Common Rules That Teams Set Up in Apollo

Rules Engine (detailed in full here) gives sales teams the flexibility to create automations that are specific to their unique processes and structure. While these can be extremely granular when they need to be, there are certain rules that are commonly found in all organizations. For the sake of showing what's possible -- and how they work -- we've detailed three of the most commonly used rules below.

Basic Sales Operations

Update Account Stage when Contact Stage is updated (more detail in the 'Rule description' field, shown below) -

• Note: You cannot currently update contact stages when account stages are updated.

Note: Triggers are not additive, so the action (shown in the second image below) will be taken if any of the above triggers are satisfied.

Important Notes:

• If you wanted to make this rule apply more granularly then this is exactly where filters come in. In the example above, the 'Contact Owner' filter effectively limits the rule so it can only be applied to accounts owned by your ADR team (the users shown above).
• In order to ensure you maintain the data integrity of your accounts, adding an exclusionary filter for accounts that are current clients is highly recommended. This is especially true for any rule built to update account stages. A filter like this will prevent current clients from having their stage updated by the rule.

Create Tasks to Call Your Warm Leads

Create a call task for highly engaged contacts (more detail in the 'Rule description' field, shown below) -

Note: The triggers above will only focus on email engagement that comes from sequences. If you wanted to set this rule up to be more broad, you would need to ensure that you have the 'Sequence' field cleared out. 

Note: 'Email Clicked' is one of the triggers in this rule (shown above), and 'Email Opened' is a possible trigger (but is not selected). Triggers don't allow you to granularly set the number of times they have to occur though (only whether they've generally occurred), so this is exactly where filters come into play. The filters shown above are what truly limit the rule to only highly engaged contacts (people who have opened a message 3 times and clicked on a link 2 times).

ADR Team Rules

Example 1

Add newly created contacts to a sequence only when their account is owned by an ADR (more detail in the 'Rule description' field, shown below) -

Important Notes:

• In order to ensure you maintain the data integrity of your accounts, adding an exclusionary filter for accounts that are current clients is highly recommended. A filter like this will prevent new contacts from being messaged if they work for an account that is a current client.
• While this filter may or may not be necessary for the first standard rule (Basic Sales Operations), it makes much more sense in this context. You may not truly want all contacts to be automatically added to a sequence as soon as they're created, and for most teams this is the case. That said, this filter allows you to ensure that only new contacts in your ADRs' accounts will be automatically messaged.

Example 2

Update an account's stage when a user sends a sequence-based email to one of their contacts OR calls one their contacts (more detail in the 'Rule description' field, shown below) -

Important Notes:

• Adding a location-based filter to this rule is a good way to ensure that only accounts in a specific 'territory' are automatically updated. For example, if your sales reps do region or territory-based sales, then this allows you to limit the automation accordingly. Note, however, that the specific rule in this example is set to apply on an app-wide basis (because no other filters have been applied), which may or may not be what you're looking for.
• Just like the first standard rule, adding an exclusionary filter for accounts that are current clients is highly recommended. A filter like this will prevent current clients from having their stage updated by the rule.

Related Resources:

Rules Engine (Beta) Overview