PREREQUISITES: Automatizer is a paid-for add-on to Pipeliner. Please contact your Account Manager directly to discuss how it can streamline your business or email customer-success@pipelinersales.com and we will ask your Account Manager to contact you.

Please make sure to read this article — and watch the videos — to learn more about the features of Automatizer in detail. This article does not contain a detailed description of each feature - it's designed to cover a useful example of how you could use Automatizer to help your business.

Automatizer is our “Point & Click” automation tool designed to help you easily and graphically build your organisation’s processes into Pipeliner. Automatizer allows you to streamline your workflows and empower your teams working with Pipeliner by automating repetitive tasks and communications.

We’ve made it as easy as you would expect from Pipeliner! No complex language or coding is required!

Every process consists of triggers, if/then conditions and can include multiple actions.

Whenever a Contact’s Last Contacted Date is more than 30 days ago we want to schedule a Call for the record owner (Account Manager) to prompt them to make contact. Automatizer is a perfect tool for this job as the calls are automatically scheduled and will pop up for each Account Manager when due and do not rely on individual users remembering to schedule their follow ups.

Open the “Automatizer” from the “Tools” menu. Click on the “Create New” button ⤵

Click on ”Save“ to save your process. This will launch the “Process Editor” ⤵

Click on "Start" to choose when you want the trigger to activate ⤵

For our example, it’s going to be “Contact”.
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Next, you need to choose when you want the trigger to activate.

We need our process to trigger every morning at 7.00am to find any new contacts where the "Last Contacted Date" has just become more than 30 days ago ⤵

Click on "Save" to save your Trigger criteria and move onto setting up your Condition(s).

We want our Condition to be based on the “Last Contacted Date” for Contacts and our process to trigger for all Contacts where the Last Contacted Date is not within the last 30 days.

First you need to understand how Last Contacted Date is updated (for both Accounts and Contacts). 

There are 3 actions that trigger the update of that field:

So, in the screenshot below, the “Call to invite to Lunch” would update the Last Contacted Date for our Contact but the “Follow up after Quote” call would not as it is linked to an Opportunity not to the Contact.

TOP TIP: To easily see the record that an activity is linked to, add Linked Items and Linked Items Type to your Activities List View ⤵

For our Condition, we’ll choose Contact Last Contacted Date and then “dynamic period is not” and "Last 30 days" ⤵

TOP TIP: Just using the value in the Last Contacted field as our Condition could mean that we schedule Calls to lots of Contacts that we keep in our database who might not need ongoing monthly calls (Accounts Payable Contacts, for example) so remember that you can add additional criteria to narrow down your selection - you might want to only enforce this process for Contacts that you have flagged as “Primary” using a custom checkbox field or those with “CEO” in Job Title (select “Primary Account Job Title” as your field) or you want to take care to exclude Contacts who have Unsubscribed. 

We’re going to add a second field to our Condition that will make sure we don’t schedule a call for any contact where there is already a pending activity. We’ll choose “Has Scheduled Activity” and then select “No” ⤵

Take care to make your Condition(s) as specific and detailed as possible to avoid unintended consequences!

Click on "Save" to save your Condition and move onto your Action.

Actions are executed when a process is triggered and the Conditions which govern them have been met.

Click on "Action" to open up the panel on the right hand side and add in the details of your Action.

We want to create a Task related to the Contact for the Owner to call to catch up with their contacts. We want the action to schedule immediately, we’ve named our action, selected action type of “Create Related Record” and chosen “Task” ⤵

Now we need to click on "Create Record Form".

Ours will give us all the fields relating to a Task. We’re going to choose “Call”, fill in the Subject Line with “Call to catch up” and make the Due Date = the current date + 1 day. The Activity Owner will be set as the same person that owns the Contact record using Triggered Record Value ⤵

Click on "Save" to save the Action and "Save" again.

You’ll need to publish to save your changes to update your process and, of course, you should always test your process before activating ⤵

As part of testing, you can make sure to create the same filter from the Contacts menu so you know exactly how many records (currently) match the criteria and can look at a few of them in detail to make sure that you’ll be happy when a call is added by the process! ⤵

Here are the test results run with the option for “Testing this process may create or update records in your space. I want to keep all these changes in this space.” ticked ⤵

Click on the successful (green) item in the Activity Log to see the individual Run Log detail ⤵

You can click through to the call that was created by the test run to check the details and to make sure it’s linked to the record(s) that you identified in your filter ⤵

When you’re confident that it is going to work exactly as you expect, set to "Active" and each morning at the time you choose, the process will run and schedule the call for any record meeting your conditions.

Use the "Process Manager" and notifications to keep track of your processes.