Opportunity Lifecycle Automation for a Global Energy Leader

Business problem

The commercial team was sitting on ~2,400 open opportunities in Salesforce. Many were expired, stuck in advanced stages without movement for weeks, or owned by reps who had already moved role or left the company. Managers had no daily visibility, and every manual cleanup was gone again a month later.

Data available

• Salesforce Opportunity, OpportunityHistory, User, Account, ActivityHistory
• HR feed with rep active status, role and line manager
• Org hierarchy for escalation paths (manager → regional VP)
• Account segmentation (strategic / key / standard)

Solution implemented

1. 1Scheduled Salesforce Flow scans all open opportunities nightly and tags each with one of five states (stale, at-risk, escalate, reassign, auto-close), with the reason written back to a dedicated field — nothing is a black box.
2. 2Power Automate syncs the HR feed: when a rep becomes inactive, their opportunities are reassigned to the line manager within minutes, with a handover note from last activity history.
3. 3Smart escalation on strategic deals: opportunities above a value threshold and in stage ≥ Negotiation with no activity for 14+ days auto-create an escalation record, post a Chatter mention to the account owner and the regional VP, and draft an Outlook email with deal context ready to send.
4. 4Daily 08:00 digest: every sales manager gets an email with their team's pipeline hygiene score, top 5 escalations of the day, and one-click actions that write back to Salesforce. Auto-close runs only below a value threshold — strategic deals always route to a human.

Impact

What I learned

The fastest way to clean a pipeline is to stop hand-cleaning it. Once the rules are written down, boring Flows and a Power Automate digest do the work — every day, forever, without a meeting.