Automatically Create Opportunities on a Schedule
How to use the Create Opportunity automation action to spawn new opportunities automatically — perfect for recurring workflows like weekly gig bookings, retainers, or any business with fixed recurring jobs.
The Create Opportunity action lets an automation spawn a brand-new opportunity — on a schedule, on a trigger, or as part of a larger workflow — without any manual input. It is the platform-native answer to recurring spawn workflows that previously required an external script.
The killer use case: recurring spawns
Think about a business that runs the same job week after week for the same clients. A trivia events company with 20 venues, for example, needs a fresh opportunity created every Monday for each venue with the host-pay product attached. Before Create Opportunity, that meant a Python script running outside TrustPager. Now it is a single Auto Schedule + automation, entirely inside the platform.
The same pattern applies to:
- Monthly retainer opportunities for agency clients
- Weekly service jobs (cleaning, maintenance, inspections)
- Any fixed recurring engagement where the customer and product are known in advance
How it differs from Create Lead
TrustPager has two actions for creating opportunities. They are designed for opposite situations:
- Create Lead — built for inbound flows where the customer and contact may not exist yet. It does a find-or-create match on company name and email before inserting the opportunity. Use this for form submissions, webhook leads, and new-enquiry automations.
- Create Opportunity — built for known relationships. It does no matching. Customer, contacts, and products are specified directly and a new opportunity is always inserted. Use this for recurring spawn workflows where you already know exactly who and what is involved.
Rule of thumb: if the customer already exists in your CRM, use Create Opportunity. If you are handling a fresh inbound enquiry, use Create Lead.
Add the action to an automation
- Go to https://app.trustpager.com/auto/automations and open (or create) the automation you want to use.
- Click Add Action and choose Create Opportunity from the action list.
- The action wizard opens. Fill in the fields described below.
Configuration fields
Required fields are marked. Everything else is optional and can be left blank.
- Pipeline (required) — which pipeline the new opportunity lands in.
- Stage (required) — which stage it starts at.
- Opportunity Name — supports merge tags (see below). Leave blank to use the customer name as the default.
- Customer — the account (company) to attach the opportunity to. When running inside an Auto Schedule with an opportunity or contact audience, this auto-fills from the trigger context if left blank.
- Contacts — one or more contacts to attach. The first contact in the list becomes the primary contact on the opportunity. Leave blank to inherit from trigger context.
- Products — add one or more products from your catalogue with a quantity. The opportunity value is calculated from these.
- Lead Source — e.g. "Recurring Schedule", "Referral".
- Deal Value and Currency — override the value if you are not using products, or need a fixed amount regardless of product pricing.
- Assigned Users — team members to assign to the opportunity.
- Expected Close Date — a fixed date, or use a merge tag like
{{today}}. - Tags — one or more tags to apply on creation.
- Custom Fields — set any opportunity-level custom fields at the point of creation.
Merge tags in the Opportunity Name
The name field supports template tokens that resolve against the pinned customer and primary contact at the time the action runs:
{{customer.name}}— the account name{{contact.first_name}}— the primary contact's first name{{today}}— today's date (e.g. 2026-05-04){{now}}— the current date and time
Example: "{{customer.name}} — Week of {{today}}" produces "Riverside Hotel — Week of 2026-05-05" when the schedule fires each Monday.
See the full token reference at https://trustpager.com/help-center/first-name-only-contacts.
Worked example: weekly trivia gig spawner
A trivia events business runs 20 venues, each with a fixed weekly host. Every Monday morning a fresh opportunity should appear for each (venue, host) pair with the host-pay product attached.
- Build an automation with a Create Opportunity action configured as:
- Pipeline: Trivia Gigs
- Stage: Confirmed
- Name:
{{customer.name}} — Week of {{today}} - Products: Host Pay × 1
- Tags: Weekly Gig
- Leave Customer and Contact blank — these will be filled from the schedule context.
- Go to https://app.trustpager.com/auto/schedules and create a new Auto Schedule:
- Automation: the one you just built
- Audience: Contacts — filtered to hosts (e.g. tag "Trivia Host")
- Recurrence: every Monday at 6:00am
- Use Preview Audience to confirm the 20 hosts are matched before activating.
- Activate. Every Monday at 6am TrustPager creates one opportunity per host, pre-named, pre-tagged, and pre-loaded with the product.
Context auto-fill in Auto Schedules
When the action runs inside an Auto Schedule with an Opportunities or Contacts audience, the Customer and primary Contact fields auto-fill from the row that triggered the run — even if you left those fields blank in the action config. This is what makes the per-row spawn pattern work without manually listing every customer ID.
If you hard-code a Customer or Contact in the action config, those values take precedence over the trigger context.
Validation
Create Opportunity validates all IDs before inserting. If a pipeline, stage, customer, contact, or product ID does not belong to your workspace, the action throws a clear error rather than creating an orphan record. Check the automation run log at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/errors if an action fails — the error message will name the offending field.