Automating lead qualification and opportunity creation so SDRs spend time selling, not clicking.
A B2B SaaS company was getting consistent meeting requests through their website. Volume wasn't the issue. The issue was everything that happened after someone booked a demo.
Once a lead hit the CRM, it sat in a queue until an SDR had time to review it, decide if it qualified, manually build out a Salesloft cadence, and then create an opportunity by hand once the meeting was confirmed. That is a lot of steps before a rep ever actually touches the deal, and each one was a place where things could slow down, get skipped, or just not happen at all.
The effects showed up in two ways. Follow-up was inconsistent. Some leads got called quickly, others sat for days depending on how slammed a given SDR was that week. And leadership couldn't trust the pipeline numbers because opportunities were getting created late, sometimes well after the meeting was already on the calendar. They were making forecast decisions off data that hadn't caught up to what was actually happening.
I was brought in to own the build from start to finish. That meant running discovery, scoping the qualification logic, configuring the automation in Salesforce, and getting the Salesloft integration working.
The stakeholder group included Marketing, SDR leadership, and Sales. Each team had a slightly different perspective on what the automation should do, so getting clear decisions documented early was what kept the project from dragging.
I kicked things off with a discovery session: one call, all the right people in the room. Marketing, SDR leadership, and the head of Sales. The goal was to get alignment on what "qualified" actually meant before any automation got built. That sounds like a basic step, but teams often think they agree on criteria until someone starts asking edge case questions.
We worked through the things that mattered most: what should automatically disqualify a lead, how to handle job title validation without triggering too many false positives, and what to do when a lead was already enrolled in an existing cadence. That last one came up more than expected. Enrolling someone in two cadences at once is easy to do accidentally and creates a bad experience fast.
Once the rules were locked down and signed off, I built the qualification logic in Salesforce using Flow. It checks each inbound lead against the criteria, routes it accordingly, and kicks off the Salesloft enrollment through the native integration when a lead qualifies. When a meeting gets confirmed, Salesforce creates the opportunity automatically with the lead details already attached.
The core deliverables included:
Built in Salesforce Flow, applying the business rules from discovery to evaluate and route inbound leads without SDR review.
Triggered automatically based on lead segment and meeting type, with conflict-checking to prevent duplicate enrollment.
Fires when a meeting is confirmed, with lead source, contact details, and meeting context already populated on the record.
A mapping step added mid-build to clean up inconsistent field data before the qualification rules evaluated it.
Qualification criteria, field mapping logic, and cadence enrollment rules written up for the internal team to own and maintain going forward.
Results showed up within the first week.
SDRs stopped doing the manual review and cadence setup work. Each rep was saving around 10 minutes per lead, which adds up quickly across a 25-person team. But the bigger shift was what they did with that time. They stayed in sales conversations instead of stopping to do data entry.
Follow-up started faster too. Leads were getting contacted within minutes of a confirmed meeting instead of whenever an SDR got to them. That kind of responsiveness matters when someone just took the time to book a demo.
On the Sales side, reps stopped having to build opportunity records from scratch. By the time a rep needed to act, the deal was already in Salesforce with the context attached. They could just move. And for leadership, the pipeline finally reflected what was actually happening. Opportunities were being created at the right time, which meant the forecast numbers were something you could actually plan around. They called that out specifically as a win.
What the project really fixed was the gap between a lead taking action and the team being able to respond. That gap had been costing them every time, and closing it made the whole process more consistent and easier to manage.
Whether you're scaling a CRM, rescuing a troubled implementation, or looking for a Salesforce consultant to join your team, I'd love to connect.