Difference Between Trigger and Workflow in Salesforce

First published: April 11, 2022 @ 6:00 pm

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software platform. It helps organizations manage customer relationships, contact information, and orders across all channels.

This article focuses on the differences between triggers and workflow in Salesforce. You will also learn how to leverage trigger and workflow to solve your business challenges with Salesforce.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash.

Difference Between Trigger and Workflow in Salesforce:

Let’s take a look at these two terms in detail.

What is Trigger?

A trigger is a pre-defined rule that tells Salesforce to perform a specific action. For example, if the sales target of your customer is crossed, then a workflow will run. A trigger can be based on various events such as an email, phone call, or SMS.

What is Workflow?

A workflow is a series of steps or tasks that are used to achieve a certain objective. The main difference between trigger and workflow is that trigger will be executed only once whereas a workflow can be triggered multiple times.

Difference Between Workflow and Trigger in Salesforce

In Salesforce, both triggers and workflows are part of the standard CRM package. However, they have some differences in functionality and setup process:

Trigger: A trigger is a pre-defined rule that tells Salesforce to perform a specific action. A trigger is also called an “action”. You can create your own custom triggers by creating your own rule based on the event you want to trigger your workflow/event.

There are some built-in triggers such as “Crossing New Customer Target” and “Receiving Lead” which are provided by Salesforce itself. These triggers help you to set up simple workflows that do not require much configuration.

There are two types of triggers:

Predefined Trigger: You can create a predefined trigger by setting up a rule for your object. You can also create custom triggers that you have created.

Custom Trigger: A custom trigger is an action that you define. You need to set up rules to enable these actions in Salesforce. You can use Salesforce Analytics to find and apply these rules, as well as view the changes in the history tab of your account’s objects.

Workflow: A workflow is an action that involves multiple objects and is triggered by certain events (such as a Lead closing). Workflow actions consist of multiple steps, which are actions performed on the different objects involved in the workflow process.

Workflows can be very complex and often contain thousands of steps, each of which must be configured manually or automatically based on various criteria (or conditions).

Workflows are configured on Custom Objects such as Contacts, Leads, Accounts, Opportunities, etc.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash.

How to Use Trigger and Workflow in Salesforce

As you can see, the trigger and the workflow have different roles in Salesforce.

Let’s take an example of automating business processes in Salesforce using triggers and workflows. In this scenario, you want to create automated follow-up email sequences for each sales order.

If an order crosses certain thresholds, then you want to send a follow-up email to each customer based on your predefined rules. You will now see how you can implement this scenario in Salesforce using triggers and workflows.

Step 1: Creating Custom Rule in Salesforce

The first step is to create a custom rule in Salesforce.

To create a custom rule, go to Setup > Rules and Alerts. Click on New Rule in the left menu and enter a name for your new rule. For example, we will call this new rule “Cross Sales Target”.

In the Rule Settings section, select the Trigger option. You can select the condition you want to use for triggering your workflow based on certain events. In our case, you will select Custom Events.

You can read more about creating custom events here.

In the Name field, enter “Target is Exceeded” and click the Save button. Now you can see that “Target is Exceeded” is added as a new custom event in Salesforce.

If an order crosses certain thresholds then it will trigger your workflow based on this custom event.

Step 2: Creating Workflow in Salesforce

Now that we have created a custom rule, we can start creating our workflow rules. To create a workflow, go to Setup > Workflows and then click on New Workflow in the left menu.

In the General Settings section, enter a name for your workflow and select Email Campaign. In the Email Campaign Settings section, select Email Trigger.

Select the New Custom Event you have previously created.

If an order crosses certain thresholds then it will trigger operation on workflow based on this custom event.

This means that whenever an order crosses the sales target of $10k or more, then you will send an email to each customer with a reminder of their order status and invoice date via your email campaigns created earlier in Salesforce.

Which One is the Most Beneficial to Sales?

Both trigger and workflow can be used to automate your business processes in Salesforce.

It depends on your business requirements and the solution you want to implement. It’s also important to understand that trigger is a very flexible automation tool that can be used for a variety of scenarios.

However, you have to be careful when using triggers as it will cause duplicate records in Salesforce if you use it improperly. 

Workflow is more limited in its functionality and will only work for a specific task or series of tasks that you define in the workflow.

However, Workflow is a good choice if you want to run the same task multiple times over different dates or across different channels such as email, phone, chat, etc.

WorkDeputy is the perfect place to find tips and software to help you develop your business operations. Find more useful information about Marketing Automation and other related articles on WorkDeputy!