Overview
The SLA Agent keeps your team's follow-up standards grounded in reality. Instead of applying one-size-fits-all SLA rules, it studies how your reps actually work — across deals, leads, and prospects — and calculates thresholds based on your team's real pace. Those thresholds power the Daily Nudge, telling it when to send an early warning and when to flag something as urgent. This feature is ideal for sales managers and operations teams who want SLA alerts that are meaningful rather than arbitrary.
To Get the Best Results from the SLA Agent
Keep activity records up to date. The analyzer learns from logged calls, meetings, emails, and tasks. The more consistently your team logs activity, the more accurate the thresholds will be.
Use pipeline stages actively. Thresholds are computed per stage (Research, Qualification, Proposal, etc.). Deals that aren't progressed through stages won't contribute to stage-specific benchmarks.
Give it time to learn. The analyzer looks back 3 months. If your CRM is relatively new, early thresholds may rely on built-in defaults — these improve automatically as more data accumulates.
Log lead and prospect contact promptly. For leads and prospects, the key metric is time-to-first-contact. The sooner a rep logs their first activity after a record is created, the cleaner the benchmark.
Don't worry about gaps in data. If a stage or entity type has fewer than 10 historical records, the system falls back to safe built-in defaults automatically and flags the threshold as estimated in the nudge email.
How It Works
Step 1. The SLA Agent Runs Automatically Each Month
Once a month, the SLA Agent runs without any action needed from you.
Behind the Scenes
The system fetches the most recent open deals from each active pipeline stage — Research, Qualification, Proposal, Negotiation, and OfferSigned — looking back over the past 3 months. Won, Lost, and Cancelled deals are excluded, since there's no need to benchmark closed records.
It also fetches recent records for Leads, Hot Prospects, Suspects, and Prospects, split by whether the record is an Organisation or a Person — 8 combinations in total.
Step 2. Your Team's Follow-Up Patterns Are Measured
For each deal, the system calculates a single representative gap that reflects how quickly your team follows up:
Deals with one activity — gap = days from when the deal was created to that first contact.
Deals with two or more activities — gap = the typical (median) number of days between consecutive touches.
Deals with no activity — excluded from the measurement, but counted so you can see how many deals have gone untouched.
For leads and prospects, the measurement is simpler: how many days passed between when the record was created and when a rep made first contact.
Step 3. Thresholds Are Set Per Stage and Entity Type
The system sets two follow-up deadlines for each stage, based on what's actually normal for your team:
WARNING — the deal has been idle longer than your team's typical follow-up gap.
BREACHED — the deal has gone so long without contact that it's now in the slowest 25% of all historical records. This is the "something's wrong" signal.
Example: Your team usually follows up on Proposal deals within 4 days, and almost never goes longer than 9 days without a touch.
Proposal deal idle for 5 days → WARNING — slower than usual, worth a nudge
Proposal deal idle for 10 days → BREACHED — among the slowest 25% of all Proposal deals
Behind the Scenes
If a stage has enough history (10 or more records), the thresholds are calculated directly from your team's data. If the numbers come out inconsistent — for example, if the warning threshold ends up higher than the breached one — the system falls back to safe built-in defaults automatically.
If there isn't enough history yet, built-in defaults are used instead. Reps will see a small note in their nudge email letting them know the threshold is an estimate, not something learned from real data.
Thresholds are saved per stage and entity type, and updated in place each month — so there's no build-up of duplicate records over time.
Step 4. The Daily Nudge Uses Your Thresholds Every Morning
From this point on, the Daily Nudge reads these thresholds each morning to determine which deals, leads, or prospects need attention — and how urgently. The nudge email also shows a benchmark summary so reps can see how their SLA timing compares to the team's historical pace.
Why This Matters
When SLA reminders feel disconnected from how your team actually works, reps start tuning them out. The SLA Agent fixes that by basing every threshold on your organisation's own follow-up history — so a nudge only fires when something genuinely looks off. The result is fewer false alarms, more rep buy-in, and thresholds that quietly keep pace with your team as habits change over time.
FAQ
What happens if my CRM doesn't have much data yet?
If a stage or entity type has fewer than 10 records to learn from, the system falls back to sensible built-in defaults — for example, 2 days for Leads or 10 days for Proposal deals. Reps will see a small note in their nudge email flagging that the threshold is an estimate. Once enough data builds up, the defaults are replaced automatically.
Are won, lost, or cancelled deals included?
No — only open, active deals. Closed deals reflect past outcomes, not current behaviour, so including them would skew the benchmarks.
What if a deal has no activity logged at all?
It's excluded from the threshold calculation, but still counted. You can see how many untouched deals exist in each stage, which can be a useful signal for pipeline hygiene.
How often are the thresholds updated?
Once a month, automatically.