EscalatePricing

What Escalate does

Escalate watches your enterprise deals from the moment they qualify until they close, auto-creates a dedicated Slack channel for each one, and DMs you (the founder-CTO) when a sub-thread has gone quiet long enough to threaten the deal.

This guide narrates the full lifecycle so you know what's happening behind the scenes from CRM trigger to audit trail. No jargon, no config files — just the flow.

§1 The trigger fires

A deal in your CRM (Salesforce or HubSpot) crosses one of your configured qualifying stages with at least your configured minimum amount. Defaults:

  • Qualifying stages: Negotiation, Verbal Commit, Contract Sent, Proposal (case-insensitive — Salesforce + HubSpot pipelines vary in capitalization).
  • Minimum amount: $75,000 USD. Deals below this are below the founder-attention threshold Escalate is built for.

Tunable via /escalate config trigger. See Triggers for the full configuration surface.

§2 Channel auto-creates

Within seconds of the trigger, Escalate creates a private Slack channel named after the deal (e.g., deal-acme-q4-renewal). This channel is owned by the Escalate bot — it's not a channel you manage; the bot creates, archives, and (if the deal closes) leaves it behind for record-keeping.

The auto-create posture matters: Escalate doesn't passively scrape existing DMs or arbitrary channels. It owns the venue it watches. Per PD #2 — see Compliance for the security rationale.

§3 Roles invited

Escalate invites the role-mapped users for this deal:

  • Account Executive (AE) — the deal owner from CRM.
  • Legal / General Counsel — pulled from your /escalate config roles mapping.
  • Security lead — same source.
  • Compliance lead — same source.
  • Founder-CTO (you) — auto-added; receives alerts as DMs.

If a role is unmapped (no user assigned), Escalate notes the gap in the audit log but doesn't block — the channel proceeds with whichever roles ARE mapped. Run /escalate config roles to fill gaps.

§4 Sub-thread silence-tracking

Once the channel is live, Escalate watches every threaded reply in that channel. The first message in each thread typically frames the cross-functional ask ("Legal: can we accept the data-residency clause?"). Escalate identifies which role owns the response and starts a silence-timer keyed to:

  • The role asked (Legal / Security / Compliance / AE / Other).
  • The business-day threshold you configured for that role.
  • The classifier verdict (was this a real ask, or a routing question that doesn't need a response?). The classifier filters noise — see Compliance for the LLM firewall narrative.

Defaults: 2 business days for Legal, 3 for Security, 3 for Compliance, 5 for Other. Tunable per-role via /escalate config thresholds. See Thresholds for guidance.

§5 Alert fires

When a sub-thread crosses its threshold without a substantive response, Escalate DMs you (the founder-CTO) directly. The alert is always a DM, never a channel post — by design, escalation is a private prompt to act, not a public shaming.

The alert DM includes:

  • The deal name + the role that's gone silent.
  • A one-line excerpt of the original ask.
  • The number of business days since the last substantive response.
  • Four action buttons:
    • Ping — Escalate posts a follow-up to the channel on your behalf.
    • Take it — you take ownership of unblocking the thread.
    • Snooze 48 BH — silence the alert for 48 business hours. Useful when you know the response is in flight.
    • Acknowledge — you've seen it; no further action expected from Escalate.

See Alerts for the full button semantics + business- hour math.

§6 Dismissal + audit

Every action you take on an alert — Ping / Take it / Snooze / Acknowledge — is recorded in the deal's audit chain. The chain is append-only; nothing Escalate writes can be retroactively edited or deleted via the product surface. (Customer-data-export via the /escalate audit-export slash command returns the full chain — see Slash command reference.)

When the deal closes (or is lost), Escalate marks the channel dismissed in the coverage state. The chain remains; the silence-tracker stops. You can re-fire the trigger on dismissed deals via /escalate retrofit if needed.

What this isn't

Escalate is not:

  • A general-purpose chat bot. It only watches channels it creates.
  • A CRM replacement. It reads CRM state via OAuth; you stay in Salesforce or HubSpot for everything else.
  • A standing-cross-functional-rhythm replacement. If your team already has a weekly deal review + deal desk + RevOps, Escalate is solving a problem you don't have. See the pricing page for the ICP filter.

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