How your organization decides to manage your lead flow is unique to each business. Below is just an example on how this process can work. We are not trying to say this is the best way – or the only way – but just an example. We LOVE the new workflow in v4 and our good friend Ben Vollmer and IBIS had some fun building out some other cool things. You can read about that on his blog here.
So your organization just imported a bunch of leads. Those leads cost money. The people that screamed for those leads will definitely follow up in a timely manner, right? I’ll say sometimes.
While people have the best intentions, they are busy. How can the organization keep track as to whether or not the leads are being pursued? The answer is WORKFLOW.
Here is a little background for this scenario. The leads come in and are imported by marketing and assigned to the marketing person. The leads are then reassigned manually to various reps. Due to this process, our workflow will fire on Record Assigned. Once a lead is assigned, we would like to notify certain CRM users if the modified date does not change in the next two days.
This looks simple enough, especially since we can have the workflow sit in timeout for an allotted period of time.
When creating this workflow, there was one thing that had me hung up. That was how to compare any time values to the current time to determine elapsed time. The secret turned out to be the Workflow: Execution value. Workflow: Execution value represents the time that part of the workflow is running which is fairly close to right now.
Here are the step by step instructions.
1. Open the CRM web client, click Settings in the lower left hand corner, and select Workflow in the top left hand side of the screen.
2. Click New. Give your Workflow a descriptive name, select the Entity it will run against, and leave the radio button set to New Workflow. Then, click OK.

3. On the workflow page, change the scope to Organization so the workflow will run against all leads and set the “Start when” value to “Record is assigned”.

4. Select the row with the label “Select this row and click Add Step” and click the “Add Step” button. From the list, select “Wait Condition”.
5. Enter a Description for the step and click <condition> (click to configure).

6. In the first picklist, select “Workflow”. Click “Select” and pick “Timeout”. Click the next “Select” and pick “Equals”. To enter a value, we will be using the Form Assistant pane to the right. We would like to wait 2 days from assignment so we will select “2” for days, “After” instead of Before, “Workflow” from the Look For picklist, and then click on “Execution Time”. Once you click on Execution Time, you will see the value populated for you. Click Save and Close. Your workflow should now look like this.

7. Select the next row, click “Add Step”, and choose “Check Condition”. We will now check if the Lead has not been Qualified or Disqualified. To make this easier we will check that the Lead Status does not equal “Open”.
8. In the first picklist, select “Lead”. Click “Select” and pick “Status”. Click the next “Select” and pick “Does not Equal”. Click the […] button and choose “Open”. Click Save and Close. Your workflow should now look like this.

9. If the lead is not open we want to stop the workflow. Click the line below the If statement and click Add Step. Select Stop Workflow and select “Canceled” from the picklist.

10. Select the If statement line, click the Add Step button and select Conditional Branch.

11. Now we need to set the condition on the “Otherwise, if” line. Click the <condition> field.
12. In the first picklist, select “Lead”. Click “Select” and pick “Modified On”. Click the next “Select” and pick “Is Less Than”. To enter a value, we will be using the Form Assistant pane to the right. Since the Modified On date got changed when the lead was reassigned, we can check if the Modified On date is less than 1 day 23 hours and 59 minutes. Select “1” for days, “23” for hours, “59” for minutes, “Before”, “Workflow” from the Look For picklist, and then click on “Execution Time”. Once you click on Execution Time, you will see the value populated for you. Click Save and Close. Your workflow should now look like this.

13. Select the next row, click “Add Step”, and choose “Send E-mail”.
14. Click the “Set Properties” button to fill in the appropriate fields on the email that will be sent out. The Regarding field already has a link to the related lead. I typically have the email sent from an administrator account. The recipient can be the rep, the rep’s manager, CRM users, etc. I don’t want to go into details on how to use Dynamic Values but they are pretty useful.
15. Please note that you need not fill in every field. Once you are done, click “Save and Close”. You workflow should now look like this.

16. Now all that is left to do is to save it and publish it. You will notice on the toolbar that you can publish from here. I made it a habit to save the workflow first, then I publish it.
17. Click “Save and Close” and then with your new workflow selected, click “Publish”.
18. Your workflow is now active and will fire whenever a Lead is assigned to another user.
Some Additional Notes:
When checking the lead modified on field against the workflow execution time, I chose not to use Less Than or Equal To 2 days because I wanted to leave a little wiggle room for latency in the workflow process running. It is possible that it would work but I figured that the odds on a rep getting the reassigned lead, calling the lead, and saving changes to the record in under 1 minute was slim to none.