Setting Up Pipelines and Automations

A pipeline is a visual board that shows where every lead stands in your sales process, from first contact to a signed job. Automations are the rules that keep that board honest: when something happens, like an inspection getting booked, Alivo does the next step for you, like moving the lead to the right column. Managing your pipeline is one of the main things your team learns to run during onboarding, so this page gives you the lay of the land before your training.

The Pipeline: Your Board

Your pipeline is made of stages, each one a column that matches a step in your process: New Lead, Contacted, Inspection Booked, Estimate Sent, and so on through a Won or Lost outcome at the end. Every lead sits in exactly one stage, you can drag cards between columns, and Alivo tracks how long each lead spends in each stage so you can spot bottlenecks later in reporting.

The board works best when the stage names match words your team already uses. If your reps say "inspection booked" and "estimate out," your columns should say the same thing.

Automations: When This Happens, Do That

Every automation is one simple rule with a trigger and one or more actions. A trigger is an event, like a new lead arriving, an appointment getting booked, an agent hitting its goal, or a lead sitting too long in one stage. An action is what Alivo does in response, like moving the lead to a stage, assigning an agent or an owner, creating a task, or sending a notification.

Put together, a typical roofing funnel runs itself:

• A new lead comes in and lands on New Lead automatically.
• Evan makes contact and the lead moves to Contacted.
• An inspection gets booked and the lead moves to Inspection Booked.
• The homeowner signs and the lead moves to Estimate Signed.
• Something goes sideways, like a canceled appointment, and the lead moves to a visible stage with a task for your office manager, so a human steps in.

Rule of thumb: if you cannot explain an automation in one sentence, "when X happens, do Y," it is probably doing too much. Simple rules are easier to trust and easier to troubleshoot.

How This Gets Set Up During Onboarding

You do not start from an empty board. Alivo ships pre-built automation recipes tailored to a standard roofing sales pipeline, covering the whole funnel: placing new leads, advancing stages as agents engage and appointments book, handling cancellations, and closing out review requests. During onboarding, your specialist sets up a working board and sensible starting rules based on how your shop runs, then adjusts stage names and rules with you as you see real leads flow through.

Your go-live training covers the day-to-day: reading the board, dragging cards when you need to, and knowing which moves happen on their own. Deeper customization, like time-based rules that flag stale leads or automations tied to your CRM's job milestones, is the kind of thing you unlock with your specialist in the sessions after go-live.

Good to know: every automation run is logged. If a lead did not move the way you expected, the log shows whether the trigger matched and which actions ran, so troubleshooting is looking something up, not guessing.

Where to Go Deeper

For the full concept walkthrough, including how to design rules that match your shop, see Pipelines and Automations in Alivo. The step-by-step setup guides for pipelines and automations cover the details when you are ready to build your own.

The takeaway: the pipeline gives you visibility and automations give you momentum. You start with a working board and proven rules, learn to read it at go-live, and customize from there as your process sharpens.

Still have a question this didn't answer? Reach out to our support team support@alivo.ai and we'll be glad to help.