Intercom workflows to notify sales when support finds upsell signals

Let's be honest, your support team is sitting on a goldmine. A customer conversation wraps up, the problem is solved, and somewhere in that chat, the customer dropped a huge hint, "We're expanding the team," or "Do you have a feature for X?" That's a perfect upsell opportunity, gift-wrapped and ready to go.

But what usually happens next? Nothing. That golden nugget of information gets buried in a closed ticket, and a potential revenue boost disappears into the ether. The communication gap between your support team's inbox and your sales team's pipeline is where good leads go to die.

This guide is about building a bridge over that gap. We'll start by walking through how to use native Intercom workflows to create a basic notification system. Then, we’ll get real about the limitations of doing it manually and show you a much smarter, AI-powered way to catch every single opportunity without adding more work for your team.

Understanding Intercom workflows

At their core, Intercom Workflows are automation tools designed to take repetitive tasks off your support team's plate. You can think of them as simple rule-setters for your customer conversations.

Most teams use them to route new conversations to the right people, send out quick replies for common questions, or add tags to keep things organized. For our purposes today, we're going to set them up to act as an alert system, giving the sales team a heads-up whenever a support agent spots a potential upgrade.

Spotting upsell signals

Before we can automate anything, your team needs to know what to listen for. Upsell signals are rarely a straightforward "I want to upgrade." More often, they're subtle comments tucked inside a larger support discussion.

Getting your support agents comfortable with recognizing these clues is the first big step. Here are some of the most common signals to keep an ear out for:

• Bumping into limits: The customer asks why they can't add another team member or create a new project. This is one of the clearest signs they’ve outgrown their current plan.

• Asking about premium features: You might get questions like, "Do you guys offer SSO?" or "Is there a way to pull more detailed reports?" These are direct inquiries about features that are likely part of a higher-priced plan.

• Describing a problem your next tier solves: A customer might be explaining a frustration without realizing you already have the solution. For instance, "It’s getting messy managing our different brands in separate accounts." If your enterprise plan fixes that, you've found a signal.

• Talking about clunky workarounds: You notice a customer is exporting data to a spreadsheet to build a report or using another tool to do something your product could handle automatically if they upgraded.

• Mentioning company growth: Simple statements like, "We're hiring a whole new department next quarter," or "We just acquired another company," are huge indicators that their needs are about to scale up.

This whole process relies on your agent's product knowledge and their ability to connect the dots during a live chat. It’s a great skill for them to have, but as we’ll see, building a revenue strategy on it alone can be a bit shaky.

Creating a manual Intercom workflow

Once your team knows what to look for, you can build a workflow in Intercom to make the handoff to sales a little smoother. The idea is to create a specific trigger that your agents use, which then kicks off an automated action.

Here’s how you can get this manual process set up using Intercom's own tools.

Step 1: Flag conversations using tags

This is the most hands-on part of the whole setup. You need a simple, consistent method for your support agents to flag a chat as a potential upsell. The easiest way to handle this in Intercom is with tags.

Go ahead and create a specific, easy-to-remember tag like "sales-upsell-opportunity". The rule for the team is simple: whenever an agent spots one of those upsell signals, they have to apply this tag to the conversation before they close it.

Step 2: Build the workflow trigger

With your tag created, you can head over to the Intercom Workflows builder. Here, you'll create a new workflow that's basically always listening for that tag.

A view of the Intercom workflow builder, which is used to set up automated processes.

The trigger for the workflow will be "Conversation tagged." Then, you’ll want to add a condition so it only runs when the tag is exactly "sales-upsell-opportunity". This makes sure the workflow only kicks off when an agent has deliberately flagged a lead.

Step 3: Define the workflow actions

After the workflow is triggered, you need to give it a job. The goal is to get this lead in front of the sales team quickly and cleanly. You have a few choices here:

• Option A: Ping a Slack channel. This is usually the most direct route. You can use the "Send a Slack notification" action to post a message in a channel like "#support-leads". The message should include some key details and a direct link back to the Intercom conversation so the salesperson can see the full context.

• Option B: Assign the conversation. If your sales team also lives in Intercom, the workflow can automatically assign the conversation to a sales inbox or even a specific account manager to follow up.

• Option C: Create an internal note. The workflow can also just add an internal note to the conversation that @mentions the sales team. This keeps the alert inside Intercom, but it can get missed if the sales team isn't glued to their notifications.

Limitations of a manual workflow

Getting a workflow like this up and running feels productive, and it’s definitely better than doing nothing at all. But when you take a closer look, you realize the whole system is propped up by a very fragile, human-dependent process.

This manual approach has some real downsides that keep it from being a scalable or reliable way to grow revenue.

• It completely depends on your agents: The entire system works only if an agent remembers to apply the tag, every single time. What happens when they're juggling five chats, dealing with a difficult customer, or are just a new hire who's still learning the product? Opportunities will be missed. It’s just not a bulletproof system.

• It’s inconsistent by nature: What one agent flags as a clear "upsell signal," another might just see as a general question. Without perfect consistency across the team, your flagging will be all over the place. You'll get some weak leads sent to sales (wasting their time) while some great ones get ignored.

• It adds more work for support: Your support team's main job is to help customers, period. Asking them to remember and apply tags is another small step that adds friction, taking mental energy away from solving the next ticket in the queue.

• It’s reactive, not proactive: This system only works after an agent has already spotted the signal. It can't proactively scan all your conversations to find hidden opportunities that an agent might have missed. You're only ever going to catch the most obvious, low-hanging fruit.

Intercom pricing

Even to get this basic manual workflow running, you need to be on the right Intercom plan. And when you start looking at their AI tools, the pricing adds another layer of complexity and cost.

The Workflow builder, which you need for the manual process we just covered, is only included in Intercom's Advanced ($85/seat/mo) and Expert ($132/seat/mo) plans, when billed annually. If you're on their Essential plan, you can't build these automations at all.

When it comes to AI, Intercom prices its Fin AI Agent on a per-resolution basis, costing $0.99 for every single conversation the AI resolves. This makes your budget completely unpredictable. As your support volume grows or you try to automate more tickets, your bill climbs higher. It's a model that can feel like it's penalizing you for being successful.

Plan	Price (per seat/mo, annual)	Workflow Builder	Fin AI Agent Cost
Essential	$29	❌ No	$0.99 / resolution
Advanced	$85	✅ Yes	$0.99 / resolution
Expert	$132	✅ Yes	$0.99 / resolution

The main thing to remember is that getting into automation with Intercom can get pricey, fast. And the per-resolution AI fees make it tough to forecast your costs from one month to the next.

An automated alternative: eesel AI

This is where a tool like eesel AI really flips the script. It solves the real problem by automating not just the notification, but the discovery of the upsell opportunity in the first place.

Instead of putting more pressure on your support agents, eesel AI works quietly in the background to make sure no signal gets missed. Here’s what makes it different:

• It finds the signals for you: Forget asking agents to add tags. The eesel AI Agent connects directly to your Intercom helpdesk and uses AI to analyze the content of every single conversation as it happens. It learns from thousands of your past tickets what an actual upsell opportunity looks like for your business, then flags them on its own.

• You can go live in minutes: There's no long sales process or technical setup. eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can connect it to Intercom with a click and start seeing it work almost immediately.

• You have total control over what happens next: Once eesel AI spots an upsell signal, it can kick off a much more sophisticated workflow than just a simple Slack message. You can build custom, multi-step actions. For example, it can automatically:

  • Tag the Intercom ticket perfectly every time.

  • Send a rich, detailed notification to any Slack channel.

  • Create a new lead or update a contact right in your CRM.

  • Assign the ticket to the right sales queue for immediate follow-up.

• The pricing is transparent and predictable: This is a big one. eesel AI's pricing is flat and straightforward. We never charge you per resolution. Your bill stays the same even if you have a crazy busy month, so you can automate as much as you want without worrying about a surprise invoice. You can even get started on a monthly plan and cancel anytime, giving you flexibility that's hard to find elsewhere.

Why automate the sales handoff from support

Your support conversations are packed with expansion revenue, but you need the right tools to find it.

While setting up manual Intercom workflows to notify sales when support finds upsell signals is a decent starting point, the process is too leaky, unreliable, and manual to be a true growth engine. You'll always be missing opportunities.

eesel AI offers an intelligent, proactive solution that automates the entire discovery and handoff process. It makes sure no opportunity slips through the cracks and frees up your support team to focus on what they do best: delivering fantastic customer experiences.

Ready to turn your support inbox into a predictable revenue stream? See how eesel AI can automatically find and flag upsell opportunities in Intercom. Sign up and get started in minutes.