Marketing & automations

What sales automation is actually for

The marketing-automation category is full of drip sequences and lead-nurture funnels. Those exist here too, but they are not where a small sales team gets its money back. The money is in three dull things: a new lead is assigned to somebody within seconds, a lead that has gone quiet is surfaced before it is dead, and the salesperson gets a to-do instead of having to remember.

The evidence for the first one is old and unambiguous. A study of 2,241 US companies published in the Harvard Business Review found that firms contacting a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour more — and that the average response time was 42 hours, with 23 % never responding at all. Nobody planned to take 42 hours. It is what happens when assignment is a human step.

So the module is built around the pipeline rather than around a campaign calendar: rules live on stages, they react to what a lead does, and their output is mostly ownership, tasks and messages — not newsletters.

The sixteen triggers

Two implementation details matter more than they look. New lead created fires at the end of the request, after webhook and form custom fields have been written — so a condition like "Ad-Campaign contains X" sees the value instead of an empty field. And idle and date-based triggers are scanned by a scheduler, so they fire without anyone opening the lead.

The sixteen actions

Ownership and data

Assign owner · change field (any static or custom field, including relative dates such as "today + 3 days") · change stage · add tag · remove tag · add note · create deal from a lead.

Work

Create task (owner or named person, relative due date) · combo task — a task that gates the flow: the rule pauses until the task is completed, then continues.

Messages

Send e-mail (from your templates) · send WhatsApp (through your connected inbox line) · send SMS (through your connected provider) · notify a user in-app.

Flow control

Wait (with weekend handling and date anchors) · condition · multi-branch switch · call a webhook with the record's data.

Actions run in the order you place them, and a run that hits a wait is queued and resumed later by the scheduler, so a rule can legitimately span days: assign now, message in an hour, task tomorrow at nine, reassign if nothing happened in three days.

Conditions, branches and the default path

A simple condition splits a flow in two. The multi-branch switch is the tool for the real case: branches are tried in order, the first whose rules match runs its actions, and if none match the default branch runs. Rules compare any field — equals, contains, empty, greater than — with AND/OR logic per branch.

Waiting: weekends and date-field anchors

A wait step is not just "N hours". Two refinements exist because real teams asked for them:

• Weekend extension. If the wait would land on a Saturday or Sunday (in your workspace time zone), add a configurable extra — say +2 days on Saturday, +1 on Sunday — so a "follow up tomorrow" written on Friday does not fire into an empty office.
• Date-field anchor. Instead of "now + 3 days", wait until a date field on the record — appointment date, contract end, delivery date — plus or minus an offset. If the field is empty, the wait is skipped and the flow continues, and the log says so.

Both are versioned: rules built before these options existed keep behaving exactly as they did.

Stage rules versus workspace rules

There are two places to put a rule. Stage rules are attached to one pipeline stage and are edited from the pipeline itself; they fire when a lead or deal enters that stage. Workspace rules are system-wide: new lead, source, tag, idle, date-based, inbound message.

The important behaviour: when a lead moves to a new stage, pending steps of the previous stage's rule are cancelled. The three-day follow-up you scheduled in "New" does not fire after the lead has already reached "Proposal". System-wide rules are not touched by stage changes. Cancelled steps are kept in the log with the reason, not deleted.

The run log: why a rule did what it did

Every trigger evaluation writes a log entry: which rule, which record, which actions, success or error, and context — the branch a switch chose, the weekend extension a wait applied, the field value a date anchor used, or "wait skipped: field empty". Pending and cancelled queue items have their own filters.

Runs also appear on the lead card's timeline in plain language — "Automation 'When a new lead is created' ran — assigned owner, added note" — so a salesperson looking at a record can see why it looks the way it does without opening the automation centre.

Web forms

A form is a hosted page (or an embed) whose submissions become leads with their custom fields filled, source set, and a submission counter on the form. Because new lead created fires after the form's fields are written, a form can feed directly into a switch: "if service = implant, assign to team A; if city = Izmir, assign to team B".

Forms are on every plan including Starter; what Starter lacks is the automation that reacts to them, so on Starter the form fills the pipeline and a person does the routing.

Campaigns: e-mail, SMS, WhatsApp

Campaigns are the one-to-many side: a message to a filtered audience. A campaign has a channel (e-mail, SMS or WhatsApp), a subject and body or a template, an audience — a saved filter or a picked list of contacts — and an optional schedule. As it runs it counts recipients, sent, failed and opened, and keeps a per-contact log with the error text when delivery failed.

A social-media planner sits in the same menu for scheduling and publishing posts. Neither campaigns nor the planner try to be a full marketing suite; they cover the announcements a sales team actually sends — a price change, a seasonal offer, a reactivation message to last year's lost deals.

When a rule "did not work"

How automations connect to the rest

Automation → leads and deals

Owner, stage, fields, tags and notes are all writable by rules; the change is logged on the record like a human change.

Automation ↔ tasks

Rules create tasks; completed tasks trigger rules; the combo task pauses a flow until the work is done.

Automation → inbox and phone

WhatsApp and SMS actions go out through your connected lines; an inbound message is itself a trigger.

Automation → external systems

The webhook action posts the record to any URL; the inbound lead webhook and web forms bring data in.

Automation → permissions

Automations are their own entity in the role editor, so building rules can be restricted to administrators while everyone benefits from them.

Which plan includes what?

Web forms are on every plan. Automations and campaigns arrive together with Growth. There is no per-run or per-message platform fee for automations; SMS and WhatsApp costs are whatever your own provider charges. See the pricing page for the full comparison, lead management for the pipeline the rules attach to, and tasks for the work they create.