Expedite Month-end Sales Quote Updates

💼 Business Problem

Latency in sales operations handling high-priority requests results in the inability to close sales deals efficiently at month-end, a critical period where an especially high volume of requests are filed around-the-clock. These requests often sit stagnant in always-full email inboxes, since email notifications are not an effective method to immediately notify sales operations of urgent actions that need to be taken.

If these high priority issues are not responded to in a timely manner, this may extend time-to-close and slow down deal cycles, with more deals slipping beyond month/quarter close - making it harder to hit department and territory sales targets, and decelerating business growth.

🙌 What Success Looks Like

Sales operations specialists are immediately informed of high priority requests coming from the sales team. Unlike other notification methods where these requests may come from a variety of communication channels such as email or chat tools, PagerDuty can be used as a centralized communication space to triage and orchestrate all these efforts. Additionally, sales operations specialists are able to delay work on non-urgent issues, and only focus on the highest priority requests during this time-sensitive period.

🛠 Related Guides

⚙️ How It Works

The Salesforce application will be leveraged in this usage scenario, however you can apply this process to other CRM applications with some customization.

In this response, whenever a P0/P1 Case Request is submitted in Salesforce to the sales operations team, through PagerDuty’s email integration capabilities, these requests are converted to real-time notifications to sales operation specialists who can then respond, diagnose, and resolve these high priority issues.

Here is what the PagerDuty notification looks like:

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ℹ️ Step-by-Step Setup

󠀠󠀠󠀠Set Up Your Team

Have each sales operation specialist configure their user notifications accordingly so they can be immediately alerted through their preferred choice via phone.
Place the entire team on a schedule called “Sales Operations Team”, adding sales operation specialists and designating shifts amongst them.
Lastly, add the schedule to an escalation policy called “Sales Operations Team” to complete the notification setup. You can optionally place a manager as an added escalation point in case requests are not acted upon by sales operation specialists within a reasonable amount of time.

Connect Salesforce Cases to PagerDuty

In PagerDuty

To add the Salesforce Application to PagerDuty, navigate to Services → Service Directory and click +New Service.
Name your service “High Priority Sales Quote Update Requests” along with a description.
On the Assign screen, click Select an Existing Escalation Policy, and search for “Sales Operations Team” configured above on the dropdown.
On the Integrations screen, select Email from the search bar, dropdown or from our most popular integrations list.
Once you are done entering your service settings, click Create Service.
You will now be in the service’s Integrations tab. Copy your integration email and keep it in a safe place for later use.

In Salesforce

Set up a workflow rule for the Case object to construct logic into which types of Salesforce Case requests the sales operations team needs to be immediately aware of. Suggested Rule Criterias are located below:

Tie the workflow rule to an email alert, inserting the PagerDuty email integration address from Step 6 into the Additional Emails field.
Lastly, build an email template tied to the email alert to add in additional field data from Salesforce records into the PagerDuty notification that will be displayed in the request. Ensure the details provide enough context for sales operations specialists who will be actioning these requests.