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 ⤵

REREQUISITES: 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.

All processes begin with a Trigger — this can be based on any of the main record types in Pipeliner — e.g. Account or Opportunity. You can choose from a new record being created and/or an existing record being updated or even deleted. You can even narrow it down so your trigger starts the process only when a specific field is changed.

Then decide on your Condition(s) - e.g. if a field (or fields) update to a specific value then executes one (or more) Actions. You can have multiple conditions which you will set up in the same way as you would set up Filters in the Power Panel or Reports.

Now decide what you want to happen when a condition is met for your process. You can create new records, update existing records and send emails!

We’re going to include several sample “Templates” out-of-the-box that you can use or adapt to your own requirements.

These will include ⤵

This article will use a step-by-step example which is going to be based on an “Invoicing process for Won Opportunities”. The scenario or “Use Case” is as follows.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO EXAMPLE

When the sales team wins an opportunity, several things need to happen every time. 

These are:

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

Complete the following fields:

NOTE: Whether you are able to create processes, change the Process Owner or Process Type is dependent on your user role which is set up and managed by your Pipeliner Admin(s)  ⤵

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

All processes start with a trigger. First, select the type of record that you want to act as the trigger for the process. From “Which record should trigger this process?”, choose from:

NOTE: not all options may be available if you do not have them enabled for your subscription tier. For example, Custom Entities are only available Unlimited Tier customers.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

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

The options in “When do you want to trigger this process?” are:

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

We need our process to trigger when an existing Opportunity is won so we will choose “When a record is updated” ⤵

From “Which user(s) should trigger this process?”, select from:

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

We want our process to run when any opportunity is won by anyone so we’ll go for “Any user”.

On choosing “When a record is updated”, you then need to select from an additional option in “Which fields on record must change?”. The options are:

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

We specifically need the update to be that an opportunity is won — in Pipeliner, when an Opportunity is moved to the final column in the pipeline (won), the Opportunity Status field is updated to “Won” (from “Open”) just as when an Opportunity is archived, the Opportunity Status field is updated from “Open” to “Lost”. We’re only interested in Opportunities that change status so we’re going to choose “Any of selected fields” and then find and select “Opportunity Status” as our field ⤵

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

NOTE: you can change the Trigger without having to recreate the entire process.

Once the process is triggered, Condition(s) determine the exact criteria that need to be met in order for Action(s) to take place. Setting up Conditions is very similar to setting up Filters in Pipeliner — either from the Power Panel or within Report Settings. If you’re not familiar with using Filters, please read this article first.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

We already know, from setting up our Trigger, that the field we’re interested in is Opportunity Status BUT we don’t want Opportunities that are archived (Opportunity Status changes to Lost) to result in our invoicing process actions taking place. We only want the actions to execute when Opportunities are Won. So our Condition will be “Opportunity Status is Won” ⤵

NOTE: You can select “Ignore Condition” if you want your actions to run every time without any conditions being applied — you might choose this if your actions should apply to every new Lead created, for example.

You can select multiple fields to define each Condition. 

Let’s say that we send one “Thank you for your order” email to customers where the value of the Opportunity is less than $10,000 and a different email where the order value was equal to or more than $10,000. We’d want to include Opportunity Value in our Condition ⤵

You can copy an existing Condition and amend it for another branch of your process ⤵

You can keep adding as many different Conditions as you need.

NOTE: Each Condition works like an IF .. THEN .. ELSE statement. IF the condition is met, THEN execute the actions ELSE stop (or move onto the next Condition).

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 ⤵

Your actions can take place/be executed:

NOTE: when you choose to schedule to a dynamic date or a specific date and time, you are choosing the date that your action will be executed/run. This is important to understand, for example, if your action is to create an Activity - you are not setting the date of the activity itself but are choosing when the action to create the activity will take place.

Select a number of HOURS/DAYS/WEEKS/MONTHS after “Now” where Now is the current system date and time ⤵

Or choose one of the date fields available for your record type ⤵

NOTE: As long as the date is in the future, you can then choose to schedule your action to execute BEFORE your chosen date instead of AFTER.

Once you’ve chosen when to execute your actions, you need to complete the following.

Give your action a descriptive name.

Select one of…

Create a brand new “standalone” record. You can create one of the following:

Create a new record that is linked/related to the record that triggered your process.

The options available will depend on your triggering record type. If your triggering record is an Opportunity, you can create one of the following:

Update the record that triggered your process.

Update a record that is linked/related to your triggering record.

The options available will depend on your triggering record type. If your triggering record is an Opportunity, you can create one of the following:

Once you have selected the related record type to update, you can then set up filter criteria to limit to specify records ⤵

Send an email.

NOTE: The Send Email functionality in Automatizer requires that users have enabled either the Office 365 email integration or the Sending Emails from Gmail integration. See these articles for more information on the requirements for Sending Emails from Pipeliner using Office 365 or Gmail.

Send a webhook to manage data flow to a different application

Move a Lost Lead or Lost Opportunity to the Archive

Enrol this record into an Email Sequence that you have created for the same entity type - i.e. you will only be able to enrol a Contact into one of your Contact-based Email Sequences.

Run another Automatizer process that can be applied to the selected related entity type i.e. run a Contact-based process if you select "Triggered Record Related Contacts (All)" from your current Opportunity process to update all Contacts linked to your Opportunities.

This action will create copies of the records that match the selected parameters. Note that records that were copied via Automatizer will not have the “- Copy” suffix in the record name. The copied record will be an exact duplicate of the triggering record unless the option to “Update Copied Record Form” is used to input a new value. Any field that is not modified will be copied with its original value ⤵

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

Back to our example, the first action we want to create is a Task related to the Opportunity for the Owner to confirm they have the correct payment details. We want the action to schedule immediately, we’ve named our action, selected action type of “Create Related Record” and choose “Task” ⤵

Now we need to click on the Create Record Form.

NOTE: The form will be specific to the type of record you’ve chosen to create. 

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

Ours will give us all the fields relating to a Task ⤵

NOTE: You can use personalisation options in most fields in the form when creating your record. When you click into a field, access the options for personalisation from the “+” icon placed on the right or use the “#” symbol. You can’t use personalisation in dropdowns, checkboxes or within system status fields — for these types of fields, you need to select from one of the valid options.

NOTE: For an introduction to using personalisation please review this article.

In a date field, click on the personalisation icon to view all relevant date fields that you can select from ⤵

If you want to access dynamic date options, once you’ve selected a date, click on the label in the field and select "Field Options" ⤵

Then enable “Use Dynamic Date” to select your due date for the task (or any other date you are working with) ⤵

You can choose to fill your field with a custom value you select or input OR pull in a value based on the triggered record or other values (depending on your field type).

For the Owner field, for example, I can select:

​The record URL field is an extremely useful field to use when you’re creating “notification” type emails or tasks for users. Insert the Record URL field and it will allow your Pipeliner users to click through directly to the record ⤵

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

We want the task to belong to the Opportunity Owner so we’re going to select Triggered Record Value — this will pull the owner from the opportunity and assign the task to that user ⤵

Once you’ve saved your action, click on the “+” symbol to add another one.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

The next action we want to add to our process is to send an email to the Accounts team to inform them about the new won Opportunity so they can prepare and send the invoice. We’re going to add an action named “Send an email to Accounts Team”, schedule it for 4 hours into the future (to give the Owner time to check and confirm the payment details) and select “Send Email” as our Action Type ⤵

Once you’ve selected “Send Email” as your action type, you’ll need to click on “Compose Email” to create your email.

NOTE: Only compose the email directly within the process if it’s going to be a one-off. It’s much easier and more efficient to create a new email template (or use an existing template). For more detailed instructions on creating email templates in Pipeliner please review Creating and Using Email Templates in Pipeliner.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

We’re going to send our email to our Accounts email address and will use the personalisation options to pull the name of the primary account for the opportunity, the opportunity name and value and the opportunity owner into our template  ⤵

When you’re happy with the template, click on "Save" to finish or move on to the next action.

NOTE: You must have enabled the Office 365 email integration or the Sending emails via Gmail integration in order for any email to be sent out directly from Pipeliner.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

One of the things that our users often forget is to update the primary Account linked to the Opportunity to change it from being flagged as a “Prospect” to being a “Customer” when they win their first Opportunity. This can impact on our marketing activities as well as our Customer Success outreach so we’re going to use our process to make that change for our users - that way everyone wins!

Remember to click on the “+” symbol to add another action.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

This time our new action is going to be named “Update Account Record to ‘Customer’" and we’ll schedule it for one day from now. We’re choosing “Update Related Record” as our Action Type and the record to be updated will be “Triggered Record Related Account (Primary)” — i.e. the primary account that the Opportunity is linked/related to ⤵

Once you’ve chosen to Update Related Record (or, in fact, Update Record), you’ll then need to click on the “Update Record Form” or “Update Record Form(s)” button to define your updates.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

For our process, we’ve chosen to update the related Primary Account record so the form will contain all the Account fields. The field we need to update is named “Customer Type” so we’ll enable that field and then select “Customer” from the dropdown options ⤵

NOTE: All fields are “greyed out” by default. First, tick the checkbox to enable it and then select your value ⤵

Enable as many fields as you need and select the values to be updated and then click on “Save” to close the form and “Save” again to add your action to the process.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

Our final action for this process is to send a Thank You email directly to the customer. We’ve already got that email template set up so we’ll be able to select it easily. This time we’re going to schedule the email to be sent 2 days after the Actual Closing Date of the Opportunity ⤵

We want the email to go to our main Contact for the opportunity so we’re going to use the personalisation to select the Primary Contact’s main (or primary) email address ⤵

And then we’re going to select our template ⤵

Click “Save” to save your email and “Save” again to add your action to the process.

Once you've created your Actions, you can easily copy them to "re-use" for different Conditions.  Click on "Copy" and then click on the "+" symbol to add in your copied Action ⤵

You’ll want to test your process before publishing it and making it available to your users (if applicable). Click on “Run Test” ⤵

NOTE: The test is a real-life execution of the process against the single record that you select so please heed the warning messages! You can uncheck the option “Testing this process may create or update records in your space. I want to keep all these changes in this space.” in which case the test results will tell you if it’s successful but no changes will be made on the record in Pipeliner ⤵

NOTE: You need to know which records are going to trigger your process so you can select them! The best way to do this is to create a test record that you know will meet each of your condition(s) and name it clearly so you can select it/them when you’re testing.

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

For testing our process, I copied 2 opportunities inside Pipeliner naming each of them clearly to identify which condition they meet. I’ll be able to archive and delete when finished as I’m the owner of each one ⤵

Click on “Run Test” once you’ve selected the record and you’ll then get a notification that the test has run successfully ⤵

Or that there are errors ⤵

Click on Activity Log to get a list of recent test runs and hover over a row to get a quick summary ⤵

Click on a row to open the more detailed log ⤵

Errors will be highlighted in red ⤵

You can download the logs if you need to ⤵

And filter specific items ⤵

Click on “Close” and then “Back” to get back to the test screen.

You must “Publish” your process in order to save all your changes and before exiting Automatizer ⤵

You have different options to choose from:

NOTE: You’ll also be prompted to test your process!

We’re selecting Publish so the process will be saved and be ready to activate but we want to check out one of our test records directly for added reassurance. 

Click on the “X” icon to close the Process Editor and get back to the Process Manager screen.

You’ll see your new process in the list showing as Active or Inactive depending on your choice when Publishing. Click on “Close” to close the Automatizer and get back into Pipeliner ⤵

💬 OUR USE CASE SCENARIO

So now we’re going to open up the test Opportunity that we set up that we know met our conditions for our actions to be executed. On the Feeds tab below, you can see that our Task to confirm payment details has been scheduled exactly as we specified. We won’t be expecting to see any of the other actions just yet as they are scheduled to execute in the future! ⤵

Here are the Sent Emails a little bit later ⤵

Once you’ve tested thoroughly and are happy that your process is working correctly and as you intended, the final step is to activate it by switching it to Active from the Process Manager ⤵

Use the Process Manager and notifications to keep track of your processes. This is detailed in this article.

Your Pipeliner admins have control over which users are able to access Automatizer to add processes and whether those processes are “Private” to the owner or apply to all users of the space. These permissions are configured per user role in the Admin module from the Units, Users and Roles menu and the Roles tab.

Edit a role and you’ll find Automatizer settings under the Features tab ⤵