Workflow Trigger: Stale Opportunities

The Stale Opportunities Workflow Trigger allows you to build a workflow that will trigger whenever a contact has had the “open” status for a set number of days, allowing you to automate follow-up actions and/or opportunity status changes depending on your needs. With this trigger, contacts who have the “open” opportunity status applied for greater than the set duration in days will be added to this workflow. This article will give an overview of how to set up a workflow using the Stale Opportunities Workflow Trigger.

Note that this article will assume that you already have Opportunities and Pipelines set up. For a detailed overview of how to set these up in your account, see our articles, “Opportunities Overview” and “How to Create and Edit Pipelines”.

Step 1: Start a new workflow or edit an existing one

Step 2: Creating and Editing the Trigger

• Click “Add New Workflow Trigger”

• Select Stale Opportunities in the Opportunities section of the Workflow Triggers Menu or use the search feature. Once selected, the Trigger setup menu will appear

• (Optional) You can change the workflow builder display name of this trigger using the textbox below Workflow Trigger Name. Note that this will only affect the display name within the workflow builder and has no other impact on the content or functionality of this Workflow Trigger.

• Press + Add filters to expand the Filters section of the Trigger setup menu. There are multiple options available to customize this trigger. Note that the Duration in Days filter is REQUIRED for this trigger to function

• (Required) Duration in Days allows you to select the number of days that a contact can be assigned the “open” opportunity status before being determined to be “stale” and thus added to this workflow. 

• This trigger is non-retroactive. This means that if upon creating this workflow, you have a contact who has been assigned the open status for longer than your set duration in days, then the trigger will not necessarily fire for them.

  • • Ex: If you select 30 days, and upon publishing this workflow you have a contact who has had the “open” status for 33 days, then the trigger will not fire.

    • Ex: If you select 30 days, and upon publishing this workflow you have a contact who has had the “open” status for 28 days, then in two days the trigger will fire.

• This trigger will fire in multiples of the set duration in days.

  • • Ex: If you select 30 days, then this trigger will fire for a contact who has been in the “open” status for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, etc.

    • Note: Because of this, it is recommended to add an action to this workflow that will change the contact’s opportunity status from “open” to “abandoned” so that they won’t be run through this workflow multiple times.

• In pipeline will limit this workflow to only apply to stale contacts that are within one of your selected pipelines. If you add this filter parameter, you will then have the option to create a separate filter parameter called Pipeline stage.

• Pipeline stage will limit this workflow to only apply to stale contacts that are within a specified stage of the above-specified pipeline.

• Has Tag and Doesn’t Have Tag will both limit which contacts can be added to this workflow based on their tags

  • • Has Tag will only allow contacts who have a selected tag to be added to this workflow

    • Doesn’t Have Tag will allow all contacts to be added to this workflow EXCEPT for ones that have the selected tag

    • Note: You can add both of these filter parameters to one trigger, but they operate either redundantly or cancel each other out, so it is recommended to use only one.

• Please Note: You can also filter by Custom Fields which will allow you to only allow contacts to be added to this workflow who meet selected custom value criteria which you can set up elsewhere in your account.

• Press Save Trigger in the bottom right corner of the Trigger setup menu

Step 3: Set up applicable Workflow Action(s). We have multiple articles available to explain the setup of each of the Workflow Actions. Feel free to review our articles on these for more information on setting these up.

Pro Tip: You can use any Workflow Actions to be triggered by the Stale Opportunities trigger or you can leave this workflow without any actions.

Step 4: Press Save in the top right corner of your browser to save the workflow

• If your Workflow is ready to be enabled, make sure the toggle switch under Save is set to Publish

• Be sure to test your Workflow to ensure it is set up correctly using the Test Workflow button next to the Publish toggle switch. 

  • • For an in-depth overview of Workflow Testing see our article, “Using the Testing Features in Workflows”

Now your workflow is set up and ready to go with the Stale Opportunities Workflow Trigger.