequence is lead routing, then handoff, then reporting. Lead routing has the clearest payback and the most visible improvement. Handoff removes the errors that damage new client relationships. Reporting comes third because it is the one most likely to reveal that the report should simply be deleted.
Commission and CRM hygiene are better later. Both benefit from the data discipline the earlier builds impose.
Which of these does your team recognise?
Thirty minutes on the phone and we can usually price the work on the spot.