Resource

    🥅 3x Yourself: Safety Net Your CRM or MAP

    10/11/2025
    Created by: Sara McNamara

    These are smart automations & alerts every Marketing Ops pro should implement.

    Use this playbook to build invisible defenses into your CRM or MAP: alerts that catch silent failures in routing, compliance, data quality, attribution, and campaign performance before they damage revenue or trust. This is one of the only ways you’ll get out of what I call Triage Hell — being so stuck below day to day tickets and fire-drills that you can’t be strategic.
     
    These are smart automations & alerts every Marketing Ops pro should implement.📐 How to Use This Guide🔥 Severity Levels (Alert Taxonomy)⚠️ Core Safety Nets: Automations & Alerts (click the arrow to open)⚙️ How to Best Set Up These Traps (by Platform)🟠 HubSpot CRM (Sales Hub)🟠 HubSpot MAP (Marketing Hub)🟦 Salesforce (CRM)🟦 Pardot (Account Engagement)🟦 SFMC (Marketing Cloud)🟥 Marketo🧠 Alert Message Template (Slack)🛠 Getting Started

    📐 How to Use This Guide

    • Start with Quick Wins (see bottom)
    • Assign owners and severity levels (P1–P3)
    • Test alerts in sandbox, then deploy
    • Log each alert fired (Slack, ticket, or dashboard)

    🔥 Severity Levels (Alert Taxonomy)

    Define level of urgency before anything else. This helps align your team and response cadence — and set expectations with stakeholders/management.
    Severity
    What It Means
    Response Time
    Channels
    P1
    Revenue, legal, or data loss risks
    1 hour
    Slack/email + ticket
    P2
    Campaign, data, or enrichment issues
    24 hours
    Slack/email
    P3
    Maintenance or hygiene tasks
    72 hours
    Email or weekly digest

    ⚠️ Core Safety Nets: Automations & Alerts (click the arrow to open)

    These are the "traps" — alerts that fire when core CRM or MAP functions silently fail.

    🧭 Lead Routing Failure Detector (P1)

    What it does: Checks for new leads that haven’t been assigned to an owner after a set interval.
    Why it matters: A lead with no owner can stall revenue and cause leakage.
    • Trigger: Lead created, Owner = null after 15 min
    • Action: Slack alert, task creation, email escalation
    • Owner: SDR Manager, Marketing Ops #mops-internal-alerts email or Slack channel

    👯 Duplicate Detection (P2)

    What it does: Flags suspected duplicates via email, domain, or fuzzy match.
    Why it matters: Duplicates fragment the lead journey, inflate counts, and harm sales trust.
    • Trigger: Matching email/domain or fuzzy match on name (you can use native functionality or an add-on like Koalify, Ringlead, etc to mark these)
    • Action: Quarantine or merge task
    • Owner: Data Steward, Marketing Ops #mops-internal-alerts email or Slack channel
    🧑‍🚒
    You’ll notice that for many of these alerts, I include sending an alert to #mops-internal-alerts email or Slack channel, even if MOPs doesn’t directly own the resolution — this is because while we don’t always own resolution, we can help cut off issues at the source. For example, if we own list imports, and people start importing lists incorrectly and causing dupes — we can see the spike in the Slack channel and get with that marketer immediately, to enable them and avoid the issue recurring in the future. Then, the data steward steps in to resolve the initial errored records.

    📭 High Bounce or Complaint Alert (P1)

    What it does: Alerts team when bounce or complaint rate crosses thresholds post-send.
    Why it matters: Early detection protects sender reputation.
    • Trigger: Bounce > 5% or complaint > 0.1%
    • Action: Slack/email alert to Deliverability Lead
    • Owner: Deliverability Lead
    🧑‍🚒
    You can set up alerts like these using HubSpot + Zapier. If you want to keep things simple to begin with, you can always set up a universal bounce list and check for any sudden peaks — that will directionally tell you when something has gone wrong and needs further investigation.

    🚫 Opt-Out / DNC Send Attempt (P1)

    What it does: Blocks sends to unsubscribed or suppressed contacts.
    Why it matters: Prevents compliance violations (think CAN-SPAM, GDPR).
    • Trigger: Contact with opt_out = true enters email flow
    • Action: Cancel send, notify compliance, log incident
    • Owner: Compliance Lead
    🧑‍🚒
    Most MAPs nowadays are sophisticated enough to know to block basic opted-out records, so you might not need this in CRM or MAP — but you could set up in 3rd party tools or to keep an eye on any variations your org has from the typical B2B policy. You also can use this to keep an eye out for leaks in your segmentation lists — if you have explicity suppressed these opted out records but they end up meeting a workflow requirement, you can look into why they could have slipped through (if it’s a bug or logic issue).

    🤖 Malformed or missing fields (P2)

    What it does: Alerts you early-on to potential integration or vendor data completeness or accuracy issues.
    Why it matters: When you spend money on leads and they come over incorrectly, it can impact whether they get qualified, routed, etc.
    • Trigger: Record comes in from Content Syndication integration without Country in ISO format.
    • Action: Alert to Marketing Ops #mops-internal-alerts email or Slack channel, potentially Content Syndication vendor POC if vendor is a repeat offender.
    • Owner: Marketing Ops
    🧑‍🚒
    I feel like you all must be tired of hearing me talk about Content Syndication (lol) but this is SUPER HELPFUL for that or any other channel where you have contractors or agencies submitting leads. They often fail to cross-pollinate your org’s data rules and stipulations, so they’ll often incorrectly send leads. If you can get alerted when they send an incorrect test lead, you can notify them immediately and avoid them sending over thousands of incorrect records.

    🧩 Enrichment Failure (P2)

    What it does: Monitors if key firmographic fields are left blank after enrichment.
    Why it matters: Impacts scoring, routing, and personalization.
    • Trigger: Required fields = null after enrichment
    • Action: Notify data owner, potentially trigger enrichment retry (be careful with credit-based vendors)
    • Owner: Data Steward

    📈 Score Anomaly (P2)

    What it does: Detects unnatural lead score increases.
    Why it matters: Prevents false positive MQLs from hitting sales.
    • Trigger: Score increases > X points in short time
    • Action: Flag for review
    • Owner: RevOps
    🧑‍🚒
    This is another one where you could get sophisticated with time, but you can start out today by just setting up lists and reports of # of MQLs in a certain time period — if it spikes or massively dips, that’s your sign to look closer at the root cause.

    🔗 UTM / Source Missing or Overwritten (P2)

    What it does: Flags new leads missing UTM parameters or having overwritten source fields.
    Why it matters: Preserves attribution integrity for spend ROI and cohort reporting.
    • Trigger: utm_campaign is null OR original_source changed
    • Action: Set UTM Missing Flag, notify Analytics
    • Owner: Marketing Analytics

    💸 Ad Spend Over Budget / Poor ROI (P2)

    What it does: Monitors paid campaign spend and cost per lead.
    Why it matters: Prevents budget overruns and inefficiency.
    • Trigger: Daily spend > limit or CPL > threshold
    • Action: Notify campaign manager
    • Owner: Paid Media Manager
    🧑‍🚒
    If you don’t want to set up an automation for this in a tool like Zapier, you can add a link to each ad platform dashboard, as well as your typical baseline metrics, in one Google doc — that way, you can just click through and view if anything looks wildly different.

    📉 High Unsubscribe Rate (P2)

    What it does: Detects content or cadence issues via unsub spikes.
    Why it matters: High unsubscribes damage sender rep and engagement.
    • Trigger: Unsub % > baseline or spike vs. average
    • Action: Alert content team
    • Owner: Email or Lifecycle Marketing

    🕰 Stale Lead / No Activity (P3)

    What it does: Identifies assigned leads untouched for too long.
    Why it matters: Keeps rep pipelines clean and responsive.
    • Trigger: No engagement within X days of assignment
    • Action: Notify rep, rotate if no action
    • Owner: SDR Manager

    🗑 Bulk Update / Delete Alert (P1)

    What it does: Monitors large-volume data changes.
    Why it matters: Prevents massive data loss from user or API error.
    • Trigger: >N records updated/deleted at once
    • Action: Alert admins, log event, create rollback task
    • Owner: System Admin
    🧑‍🚒
    If your MAP or CRM doesn’t support this, like with many of these other automations, you can always resort to a list for v1 — just document your typical daily/monthly/quarterly baseline and a link to each report in one easy-to-access place.

    🔌 API / Integration Failure (P1)

    What it does: Detects system feed failures and API outages.
    Why it matters: Broken syncs stop your data and routing logic cold.
    • Trigger: No data received in X time or error threshold hit
    • Action: Notify system owner, disable flows if needed
    • Owner: Integrations Lead
    🧑‍🚒
    Unfortunately the MAPs are not great with this, but you can look to see what Admin settings you can set up for your specific instance and license level. Outside of that, you can also look to use Stack Moxie.

    📬 Invalid Email Format Spike (P3)

    What it does: Watches for bad email pattern spikes in new records.
    Why it matters: Bad addresses kill deliverability and hurt list quality.
    • Trigger: Leads with invalid email addresses start being created
    • Action: Quarantine into a list, notify form/product owner
    • Owner: Data Steward

    ⚙️ How to Best Set Up These Traps (by Platform)

    I’m not going to go into extreme detail on these as the platforms change so frequently — but I wanted to point you in the right direction on how you might start to set up some of these alerts in each platform.

    🟠 HubSpot CRM (Sales Hub)

    • Tool: Workflows
    • Use property checks like Owner is unknown
    • Automate tasks and Slack alerts via built-in integrations
    • Use delays to detect stale records

    🟠 HubSpot MAP (Marketing Hub)

    • Tool: Workflows + Active Lists + Custom Properties
    • Attribution QA: If utm_campaign is null → set flag, alert Analytics
    • Use lists to exclude quarantined records
    • Use “send internal email” + “Slack message” actions

    🟦 Salesforce (CRM)

    • Tools: Lightning Flow + Validation Rules + Platform Events
    • Track field changes, bulk edits, and missed assignments
    • Schedule flows to check for stale or missing data
    • Use Event Monitoring if available

    🟦 Pardot (Account Engagement)

    • Tools: Automation Rules + Dynamic Lists + Completion Actions
    • Use rules like “form submitted > N times in Y mins”
    • Add suppression tag or notify user automatically
    • Connect automation results to Salesforce for alerting

    🟦 SFMC (Marketing Cloud)

    • Tools: Automation Studio notifications, SQL Query Activities, Data Extensions, SSJS scripts
    • Use rules like: “no new data in X hours” or “automation failed”
    • Action: Email or Slack alert to integrations owner via Automation notifications or SSJS script
    • Connect results: Log issues to Salesforce or external monitor (Zapier, ENS)

    🟥 Marketo

    • Tools: Smart Campaigns + Smart Lists + Webhooks
    • Use filters like Email Bounces >= 5 post-send
    • Send Slack alerts using webhook or internal alert email
    • Flag risky campaigns instead of auto-pausing

    🧠 Alert Message Template (Slack)

    Use this or create your own template to standardize alert messaging for your ops team. Clear, actionable messages speed up triage and make alerts easier to track.
    This is a bigger deal than one would think, especially across GEOs — the more repetitive the format is, the easier it is to document and enable.

    🛠 Getting Started

    1. Pay attention to the bugs that happen the most often first. Look at past Slack messages, emails, tickets — what have been the biggest time-sucks? Focus on these first, to save your team from drowning in the repetitive tsunami.
    1. Once those are done, think about the data that matters the most to the business. If your Sales team is dying for leads, focus on making sure every lead makes its way smoothly and accurately to Sales. If your team is undergoing an attribution audit, focus on UTMs and tracking fields first.
    1. Solicit help from partners. Make sure you’re approachable, and then invite partners to report any issues in a common channel, like #marketing-ops-triage. Ask marketer to “post something if they see something” for a few weeks, so you can get a full handle on where leaks or bugs are happening and how to set up alerts to nip them in the bud. A key part of getting their participation (especially a team that is exhausted from data issues) is to offer that you’re trying to eliminate these issues for them, that there is an end in sight.

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