Process Rules

Applying Rules to a Process is a great way to help you stay on top of what's important, keep the momentum up, and ensure your Prospects and Projects are in a healthy state. For example, you may want to:

• Highlight Sales Projects that are stalling; if too much time has elapsed, emphasize urgency by giving your process rule a unique name and description of the problem! These will display whenever a user hovers their mouse cursor over an alert.

• Get an alert if a new Prospect hasn't been contacted within a certain number of days, hours or minutes.
• Give the team Coaching Advice if an Account Growth Project hasn't had any activity.

Benefits

Once configured, alerts will trigger in the form of blue puzzle pieces, yellow flags and red flags throughout your Membrain instance. They'll help you prioritize your efforts and focus on Prospects, Sales Projects or Account Growth Projects that require more attention.

 Rules can alert you in various ways:

• Show a color-coded icon on the Project in question
• Send a notification to the owner or others on the team via Membrain Guide 
• Use automated events to send emails, create tasks, create new projects, add labels, and send  notifications to Slack/Teams, to name just a few.  

Visualization

There are 4 different Health Statuses that a Project can have, based on the rules that are configured. Of course, if no icon is shown, then the Project is Healthy.

Blue Puzzle Piece - coaching advice indicates that there is something that needs to be addressed, even if it is not yet urgent. 

Yellow flags mean that quick action is required to address the problem at hand.

The final level is the red flag – a serious warning that should not be ignored.  Something very important has been missed that could impact the success of a Project.

Prioritization

Configure Lists using filters, sorting, and grouping, which will help you work through your Projects in the order of their importance.

Setup

Rules and their importance are set up by your Membrain Administrator and are applied in the Process Editor. Upon creation, you'll be given the option to apply a name and description to your rule for easy reference (see below for an example of what this might look like)

Rules can be set to trigger based on the following criteria:

• Age: How long the Prospect/Project has been in the pipeline, in days, hours or minutes
• Stalled: Number of days, hours or minutes since a process step was last completed
• Activity: Number of days, hours or minutes since the last completed activity in the Prospect/Project
• Number of Activities: Number of Activities that have been completed on a prospect/project. For example, count of activities is equal to or less than 2
• Time in Stage: How long the Prospect/Project has been in the current stage, in days, hours or minutes
• Next Activity: How many days, hours or minutes since a Prospect/Project last had a future activity planned
• Date: This rule triggers some length of time before or after a specified date.
• Custom: A rule that triggers when a custom condition is met.

Additional Rules to Prospecting Processes:

• Time to first activity: Number of minutes, hours or days until the first logged Activity related to the Prospect.
• Not Assigned: Number of minutes, hours or days the Prospect has been Unassigned.

For easy setup, some important options have been predefined, with an editable number of days before being triggered - to give you full control. The intensity of the rule increases based on the time you configure during the rule setup.  For example, start the alert with a puzzle piece, after x amount of days increases to a yellow flag, and after x amount of days increases again to a red flag.

The time frames for these predefined rules can be edited:

Optional - No alert is issued, this is entirely optional for the salesperson 

Helpful - Issues a blue puzzle piece instantly

Mandatory - Issues a blue puzzle piece instantly, followed by a yellow flag

Important - Issues a blue puzzle piece instantly, followed by a yellow flag after 7 days, followed by a red flag after 14 days (but these can be changed to minutes, hours and days to better reflect your needs)

Critical - Issues a red flag instantly *use with caution and only in extremely serious situations

Example Rules

Here are some examples of ways you could set up Rules for your Process. They can be applied to Prospecting Processes, Sales Processes, and Account Growth Processes. Examples 1 and 2 are basic rules, example 3 is more advanced, whereas examples 4, 5 and 6 are more complex rules.

Example 1 - Stalled (No progress)

Stalling with no progress means that STEPS haven't been completed in the project, even if there's been activity. For this example, you want to highlight Sales Projects that stall for more than 21 days in the final two stages of our Sales Process. 

To suit your team, you want this to generate a blue puzzle piece after 14 days and a yellow flag after 21 days

1. Go to Sales Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Stalled.
4. Select the final two stages under Applies to.
5. Drag the Importance bar to Mandatory.
6. Edit the blue puzzle piece to 14 days and the yellow flag to 21 days.
7. Click Save.

Example 2 - No Activity

You want to highlight Sales Projects that have had no activity after a certain time span.  No activity relates to no emails sent, no notes recorded, no appointments made, etc.  

To suit your workflow, you have decided that you would like this to generate a blue puzzle piece after 7 days and a yellow flag after 14 days. You want this to apply to all stages.

1. Go to Sales Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Activity. 
4. Type is and Activity Type is set to Any.
5. Drag the Importance bar to Mandatory.
6. Edit the blue puzzle piece to 7 days and the yellow flag to 14 days.
7. Click Save.

Example 3 - Time to First Activity

For Prospecting you might want to have a shorter time between creation and a follow-up with a first activity

1. Go to Sales Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Time to First Activity
4. Set what Stage is rule should apply to and additional conditions
5. Drag the Importance bar to anything from Helpful to Critical.
6. Edit the different puzzle pieces/flags to match your criteria.
7. Click Save.

Example 4 - No Phone Call

You want to call attention to Account Growth Projects that have had no Phone Calls after a certain time span. Phone Call in this scenario only relates to the Activity Type, meaning that you can use Call, Task, Note, etc. to log this activity, as long as the Activity Type is set as a Phone Call.

To suit your workflow, you have decided that you would like this to generate a blue puzzle piece after 10 days, a yellow flag after 15 days, and a red flag after 20 days. You want this to apply to all stages.

1. Go to Account Growth Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Activity.
4. Have Type is set to Any and Activity Type is set to Phone Call.
5. Drag the Importance bar to Important.
6. Edit the blue puzzle piece to 10 days, the yellow flag to 15 days, and the red flag to 20 days.
7. Click Save.

Example 5 - Using AND/OR statements (Conditional Rules)

Conditional rules enable you to prioritize your efforts, and base alerts on criteria you've decided is relevant to your business. 

As an example, you want to highlight Sales Projects that are at Churn Risk OR those that are going through Management Changes to determine mitigation steps to take, In this example, the rule applies when either of the conditions is met.

1. Go to Sales Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Time to Activity.
4. Drag the Importance bar to Mandatory.
5. Change the blue puzzle piece to 2 days and the yellow flag to 7 days.
6. Click on +ADD CONDITION.
7. Select Current Status "Churn Risk", or.
8. Click on +ADD OR, and select OR.
9. Select Key Driver "New management" as the second condition.
10. Click Save.

Example 6 - No Review on top priority Accounts

The Rule applies when the Type is Appointment and the Activity Type is Customer Review.

You have decided that you would like this to generate a yellow flag after 30 days and a red flag after 40 days. You want this to apply to all stages.

1. Go to Account Growth Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Activity.
4. Click on Type is and select Appointment.
5. Click on Activity Type is and select Customer Review.
6. Click on +ADD CONDITION and select Grid Quadrant.
7. Select True If Any of selected, and add Top Right to your selected list.
8. Drag the Importance bar to Vital.
9. Edit the yellow flag to 30 days and the red flag to 40 days.
10. Click Save.

Example 7 - Deadline Approaching (Date Field Rules)

Adding date fields to your process can help you keep on top of your calendar, and adding rules based on those dates will ensure you never miss a deadline. 

In this example, you want to alert members of your team to an impending contract renewal, and give customers plenty of time to ask clarifying questions. Based on your renewal process, you've decided to create a rule that will generate a red flag one day before the auto-renewal kicks in, and as an extra reminder, an additional rule that sends a yellow flag 90 days out, but only if the customer has given you reason for concern. 

1. Go to Sales Process Editor.
2. Scroll down and click Add rule.
3. Select Date
4. If the renewal deadline is based on a project's starting or closing date, those options are already available to select; if not, you'll need to select a date field from any you've added via your Process Custom Fields. 
5. Choose the red flag.
6. Select 1 days before
7. Click Save.
8. Repeat the process with another rule, this time with a yellow flag and 90 days before. 
9. Click on +ADD CONDITION and select your (previously configured) Process Custom Field. We'd recommend a single-select list for this scenario.
10. Click Save

Example Rules - Prospects

There are two additional options of Rules that are only available to Prospecting Processes, Time to first activity and Not Assigned. These rules can not be applied to a Sales Process or Account Growth Process. 

Example - New Prospect First Activity

We want to add a rule that all new prospects are contacted within 1 week

1. Go to the Process Editor.
2. Select the process you'd like to add a rule to, then scroll down and click Add rule. 
3. Select Time to First Activity.
4. Drag the Importance bar to Mandatory.
5. Change the blue puzzle piece to 2 days and the yellow flag to 7 days.
6. Click Save.

Important considerations

Depending on your Process Settings, there may be a countdown clock of 14 days visible. If this happens you will have 14 days to address the problem or walk away from the opportunity. After the 14 days are up, the Sales Project will be automatically archived.  However, it can be brought back into your pipeline at any time simply by reactivating the project. To learn more about auto-archiving, read this article here. 

In the Active Pipeline, Sales Projects with red flags show as a solid red color, so it's even easier to see where you're efforts should be focused. If a Project has a red flag, it is considered unhealthy and shows as a solid red-colored background in the Active Pipeline. These Sales projects with red flag warnings are not included in your forecast and are no longer included in your weighted pipeline.