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Creating Basic Sales Workflows

Learn how to create a workflow of tasks, emails, calls, and texts for each of your sales stages.

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Written by Chris Winn
Updated over 2 months ago

Workflows are basically a series of tasks that you want to follow at each stage of your sales process. By defining and pre-scheduling the steps in your sales process, you can ensure peak performance and consistent results.

For more information on why sales process design matters check out the webinar, "Designing A Killer Sales Process" as well as lesson #6 in the LeadSimple Sales Course.

Building a Workflow

To start, navigate to the pipeline you want to edit the stages and workflows for (click "Leads" in the sidebar and click one of the options below). Then click the settings icon at the top of the page.

Next, select "Stages and Workflows" in the left-hand navigation that appears.

Click on the stage you want to edit.

Begin adding steps to the workflow by clicking one of the step-type buttons: Todo, Call, SMS, Email, Meet. 

Note that each step type is represented by an icon (phone icon for Call, envelope icon for Email, etc...). 

Create descriptions for the steps if desired.

Space your workflow out over time by adding delays between each step. To do this click the time stamp to the left of a given step. 

Note that by default the time delays on each step are relative to the step before, not the date the workflow began. You can edit this and make the step relative to other dates and even custom date fields.

The day each step will occur is displayed just below the delay. Keep in mind this assumes each step is being completed on time. If steps are being delayed it will delay all steps after it and skew these numbers. 

Email Automation with Templates

You can add automation to your workflow by creating email or text templates. These templates can be attached to email steps in your workflows:

Then set them to send automatically by checking the lightning box on that step:

Reordering Workflow steps

Steps in the workflow can be moved by clicking (and holding) the icon of a given step and dragging it to the desired position.

Deleting Workflow steps

Steps in the workflow can be deleted by clicking on the trash icon to the far right

Using a Workflow

Once your workflow is created AND active, it will automatically begin creating tasks for each new lead that enters the stage where that workflow is active.

Note that any changes you make in a workflow WILL NOT apply to leads that were previously in that workflow (they will apply to new leads that enter that stage though). If you want the new changes to apply to leads previously in that stage, you have to move those leads into a different stage and then move them back into their former stage (the one you made edits to).

Put a lead in a stage with an active workflow

Workflow steps are triggered by putting a lead in a Stage which contains a Workflow.

For example, new leads that import into your LeadSimple account are automatically placed in the stage "New". You can apply a workflow to a given lead by updating it's stage to a stage with an active workflow set up inside it.

Once that happens, the steps in that workflow will automatically be applied as tasks for that lead. These tasks will be assigned to whoever the lead is assigned to by default but you can have tasks assigned to a specific user no matter if the lead is assigned to them. Read more about that here

LeadSimple will only display the next task in the workflow so as not to create unnecessary clutter by displaying all future workflow tasks at once. Once the current workflow task is completed, the next one will automatically appear behind it.

Once the lead's stage is changed, the workflow of the old stage and its tasks are automatically removed from that lead. If the new stage has a workflow inside it then those steps will automatically be applied. That way, the tasks are always current relative to where the lead is at in the sales process.

The person assigned to the lead will get a reminder each day a workflow task is due reminding them to complete it.

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