The working boundary
A sales workflow needs a rule, an owner, and a stop condition.
The goal is not to automate a sales person. It is to remove the work that makes a capable sales person spend their day reconstructing state: which lead arrived, which record is incomplete, what needs a response, and who owns the next step.
The moment a rule cannot tell a routine enquiry from a sensitive account, a strategic opportunity, or a record with missing context, it should make that uncertainty visible.
Systemise: lead capture, enrichment checks, routing, and next-step reminders.
Keep human: deal strategy, exception handling, commercial promises, and relationship judgement.
Write the stop: missing owner, conflicting signal, unusual account state, or unclear consent.
Review the queue: turn recurring exceptions into a better rule, not silent workarounds.
Start with one path
Build the automation around a real sales decision.
01
Trace one lead path
Follow a lead from arrival to first useful action and mark every repeated handoff.
02
Name the evidence
State exactly which fields make routing or follow-up safe enough to automate.
03
Design the exception queue
Route incomplete, conflicting, or high-context cases to the person accountable for the next decision.
04
Review what stopped
Use the queue to improve the capture rule, not to hide uncertainty in a generic status.
