One of the great functions in salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM Dynamics 4.0 and others is their ability to setup workflow processes for time-based and sequenced marketing communications.  As an example, we can setup a series of 4 emails to be sent at 7 days after a new lead is received, another one on day 21 and so on.  This is in addition to auto-responders that get sent when the lead initially arrives.

So for the next few minutes let's pretend that our email series consists of 12 unique messages over the course of 12 months.  The series is triggered based on the value of the customer.  Let's further assume that we have segmented our customer base into three divisions based on value: low value, medium value and high value.  Each segment receives a string of 12 email communications... and once the email is sent, a task is scheduled for the assigned sales person that owns the customer relationship and this task is placed on their "to do list" in the CRM system.  Sounds pretty good so fare, doesn't it?

Well, if we add this up, we have 3 segments, times 12 messages equals 36 emails to be scheduled and an equal number of tasks to be assigned to the sales team.  Total number of workflow items is 72.

Okay, now let's assume that we have 1,000 customers in each customer segment.  Add it all up and voila! - 72,000 workflow items.  Now remember this is not a single marketing campaign, but instead is a series of communications that is personalized with the customers name, account executive information and segmented according to the value of the customer and will be sent over the course of 12 months.

The question that I posed at the top of this email is whether you should create one workflow object or many?  If we create one workflow object for each of the three customer segments and place the 12 email messages and each related set of tasks within each object then in reality we only have 3 objects to manage.  That's pretty reasonable if you ask me... but wait...

Salesforce.com (I don't know about Microsoft yet) provides you with a monitoring "que" in order to see and manage your automated workflow objects and rules.  Very cool!  Unfortunately it has a visual limit of 250 items.  It's not that the other items go away, you just can't see them.  So in our example, we have three objects and 72,000 workflow items...  Also, it appears that the entire workflow stream is qued at the beginning and loaded whenever the first rule condition is met.  In essence all 12 email messages are loaded up and emailed out according to the time based intervals that are defined (e.g. 7 days, 21 days, etc.)... but wait...

What happens if I want to deactivate the series so I can modify my content, etc.?  Well, you can deactivate but the entire que remains loaded and intact and will be sent unless you delete each item.  Deactivating the workflow objects does not cancel those workflow items that have already been qued up.  Remember the 250 visual limit?  This is also the maximum number of items that you can select "at once" and delete en masse (e.g. in salesforce.com).

So back to my question - should you create one workflow item or many?  In our opinion, you create one if you can modify the content as necessary along the communications stream, knowing that you have visibility to the que and can delete emails scheduled for tomorrow by editing the que.  Otherwise, take the time and effort to setup each and every workflow object separately (e.g. 12 separate workflow objects times 3 customers segments equals 36 workflow objects.)  In essence, by separating your workflow objects with greater granularity you obtain a more management que, but the trade off is, your workflow objects become a little more cumbersome.  This approach doesn't automatically improve manageability of your que... although there are options for doing so.

Net/net think through carefully how you want to manage workflow objects, workflow items and the workflow que.

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