This article covers:

PREREQUISITES: Automatizer is a paid-for add-on to Pipeliner. Please contact your Account Manager directly to discuss how it can streamline your business or email customer-success@pipelinersales.com and we will ask your Account Manager to contact you.

Please make sure to read this article — and watch the videos — to learn more about the features of Automatizer in detail. This article is not a detailed description of each feature.

Automatizer is our “Point & Click” automation tool designed to help you easily and graphically build your organisation’s processes into Pipeliner. Automatizer allows you to streamline your workflows and empower your teams working with Pipeliner by automating repetitive tasks and communications.

We’ve made it as easy as you would expect from Pipeliner! No complex language or coding is required!

Every process consists of triggers, if/then conditions and can include multiple actions.

When the close date for an opportunity is in the past, we’re going to automatically archive the Opportunity using an Automatizer process.

As an add-on, for those customers who actively use “Velocity Days” for their pipeline stages, we’ll then add an additional criteria to the Condition to show how you could also include “Overdue” as one of your criteria to identify Opportunities to be archived.

Open the “Automatizer” from the “Tools” menu. Click on the “Create New” button ⤵

Click on ”Save“ to save your process. This will launch the “Process Editor” ⤵

Click on "Start" to choose when you want the trigger to activate ⤵

For our example, it’s going to be “Opportunity” and we want our process to trigger every morning at 7.00am to find any new Opportunities where the "Close Date" is in the past (and, for those customers that use it, that are also Overdue) ⤵

Click on "Save" to save your Trigger criteria and move onto setting up your Condition(s).

We want our Condition(s) to be based on the “Close Date” for Opportunities and our process to trigger for all Opportunities where the Close Date is in the past. We’re also going to add a second criteria which will limit the opportunities to be archived to those that are “Overdue” (if you don’t use this feature, just ignore this part).

When setting up a pipeline, Pipeliner Admins can enable an expected duration or maximum number of Velocity Days for each individual sales step. Opportunities that remain in a sales step for longer than this expected duration are flagged as “Overdue”.

In the example below, the maximum number of "Velocity Days" that opportunities should spend in the "Proposal" step has been set up as "50". Any Opportunity sat in Proposal for more than 50 days will therefore be Overdue. There are 3 Opportunities that are Overdue as indicated by this icon ⤵

...and also in the Quick View as “3 Velocity issues” ⤵

You can also filter “Overdue” opportunities from the "Filter" tab. It’s an option on the Preset screen in the “Due in Sales Step” field which is the field that indicates how many days are left until the Opportunity becomes “Overdue” ⤵

When using Automatizer, you can only use the Custom filter option, so select “Overdue” in the Preset screen and then change to the Custom screen to see the corresponding option to choose when setting up your Condition ⤵

Back in Automatizer, for our Condition, we’ll first choose Closing Date and then “less than” and "Today". When the process runs at 7.00am every morning, any Opportunity with a "Closing Date" of before today’s date will then be included. Feel free to adapt the criteria to suit your own business needs! ⤵

For those customers using Velocity Days, we’ll also add “Days in Sales Step is less than or equal to 0”. 

We only want our process to archive Open Opportunities (not Won Opportunities) so we’re going to add in “Opportunity Status” = "Open". 

Finally, we have multiple pipelines and we only want this process to archive Direct Sales Opportunities so we need to add another criteria “Pipeline” = "Direct Sales" ⤵

NOTE: Take care to make your Condition(s) as specific and detailed as possible to avoid unintended consequences!

Click on "Save" to save your Condition(s) and move onto your Action.

Actions are executed when a process is triggered and the Conditions which govern them have been met.

Click on "Action" to open up the panel on the right hand side and add in the details of your Action.

We now want an action which will archive the Opportunities that meet our Condition ⤵

We want to execute our action immediately, our Action Type will be Archive Record and we’ll then need to fill in the required information on the Opportunity Lost Form ⤵

Click on "Opportunity Lost Form" to complete the required fields.

When any Opportunity is Archived in Pipeliner, the Opportunity Status is changed to Lost and the Opportunity is moved to the Archive menu (or visible only from the Account Opportunities tab for Starter Tier customers). "Lost Reason" is a required field in order to archive. The list of Lost Reasons is customisable by your Pipeliner Administrator in the "Admin Module" › "Fields & Forms" and the Opportunity tab under Fields. You might want to add a specific reason to use when an Opportunity is archived by your process rather than manually by a user as this would be a very useful value to use in your Lost Opportunity reporting to allow you to differentiate between Lost Reasons.

NOTE: You can also make other fields required on the Lost Opportunity Form.

We’ve added a specific Lost Reason of “Auto Archived due to expired Close Date” and published our changes so it will be available for us to select in our Archive Record action.

Click on Save to save your choices for the form.

Finally, you need to choose whether you want any uncompleted activities to be automatically set as “Completed” whenever an Opportunity is archived by the process. Tick “Automatically Complete all related activities” if you do ⤵

You’ll need to publish to save your changes to update your process and, of course, you should always test your process before activating ⤵

As part of testing and planning your process, remember you can create the same filter from the Opportunities menu so you know exactly how many records (currently) match the criteria and can look at them in detail to make sure that you’ll be happy for them to be automatically archived!

When you’re confident that it is going to work exactly as you expect, set to Active and daily at the time you choose, the process will run and schedule the task for any Opportunities meeting your conditions.

Use the "Process Manager" and notifications to keep track of your processes — for more informations look into this article.