Alpha Pipeline Steps
Hand the human half of your sales process out as tracked work, with reminders and escalation
Pipeline Steps
Some parts of a sales process cannot be automated: somebody has to write the summary of a conversation, record what came out of a call, or take a new customer through onboarding. Alpha can hand each of those out as a task with an owner and a deadline, nudge the owner when it goes past that deadline, and pass it up to their manager if it stays undone.
Everything on this page is off by default. A team that works its pipeline by hand keeps working it by hand until somebody switches a step on.
The five steps
| Step | Fires when | Typical owner | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appointment summary | An appointment is booked | The setter who sourced it | Capture what the conversation was about, so whoever runs the appointment does not open with questions already answered |
| Appointment prep | An appointment is booked | Whoever runs it | Reach out beforehand: a message, a personal video, so the person turns up |
| Appointment outcome | The appointment has been and gone with no outcome recorded | Whoever ran it | Say what came of it, which is what branches the rest of the pipeline |
| No-show follow-up | An appointment is marked as a no-show | Whoever ran it | Win the person back, with the message already drafted |
| Customer handover | A payment is confirmed | The customer's new owner | Work through everything a new customer needs to get started |
The appointment summary step is special: whatever the owner writes when completing it is copied onto the appointment itself, so it shows up where the person running the appointment will actually look.
Configuring a step
Open Settings → Tenant → CRM → Pipeline steps, switch the workflow on, and add the steps you want.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Assign to | Who the step lands on: the appointment's owner, the setter who sourced it, the record's owner, or the next person holding a role (round robin) |
| Role | Which role to rotate through, when Assign to is set to a role |
| Subject | The task title the owner sees |
| Description | Context shown on the task |
| Draft message | Text prepared for the owner to review and send. Use it for steps that come down to "say this to the customer" |
| Due after (hours) | Counted from the moment that unblocks the step: the booking being made, the appointment ending, the money arriving |
| Escalate after (hours) | How long past the deadline before the owner's manager is told. Leave empty to never escalate |
| Checklist | Sub-steps, each ticked off individually |
Assignment can come up empty
A step assigned to the setter needs that setter to have a login; a step assigned to a role needs somebody to hold it. When nobody can be found, the step is skipped and logged rather than saved without an owner; a task nobody owns is a task nobody does.
The setter route falls back to the appointment's owner, so a team member without a login does not silently swallow the work.
Checklists and gates
A checklist item can be marked as a gate. Until a gate is ticked, the items after it cannot be, and the task cannot be closed.
Use it for the thing your team does not control. The classic case: a customer has to install an app, return a form or send a document before the rest of onboarding can happen. Without a gate, a checklist records intentions; with one, it records facts.
Reminders and escalation
- An overdue step is nudged to its owner once: an overdue task is not an hourly alarm.
- If it is still open after the escalation window, it goes to the owner's manager (Employee → Manager in HR), and the task records who it went to.
- A step whose owner has no manager is marked as escalated anyway, so it is not reconsidered every hour for a manager who does not exist.
Escalation needs a manager on the employee record. If nobody has one, steps will go overdue and stay there.
Where the work shows up
- CRM → Activities: pipeline steps are ordinary activities of type Task, so they appear in every activity view alongside everything else.
- My open pipeline steps: the steps waiting on you, soonest deadline first.
- Notifications: the owner is told when a step is handed to them, when it goes overdue, and the manager when it is escalated.
Automatic messages to the customer
Two messages run without anybody being asked to send them. Both are off until configured, and both are claimed before sending so a retry cannot send twice.
After the appointment
Set Follow-up after (hours) on a booking widget to ask whoever attended how it went. Only appointments that actually took place qualify; there is nothing to ask somebody who never turned up.
Template: Appointment Follow-up.
Winning a lost lead back
Under Settings → Tenant → CRM, switch on Re-engagement and set how many days after a lost appointment to reach out. Sixty days is a common choice.
Template: Lead Re-engagement.
These go out by email. Sending the same message as a DM on Instagram or WhatsApp is restricted by those platforms outside a short reply window, so a re-engagement DM months later cannot be automated; configure a pipeline step with a draft message instead and let a person send it.