Hello everyone,

It’s Hack Wednesday and I’m going to share a simple hack around Blueprint. Blueprint ensures that your sales team follows a standard set of processes without bypassing any processes in between.

Let us consider a sales process with eight Lead Status - Attempted to contact, Contact in Future, Contacted, Pre-Qualified, Event scheduled, Event updates, Convert lead and Lost Lead. A Blueprint is created with these lead status as States and the successive stages as transition. This ensures that your team qualifies the leads diligently. However, there is a downside to this. Blueprints work fine as long as your users follow a linear path from start to finish. What if the leads are created from an intermediary stage, say for example Pre-Qualified? Blueprint kicks in from this state and the transition allows the user to move on to the next state - Event Scheduled. This is a concern if your sales routine is highly process oriented and a user skips a critical preceding stage. I'm going to propose a simple hack to address this concern by adding a entry criteria in the Blueprint:

This hack restricts the creation of leads from an intermediary stage. Choose the Entry criteria as 'Lead status isn't', add all the Lead Status individually and save the blueprint. The users now have no other choice but to create a lead with "None" status. The Blueprint now thwarts users from creating leads with an intermediary stage and thereby skipping the preceding stages. 

Steps:

Go to Setup->Automation->Blueprint->Select the particular Blueprint-> Click on "Add Criteria" listed on the right, next to "Entry criteria for this Blueprint"->Choose Lead status isn't and Select all the Lead status as highlighted in the below screenshot.

As you see,  the transition button is shown.only if the Lead status is None. This ensures your users qualify the leads diligently as set in your Blueprint.

You can replicate this hack across other modules and fields as appropriate. Hope you found it useful. Check out the other hacks shared in this series here.