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Automation workflows

Triggers, conditions and actions — with the safety rails that stop a loop.

2 min readUpdated 30 July 2026
How it works
The journey of one lead
  1. 01
    Capture
    Ad, form, WhatsApp or call
  2. 02
    De-dupe
    Phone and email matched on entry
  3. 03
    Score
    Signals become a probability
  4. 04
    Distribute
    Right agent, right centre
  5. 05
    Engage
    Call queue, WhatsApp, email
  6. 06
    Convert
    Deal, revenue, attribution back
Every step runs automatically unless a rule tells it otherwise. Lead Loss Protection watches all six.

Settings → Automations.

A workflow is a trigger, some conditions, and a sequence of actions.

Triggers

What starts it:

  • Lead created
  • Lead stage changed
  • Lead assigned
  • Lead field updated
  • Call logged
  • Message received
  • Callback missed
  • Appointment booked
  • Deal won or lost
  • On a schedule

Conditions

Narrow the trigger. "Lead created" plus "source is Google Ads" plus "estimated value over ₹50,000" runs only for leads matching all three.

Conditions can branch mid-workflow, so one automation can handle several paths rather than needing three near-identical copies.

Actions

  • Assign to a user or a distribution rule
  • Change the stage
  • Send a WhatsApp, SMS or email
  • Create a task or a callback
  • Set a field
  • Notify a user
  • Wait for a period
  • Call a webhook

A worked example

Trigger: lead created Condition: source is Meta Ads

Actions:

  1. Send the WhatsApp template welcome_enquiry
  2. Wait 30 minutes
  3. If the stage is still New, notify the owner
  4. Wait 24 hours
  5. If the stage is still New, create a task for the manager

That is a complete no-lead-goes-cold safety net in five steps.

Safety rails

Automation that can trigger itself is how a workflow sends four thousand messages at 3am. Three limits prevent it:

Max depth

An automation whose action triggers another automation is nested. Past the depth limit (default 3) the chain stops and the run is marked as depth-limited.

Re-enrolment

By default a lead enters a given workflow once. Enable re-enrolment deliberately, and set a cooldown — otherwise a lead whose stage flips back and forth re-enters every time.

Run limit per entity

A hard ceiling on how many times one workflow may run for one lead, whatever else is configured.

Warning
Test with re-enrolment off and a narrow condition before switching a messaging automation on for everyone. A workflow that messages on every field update, with re-enrolment on, will message the same customer every time anyone touches their record.

Versions and drafts

Editing a live automation creates a draft. The live version keeps running until you publish, so a half-finished edit never fires.

Publishing swaps the active version atomically. Previous versions are kept, and you can roll back.

The run log

Every run is recorded step by step — which conditions passed, which actions ran, what each returned.

Settings → Automations → [workflow] → Runs. This is where you look when an automation "did not work": nine times out of ten it ran and a condition you did not expect evaluated false, and the log says exactly which one.

Something unclear or missing? Tell us and we will fix the page — send us a note.

Automation workflows — Documentation — atomcrm.ai