At Tines, we use our workflow orchestration and AI platform to power our mission-critical processes, and the Revenue Operations team is no exception. In this post, we’ll share how we use Tines to automate a key part of our go-to-market motion: lead management.
The workflow we’re sharing powers every inbound lead we receive, whether it comes from a demo request, a webinar sign-up, or a bulk CSV upload from the marketing team. It’s how we ensure fast handoffs, clean data, and consistent routing.
It’s the best and most flexible lead management system I’ve ever worked with, hands down.
The challenge: Complex routing needs and fast-changing GTM requirements
As our go-to-market strategy at Tines matured, we began operating in more regions, with more sales reps, more segmentation, and more input sources.
We needed a system that could:
Handle all inbound leads, regardless of where they came from
Enrich those leads with up-to-date information
Determine if they should be leads or contacts in Salesforce
Assign them to the correct owner based on territory, account status, or marketing guidance
Trigger Slack notifications to the assigned owner, with context and links
Doing this in Salesforce alone would have required multiple flows, each tied to specific leads or contacts, with complicated change management overhead.
Manage Salesforce leads with automated workflows
This automation manages every inbound lead at Tines, from intake to assignment. It filters, deduplicates, enriches, and routes leads based on dynamic territory logic, then notifies the right person in Slack with full context. Built entirely in Tines, it replaces complex Salesforce flows with a single, adaptable workflow.
Tools
Created by
Conor Flanagan
The solution: A fully automated and centralized lead management workflow
We built our lead creation workflow in Tines over four years ago, and the accompanying routing workflow shortly after. Despite many changes in our go-to-market operations, both are still running smoothly today with minimal rework.
Today, every inbound lead flows through a central webhook that kicks off a multi-step workflow:
1. Filtering and enrichment
Before a lead is created in Salesforce, we:
Filter out spam and fake domains
Deduplicate against existing records
Enrich leads with firmographic and geographic data (e.g. via ZoomInfo)
2. Lead/contact logic
Tines determines whether to create a lead (for prospects we don’t know well) or a contact (for customers, active opportunities, or partners), using logic that would be extremely difficult to replicate natively in Salesforce.
3. Territory-based routing
Using an external CSV file that maps regions down to zip codes and counties, Tines matches enriched lead data against defined territories and assigns the lead accordingly.
This includes:
Granular routing for major regions like Manhattan and California counties.
Dynamic updates. For example, if we need to reroute all Australian leads, we just add a new series of actions to the workflow.
Built-in fallback. If a lead doesn’t match any defined territory, it’s automatically assigned to the EMEA XDR team in a round-robin cycle.
4. AI action routing features
We leverage our AI action for two main features:
Detect leads from the federal government and route them directly to our Federal team.
Summarize all key inputs for lead routing and explain why a lead was routed to a specific rep. We then surface this detail directly in Salesforce.
5. Slack notifications
Once a lead is assigned, we trigger a custom Slack message to the owner with:
Salesforce links
Notion campaign details
Sales Navigator profile
A link back to the specific Tines event for easy triage
If we want to tweak formatting, add more context, or take something out, we can. That flexibility is a huge win.
No Salesforce flow could match the level of customization and context these messages provide.
No Salesforce flow could match the level of customization and context these messages provide.
Supporting marketing campaigns and sales alignment
Tines isn’t just powering real-time lead management for the RevOps team. We’ve built dedicated stories for marketing teams to upload campaign leads, assign them to the right reps, and preserve rich notes and context - everything from event conversations to specific buyer challenges.
We even built safeguards like:
Rules of engagement: the workflow detects if a rep is working outside their territory and alerts the team.
Out-of-office handling: the workflow reassigns leads if a rep is on leave.
Why we built it in Tines
Salesforce flows don’t allow seamless handling of multiple objects like leads and contacts in a single place. You’d need multiple flows with complex logic and maintenance overhead – and even then, you'd be limited in what you could achieve.
In our case, the ability to work across leads, contacts, accounts, and custom objects in a single Tines workflow was critical. We’re also referencing a 300+ line CSV to handle territory definitions with precision, something that would be nearly impossible to replicate natively in Salesforce.
With Tines, we have:
A single source of truth for all inbound leads
Easy debugging and event history for triage
Rapid adaptability to GTM changes
A deeply customized Slack experience
Transparent routing logic for sales and marketing
Event retention has also been a game changer. If something goes wrong, I can isolate a single event, inspect the runs, and get straight back into the workflow to triage it.
We built this workflow once, and now it continues to work every time.
We built this workflow once, and now it continues to work every time.
Beyond lead routing: Keeping the team aligned with Slack bots
We’ve also built some Slack bots in Tines to keep our GTM team in sync. These include:
Sales wins: Notifies the team when a deal closes
Pipeline alerts: Flags when pipeline gets added
Customer team tracking: Prompts CSMs to categorize new teams directly in Slack, helping us understand where Tines is gaining traction
These workflows are simpler than the one highlighted above, but they’ve made a meaningful impact on visibility and team coordination.
What’s next?
While this workflow doesn’t yet use the Tines AI action, we’re exploring adding AI-based fallback enrichment for cases where tools like ZoomInfo fail. That could mean dynamically scraping location info from a company’s website to ensure proper routing, something we’re already testing in other workflows.
We’re always refining our story as our GTM team scales to build more efficiency and address new logic. We’re exploring adding actions to enhance data enrichment (for cases where tools like Zoominfo fail), handling faults (like inactive user assignments), and passing additional variables to Salesforce (like updating fields to store information about which Tines stories triggered an update in Salesforce).
Final thoughts
Automation and orchestration aren’t just for IT and security teams. They’re foundational to how our RevOps team operates, scales, and collaborates. This workflow has helped us move faster, collaborate more effectively, and ensure that no inbound lead gets left behind.
Explore more pre-built workflows in the Tines library.