Automations are repeatable actions carried out on a schedule, for the companies or contacts that match your criteria. The difference between automations and triggers is that triggers execute actions when creating, updating, and removing elements.
Automations are part of Workflow Automation. Only administrators can set them up.
Imagine you want all companies with a certain marketing score, and number of employees or revenue, be assigned to a role.
Set the automation to find companies with at least the marketing score you have set, and check if the revenue and number of employees fields have the right value. If so, assign them to the role.
You can also add other actions. For example, creating activities for the assigned users with the company, or emailing a user telling them that the company has reached the marketing score level.
Instead of relying on a user to do this manually, the automation automatically takes care of it.
How to create an automation
- Click Settings → Account → Business rules → Automations.
- Click New automation.
- Give the automation a name and choose Company automation or Contact automation. Choose the type before you add criteria. It can't be changed after the automation is saved.
- Add the criteria the companies or contacts must match.
- Add one or more actions. Each action can be added once.
- Leave Active on and save.
Available actions
Company automation: Create activity, Plan phone call, Create to-do, Assign, Update company contacts, Update company, Send email, Send webhook.
Contact automation: Create activity, Plan phone call, Create to-do, Update contact, Update contact company, Send email, Send webhook, Anonymize contact, Add contact to segment.
Plan phone call and Create to-do are available in accounts that use to-dos. In accounts where Activities have been replaced by to-dos, Create activity is not available.
When automations run
Active automations run every three hours, on a fixed schedule. A newly activated automation starts at the next scheduled run. If the previous run of an automation has not finished when the next run is due, that automation is skipped until the run after.