Introduction to workflows

A lot of front-office work is the same reaction, every time: an inquiry arrives, someone routes it, someone starts the reply, someone remembers the follow-up. A workflow is that reaction written down once and run automatically — the standard operating procedure that no longer depends on who is at the desk. Every workflow, however elaborate, is built from three parts.

Triggers, conditions, actions

• A trigger starts it. Something happens in the workspace: a record is created, an attribute changes, a message arrives, a date arrives. One workflow, one trigger.
• Conditions decide what applies. Checks that route the run: is this inquiry a wedding or a corporate event? Is the value above €5,000? Records that do not match simply pass by untouched.
• Actions do the work. Create or update records, add a record to a list, or bring Winston in to draft a reply. A workflow can chain several actions in order.

If you have ever written "when X happens, we do Y" in a training document, you already know how to read a workflow — trigger, conditions, actions is that sentence, made executable.

A worked example: route a new inquiry

Here is the first workflow most teams build. The job: no inquiry waits, and no inquiry lands on the wrong desk.

1. Trigger — a new inquiry arrives by email, and a person record is created.
2. Condition — check the event type on the inquiry: weddings go one way, corporate events the other.
3. Action — create a deal, assign it to the right owner for that event type, and add it to the team's New inquiries list.
4. Action — have Winston draft a reply from the record's history and your past answers to similar inquiries.

That last step is where the trust rule applies: the draft waits for the owner's approval — Winston never sends without it. The workflow does the routing, the bookkeeping, and the first ninety percent of the reply; a human reads it and presses send. The result: every inquiry answered from a draft that already knows the history, minutes after it arrives, whoever is on shift.

Workflows and sequences

Alongside workflows sit sequences — scheduled series of messages to a set of records, with the same approval rules. The rule of thumb: a workflow reacts to something happening; a sequence follows up over days or weeks — the three polite nudges after a proposal that no one has to remember to send. If a record replies, the sequence stops.

Start small

Workflows are drafts until you publish them, so nothing runs against real records while you are building. Start with one reaction you repeat every day — routing, a follow-up email, a list that maintains itself — and let it run for a week before adding the next. Conditions often lean on the fields Winston keeps current, so AI attributes are worth understanding first; when you are ready to build in earnest, the Workflows & automations section covers every step type in detail.