Pipeline agents

Pipeline agents are always-on discovery jobs that hunt for pipeline while you focus on the deals in front of you. Each agent is tied to a seller profile, sources companies from one or more places you choose, evaluates them against a focus you author with ShiftUp, and surfaces graded candidates in a company-centered review workspace. Activating a candidate creates a full Sales Strategy with a scorecard, deal outlook, and stakeholder roster ready to work.

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How pipeline agents work

1. Configure — a wizard captures the agent’s seller profile, its focus (starting idea, customer focus, priority areas, and custom filters), the sources it will scan, and the run limits it will honor.
2. Discover — the agent scans the selected sources: monitored accounts, an explicit Salesforce selection, uploaded CSV or XLSX company lists, and market discovery.
3. Evaluate — each eligible company is researched and scored on a six-dimension scorecard (need and urgency, seller fit, commercial potential, stakeholder access, decision friction, evidence quality) plus any custom priority areas. Each company gets a quality grade of A+, A, B, or C and a decision brief.
4. Review — candidates land in the agent’s Overview as a company-centered review workspace. You can group, filter, and search, then activate or dismiss rows.
5. Activate — accepting a candidate creates a full opportunity strategy in ShiftUp. By default each strategy is assigned to its account’s Salesforce owner (resolved live at activation), with fallbacks and manual override available.

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Create an agent

Open Pipeline agents in the left sidebar and click New pipeline agent. The create wizard has four steps:

1. Focus — pick a seller profile (inherited when unambiguous), choose a starting idea, and choose whether the agent should look for New, Existing, or Any customers. Either accept the AI’s “companies like your best customers” idea (auto mode) or write your own specific focus.
2. Plan — ShiftUp builds the plan from your Focus choices: an agent name, the focus text (in specific-focus mode), a set of priority areas the agent grades every company against, and a set of custom filters that layer on top of the built-in universal filters. Refine the plan in natural language (“focus on manufacturing under 500 employees”, “drop the healthcare block”). Returning to Focus and continuing rebuilds the plan with the changed choices.
3. Sources — turn on one or more source tiles. Each tile you check opens its own setup card below:
   • Monitored accounts — the account plans the agent already watches.
   • Salesforce selection — an explicit list of Salesforce Accounts.
   • Uploaded lists — a CSV or Excel list of companies, cleaned by the list assistant.
   • Market discovery — ShiftUp finds companies outside your CRM. Requires the Enable Pipeline Account Discovery setting.
   A configured card collapses to a one-line summary with a Change button. A card that still needs setup stays open and shows the reason. Below the cards, What this agent researches summarizes the combined scope. One shared, optional Companies to skip section applies to every source, so you can exclude current customers or partners once. Each company and analysis scope is researched once per run. Explicit picks and uploaded targets share a limit of 1,000 distinct company-and-scope targets. Overlapping sources count once, and different Salesforce Accounts remain separate.
4. Runs — pick a schedule (On demand or Weekly) and set the run limits. When account discovery is enabled you can pick Standard (10 recommendations from up to 100 companies), Expanded (20 / 250), Extensive (40 / 500), or Custom (targets up to 100 recommendations and up to 1,000 companies). Independent controls set the minimum quality grade (defaults to A) and the review queue threshold (100 by default; choose 100, 250, or 500).

Confirming the wizard creates the agent, starts a discovery run, and opens the agent’s detail view. Failed creation keeps your inputs for correction and retry. New agents do not set a revenue goal.

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Clean an uploaded list with the list assistant

When your ShiftUp backend supports list cleaning, an uploaded list goes to the list assistant before anything runs. The assistant reads every row, splits companies from their sites, and tidies the values. Older backends keep the column-mapping step instead.

1. Upload a CSV or Excel file (up to 10 MB). Optionally tell the assistant anything it should know, such as “each plant is its own account” or “skip the contact columns”. Research on these targets also uses this guidance.
2. Watch live progress. The setup card shows the assistant’s current step, rows saved so far, and a progress bar with the estimated time left.
3. Review the Cleaned list preview. Click Download CSV to see every value.
4. Refine the list in chat, for example “Write site names as City, State” or “Use one row per company”. Each request builds on the previous one.
5. Check How rows become targets. The assistant picks the Company, Website, and Site, division or region columns. Change any role that looks off, or choose None when every row is a whole company.
6. Set Account matching, then click Review targets.

Saved lists reopen with the chat that produced them, so you can keep refining later from Settings → Sources.

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Scoped sites and Account matching

When a list has a site, division, or region column, each company-and-scope pair is a separate research target. Sibling sites under the same company keep their own activity rows and strategy recommendations, even when they share a Salesforce Account. A different scope under the same company stays eligible even while a sibling is in cooldown. Account matching controls which Salesforce Account each scoped target activates into:

• Match Accounts using analysis scope — match or create an Account for each site, subsidiary, or division. Leave it unchecked to match or create the company Account while keeping a separate strategy for each scope. Rows with a blank scope stay company-wide.
• Match parent Account — available only with scope matching. ShiftUp matches or creates the company Account and fills the scoped Account’s Parent Account field. If the scoped Account already has a different parent, you can review and resolve that relationship.

Ambiguous Account or parent matches stay unresolved until you pick one. Research can continue, but ShiftUp blocks single and bulk activation for unresolved targets.

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Agent detail

Selecting an agent opens its detail view with four tabs:

• Overview — one compact summary above a full-width review workspace. The summary pairs all-time outcomes (distinct companies, recommended strategies, won revenue by currency) on the left with the current run’s progress on the right. Below that sits the review workspace.
• Activity — the full history of company research and its outcomes, with the same filter menus and grouping controls as Overview.
• Settings — grouped into Focus, Sources, Runs, and Advanced. Saving Focus does not automatically regenerate priorities or filters. Each source has independent controls and validation; a source can be collapsed without turning it off, and re-enabling it restores its unsaved draft. Hidden for view-only users.
• Sharing — who can see the agent and its draft strategies. See Sharing an agent. The tab appears only when your org’s sharing settings allow granting extra access on Pipeline Agents.

Recommendations appear in the review workspace as soon as ShiftUp completes them, while the rest of the run continues.

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Re-evaluate the saved backlog

Use Settings → Advanced → Re-evaluate all candidates after you change an agent’s focus or priorities and want the existing backlog reassessed. The run:

• Skips cooldowns and your usual run limits, so it can take longer than a normal run.
• Refreshes existing recommendations using the agent’s current settings.
• Refreshes activated strategies separately, using each strategy’s own saved criteria.
• Retries previously rejected companies.
• Keeps dismissed candidates dismissed and discovers no new companies.

The button is disabled while another run is active. It is also disabled until the agent and a linked seller profile are active. Above the Strategies section on the agent’s Overview, a compact history and current-value strip summarizes retained research milestones and the collapsed Current pipeline value table. Current values stay separate from historical counts.

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The review workspace

Overview and Activity share one company-centered review table.

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Group and sort

Group by Company, Status, Account owner, Industry, Run, or None. Sort by Quality grade, Potential, Estimated deal value, Time to close, Latest, or Company A–Z. The default order ranks grade descending, then numeric quality descending, then recency, with ungraded rows last.

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Status views

Each row shows one status:

• In review — awaiting your decision.
• Creating — a sales strategy is being created in Salesforce; Cancel stops creation.
• Active — a seller created the sales strategy in Salesforce.
• Dismissed — a seller dismissed the recommendation; it stays in history but is not re-surfaced.
• Evaluating, Rejected, Cancelled, Failed, Too soon, Overridden — the various research outcomes.

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Filter menus

Overview and Activity filter menus hide parents and choices without matches. Visible parents show a matching-row count across all pages, respecting your search text and any other applied filters but ignoring the filter’s own selection. Applied filter chips remain removable even when a live search or reload would leave them without live facet values. The filter picker exposes the same server-side facets the agent used during evaluation — industry, employee band, timing, signals, opportunity value band, account owner, and more. Turning a row signal into a filter with one click narrows the table without opening the row. Filter selections persist per agent and restore when you return.

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Quality grades

Candidate quality renders as one of four letter grades on the same numeric thresholds ShiftUp already uses: Missing scores render as Ungraded rather than a numeric zero. Filter and API grade bands remain A/B/C/D so saved selections and integrations keep their existing values; the seller-facing labels are derived from the same thresholds.

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Grades on activated strategies

Once you activate a candidate, the new strategy owns its grade. The pipeline’s Active row and the strategy page show the same saved assessment. When ShiftUp reassesses a strategy, the current grade stays in place until a replacement is published. The Quality grade filter on the Strategies list shows only strategies that match the selected grades. Click any grade to open its breakdown popover. It shows Why this grade, All dimensions, Mission priorities, and What changed since the previous assessment. When Enable Pipeline Agents is disabled, strategy lists, detail pages, and PDFs fall back to the released numeric Confidence percentage and the legacy strategy strength display instead of the quality grade.

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The decision brief

Selecting a candidate opens its decision brief — one shared surface used by pending review, discovery history, and the original-candidate dialog.

• Overview pairs a company introduction and facts with the complete suggested approach (or why not now for rejected candidates), the timing estimate, and the recommended people.
• A persistent contents menu on desktop, or a grouped picker on narrow screens, opens Overview, Estimate & timing, Signals, Research & quality, and each saved person directly. Navigation moves keyboard focus to the selected heading and keeps visited evidence disclosures.
• Each person card opens the same saved profile as the contents menu, with saved research, sources, and a collapsed suggested message.
• Signals, company research, and estimate assumptions are directly readable. Quality factors and close stages expand individually; validation questions share one disclosure.
• Estimated deal value shows the saved Base scenario; Low / Base / High assumptions and evidence remain available. Any linked CRM opportunity amount stays a separate fact. A saved zero stays a zero; a missing scenario shows Estimate unknown.
• Rejected candidates lead with why not now and retain any saved estimate and people research. The saved admission explanation for that run, including its required grade, is shown.
• Export PDF produces a full decision brief that follows the same order and retains every saved question, stakeholder, assumption, source, and reasoning step. Rejected exports lead with why not now. Grade versus strength display in the PDF follows the same Pipeline Agents flag as the on-screen brief.

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Candidate actions

• Activate — creates a full opportunity strategy from the candidate. The activation dialog picks who owns each new strategy (see Assignment on activation).
• Select mode — the pending table’s Select header reveals checkboxes on in-review and creation-failed rows (shift-click selects a range). Bulk Activate or Dismiss fans out per candidate with per-candidate failure reporting.
• Activate all — filter-scoped: activates every matching candidate, including pages the table has not loaded, using the same activation dialog.
• Cancel — returns an in-flight creation to review.
• Dismiss — marks the candidate as dismissed; it stays in history but is not re-surfaced.
• Override — reopens a rejected candidate for another evaluation.

Pending rows show the Salesforce destination — New account, Matched account, Monitored account, or Restricted account — with an inline change control so you can pick a different account before activation. Scoped rows also show their analysis scope. When scoped activation sets parent accounts, the activation dialog names the parent account it sets and notes when ShiftUp will create it in Salesforce. Sibling sites and earlier activations share one parent, so ShiftUp creates each parent only once. If a target has no Account Plan yet, the creating row shows Account Plan research and save progress before strategy generation starts. After a reload, the row waits for the next progress update instead of guessing a step. On an Account Plan, you can open the immediate parent plan and a menu of immediate child plans. Both directions list only plans you can access that belong to the same Seller Profile.

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Assignment on activation

The activation dialog picks who owns each new strategy:

• Automatic (default) — each strategy is assigned to its account’s Salesforce owner. ShiftUp re-reads Account.OwnerId at activation time, so stale seed data on a candidate row cannot misroute a strategy or overwrite a new owner. A preview breaks the batch into owned accounts, ownerless accounts, and accounts not yet in Salesforce.
• Fallback for accounts without an owner — pick a single user (or leave unassigned) to catch accounts that have no resolvable owner. This applies only to those rows. When the batch includes accounts not yet in Salesforce, the picker’s label calls them out so you know the fallback pick also decides who owns those new accounts.
• Everything to one user — switch to a typeahead to search users by name and assign the entire batch to one person.
• Suggested assignees — the last successful assignment for the current filter set is remembered per agent and offered back the next time you activate a similar batch, with provenance.
• Also make this user the account owner — an opt-in checkbox on both pickers. When checked, ShiftUp updates the Salesforce Account owner and the ShiftUp Account Plan owner to the chosen user after the strategy is created. The transfer is scoped to the accounts the chosen user was assigned in this activation. This option is hidden or disabled unless the transfer feature is turned on for the org and you have Modify All Data — see Permissions.

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Owners for accounts created during activation

When a candidate’s Salesforce destination is New account, ShiftUp creates the Account and its ShiftUp Account Plan as part of activation. The owner of those new records is set at creation time from the same assignment choice you made in the dialog:

• Everything to one user — the new Account and its Account Plan are created with the chosen user as owner.
• Automatic with a fallback user picked — the fallback user owns each new Account and its Account Plan. Automatic assignment then reads that live owner and routes the strategy to the same user.
• Automatic with no fallback picked (or Leave all unassigned) — new Accounts and their Account Plans are created for the seller profile owner, and the strategy follows that owner.

Existing Accounts and their existing owners are never changed by this step; only accounts created during activation are affected. Use the Also make this user the account owner opt-in when you need to transfer an existing Account too. The dialog surfaces how many candidates in the batch are new to Salesforce alongside the owned and ownerless counts, so you can see at a glance how many accounts the assignment will create. The user chosen as the new-account owner (specific user, or the automatic-mode fallback) must hold a Salesforce license — the shared assignee picker filters to active Standard users, and the server re-checks the user before any Account is written. A user who is not an active Standard user is rejected with invalid_new_account_owner and no records are created.

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Provenance on activated strategies

Every strategy an agent creates carries the source agent in a Sourced by badge on the strategy detail page. The strategies list also includes a sortable Pipeline Agent column, letting you slice pipeline by source and jump from a strategy back to the agent that generated it.

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Approvals in the Workspace

The Strategy approvals widget in the Workspace is the manager’s shared queue for pipeline agent candidates. When more than one agent exists, pick an agent from the widget picker; the widget then scrolls through every pending candidate for that agent, sorted server-side, with the same activate / dismiss / bulk actions available on the agent detail page. Managers and admins land on a pending-led workspace layout by default that surfaces this widget first. The widget follows the Workspace global filter you select. Account owner criteria (Me, team users, or None) match the candidate’s captured Salesforce Account owner, which can differ from the Account plan owner. None also includes candidates with missing owner data. Industry criteria match the candidate’s industry. Criteria without a candidate equivalent, such as Favorites, don’t narrow the queue. See Strategy approvals and global filters.

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Older agents

Pipeline agents load and render even when older agents are missing non-critical fields:

• An agent whose saved configuration does not carry a target mix loads with Any customer focus.
• A missing agent description stays blank rather than blocking the list or detail view.
• Saving unrelated settings does not overwrite the absent values.

One agent’s missing optional data never prevents the rest of the list from rendering.

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Sharing an agent

The Sharing tab on the agent detail view controls who can see the pipeline agent and its draft strategies. Pipeline agents follow standard Salesforce record sharing: the tab appears only when the Pipeline Agent object’s organization-wide default leaves room to grant additional access. When the org-wide default already gives everyone full access, the tab is hidden.

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Who can manage sharing

You can add and remove shares when you are the agent’s owner, sit above the owner in the role hierarchy, or hold Modify All on Pipeline Agents or the Salesforce Modify All Data permission. Everyone else sees the Sharing tab in view-only mode: the current share list is visible, and a notice explains to contact the owner or an administrator for changes.

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Add users or groups

Search for users or public groups (switch between the two with the tabs above the search box), pick an access level, and add them. The access levels offered — Read Only and Read/Write — depend on how much room the org-wide default leaves to grant. Each share appears in the list with its access level. Remove a share to revoke that access. Sharing an agent also grants the recipient Read access to the agent’s linked Seller Profile, so the shared agent renders with its profile context. That synced access appears on the Seller Profile’s sharing list with a Via agent badge and is cleaned up when you unshare the agent, unless another shared agent still requires it. Shares can also arrive in the other direction: when someone shares the agent’s Seller Profile and opts to include the related pipeline agent, the resulting agent share carries a Via profile badge. Remove that access by unsharing the Seller Profile.

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Copy Seller Profile access

On a seller profile’s default agent, users who can manage sharing see a Copy Seller Profile access button in the Sharing tab header (shown only when Seller Profile sharing is also available in your org). It copies everyone explicitly shared on the linked Seller Profile — users and groups — onto the pipeline agent, so they can see the agent and its draft strategies. If a recipient holds both levels through different shares, Read/Write wins. A confirmation dialog summarizes the effect before anything is copied. The copy is one-time: after it completes, agent access is managed independently, so later Seller Profile sharing changes are not synced. Run the copy again to pick them up. If the Seller Profile has no explicit shares to copy, ShiftUp reports that nothing was available to copy.

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Permissions

Pipeline agent access is opt-in via two permission sets:

• ShiftUp Pipeline Agent Viewer — read pipeline agents and their candidates.
• ShiftUp Pipeline Agent Manager — create, edit, run, activate candidates, and archive agents.

Assign these from the user setup Permissions Management modal. They stack with your personas — Seller, Manager, Admin — and are removed cleanly when you use Remove Permissions.

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Account ownership transfer on activation

The “Also make this user the account owner” opt-in on the activation dialog is gated by two things, both checked server-side at activation:

• Enable_Account_Owner_Transfer app setting — an admin-only ShiftUp setting, off by default. Turn it on from ShiftUp Setup → Allow account ownership changes from activation. When the setting is off, the checkbox is hidden or disabled and the dialog explains that an admin needs to enable it.
• Modify All Data — the acting user must hold the Salesforce Modify All Data system permission. Users without it see the option locked out even when the org setting is on.

Enabling the setting also syncs the packaged ShiftUp Account Transfer permission set, which carries the Salesforce object permissions needed to update Account.OwnerId and the ShiftUp Account Plan owner.

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Related pages

• Workspace — where the Strategy approvals widget lives.
• Sales Strategy — the strategy record an accepted candidate becomes.
• Seller profiles — the profile an agent is linked to.