Seller availability and workspace personalisation

What it does

Sellers can tell the sales accelerator when they work, what should happen after they finish an item, and which filters they want to see. Availability is the important one: it feeds the wait-time calculation so scheduled steps don't land on a Sunday or during a fortnight in Spain.

Key facts

Four areas: Availability, Auto advance, Steps and activities, and Filters. On Sales Premium they're all under My Work > Sales accelerator > Settings.
On Sales Enterprise, availability is set through Change area > Personal Settings > Calendar rather than inside the accelerator settings panel.
Availability covers three things: working hours (default 8 AM to 5 PM, with breaks, repeating daily or weekly), non-working hours for one-off blocks, and time off for whole days with a description.
The time zone defaults to UTC/GMT. For a UK client that's right half the year and an hour out the other half, so it still needs setting explicitly.
The seller needs read and write privileges on the Calendar table, or availability silently fails to save.
Availability only bites if an admin has enabled it — the relevant control is the wait time computation option in sequence settings, which decides whether steps respect the seller's work week and hours. With it off, sequences count every day of the week.
Auto advance offers three behaviours after completing or skipping an item: ask before moving, automatically go to the next work item, or stay on the current record with the up next widget showing what's next.
Steps and activities links activity completion to sequence steps: mark the step complete when the seller sends an email, when they complete a phone call activity, and whether completing a phone call step prompts for an activity status or uses the organisation default.
Admins can apply Lock settings so sellers can't modify them to the sequence activities configuration, which removes seller control of that section.
Sellers can hide filters they don't use, but filters an admin hid at workspace level cannot be brought back by the seller.

When to use / skip

Enable availability wherever sequences have wait steps and the client cares when contact happens. A three-day wait that fires on a bank holiday morning isn't a disaster on its own, but a queue of them means sellers come back from leave to a hundred overdue items and stop trusting the list. That's the failure mode this prevents.

Auto advance is worth a decision rather than a default. Teams doing high-volume dialling want automatic advance and never want to see a confirmation dialog again. Teams doing considered follow-up want to stay on the record and write notes. Getting this backwards makes the workspace feel wrong in a way sellers struggle to articulate.

Steps and activities is where you'd spend the least time. The defaults are sensible and the main reason to touch them is a client using Channel Integration Framework, where automatic phone call activity creation duplicates what the telephony integration already logs.

Configuration decisions

Whether wait time computation respects working hours at all, which is an admin decision in sequence settings, not a seller one.
Whether working hours are set centrally as a standard or left to each seller. Central is easier to support; individual is more accurate for teams spanning time zones.
Which auto advance behaviour is the house default, and whether sellers may change it.
Whether to lock the sequence activities settings, and therefore whether sellers can decide when a step counts as done.
How time off is expected to be recorded — through the accelerator calendar, through Outlook, or through the HR system — and what happens when those disagree.
Whether the Calendar table privileges are actually in the client's custom security roles, which they usually aren't.

Gotchas

Missing Calendar privileges produce a save that doesn't stick rather than an error message. Check the role before debugging anything else.
The UTC default time zone is easy to miss and produces steps arriving an hour early or late for UK sellers, which reads as a sequence bug.
Availability configured by sellers does nothing at all until the admin turns on wait time computation. Two teams each assume the other did it.
Time off entered after a sequence has already scheduled its steps doesn't retrospectively move them. Sellers expect it to.
Admin-hidden filters are invisible to the seller with no indication they exist, so "I used to have that filter" tickets go to the wrong team.
On Sales Enterprise the availability settings are in a different place entirely. Training material written against a Premium environment will send Enterprise sellers to a screen that doesn't exist for them.

Consultant notes

Make setting working hours and time zone part of the seller onboarding checklist. It takes two minutes and prevents a category of complaint that's otherwise very hard to diagnose.
Confirm which SKU the client is on before writing the training screenshots for availability — the navigation genuinely differs.
Decide the auto advance default with the sales manager, not the project sponsor. It's a working-style question and the manager knows the answer.
Check Calendar table privileges in the client's custom security roles during build, not during UAT.
If the client uses Channel Integration Framework or an embedded dialler, review the phone call activity settings together with the telephony configuration so calls aren't logged twice.

Worth another look if availability configuration converges across Enterprise and Premium, or if time off starts rescheduling steps already in flight.