There are flashy Salesforce automations and there are boring ones. The boring ones do most of the work. Here are the five that, in my experience, every growing ops team should have running before they think about anything more ambitious.
1. Inbound lead routing with a fallback
If a new lead lands and your team finds out about it the next morning when somebody scrolls a report, you have a problem. The bare minimum:
- Round-robin or weighted assignment to the right team, respecting territory.
- A fallback when the assigned owner is OOO or quota-capped. Most teams skip this, and it's where leads die.
- Fast notification — email plus Slack or SMS, with the lead's name, source, and what they said.
- A timer. If nobody touches the lead in ten minutes, it reroutes.
Done well, this single automation usually moves time-to-first-touch from hours to minutes. The conversion lift is real.
2. Activity logging that doesn't depend on willpower
Reps don't log activities reliably. They never have. Stop trying to fix that with policy. Fix it with integrations:
- Email integration that logs without a click.
- Calendar integration that creates Salesforce events automatically.
- Phone integration (RingCentral, Dialpad, Aircall) that logs calls and writes outcomes.
If your reporting is wrong because activity data is incomplete, the fix is upstream of the report.
3. Stage-change automation with required fields
When an opportunity moves to "Proposal Sent," you should know who sent what, when, and to whom. The automation:
- Validation rules require key fields before stage advancement.
- Record-triggered flows create the right follow-up tasks for the rep, automatically.
- Stage-change notifications to the right people — not all of them.
The trick is restraint. Every team I've worked with has a backlog of "wouldn't it be nice if Salesforce did X when Y happens." The right answer is usually "yes, eventually, after the obvious ten things." This list of three is the obvious ten.
4. Document generation for the top three documents you produce
Whatever your top three documents are — proposal, contract, NDA, statement of work — they should be one click. The data lives in Salesforce. The template lives in Salesforce or a doc tool. The signed PDF comes back to Salesforce. Nobody copy-pastes anything.
If a salesperson is spending an hour assembling each proposal, that's an hour of their week, every week, for every salesperson. The math is brutal.
5. A renewal or follow-up reminder you actually trust
Almost every team has the same gap: the existing customer or warm lead who falls off the radar. The fix isn't a fancy nurture campaign. It's:
- A scheduled job that finds accounts in the right state (renewal in 60 days, last activity 30+ days ago, etc.).
- A task created on the right owner.
- A notification when that task is overdue.
Every team I've helped build this for has been surprised by how many opportunities it surfaces in the first month.
What I'm not on this list
Notice what isn't here: lead scoring, predictive analytics, complex multi-step nurtures, AI summarization, custom dashboards. Those have their place — sometimes. But if you don't have these five running, those will not save you. You're trying to optimize a process that isn't running yet.
If you want help putting these in, get in touch. Most of the five take a week or two together to do right.