Introduction to workflows

⁠Workflows in Attio give your team complete control and flexibility to build out virtually any process you need, right inside of Attio. By automating these processes, not only are you speeding up the velocity of your business but also making your processes and data much more reliable.

Accessing workflows

You can access your workflows by clicking on Automations, then Workflows in the navigation panel of the left sidebar.

The first thing you’ll see is a list of all your current workflows. You can sort them by in Ascending or Descending order, by Last published, Creation date and Number of runs. Let’s stick with viewing our workflows in order of when they were Last published and in descending order.

How to create a new workflow

To create a new workflow, click New workflow at the top right of the Workflows page. You’ll now see your canvas, which is where you can visually build out your workflow.

Templates

When you create a new workflow, you have two options: you can build from a workflow from scratch, or you can start with templates.

Templates contain pre-built blocks and patterns for common go-to-market activities. There are over 20 by default included with Attio, and you can search for a specific template, or filter by category.

You can also preview each template where you’ll get more detailed explanations and concepts of what it does.

Build a workflow

As an example, let's build a workflow that updates a company's record once a deal is Closed Won, and adds that company to a customer onboarding list if it’s an enterprise customer. We’ll explain various workflow concepts throughout.

Triggers

Every workflow starts with a trigger block. A trigger block is an event that starts a workflow.

There are six types of trigger blocks in Attio: Records, Lists, Data, Tasks, Utilities and Integrations. We won’t go over them all here, but you can hover over each block to get an explanation of each one or check out the article in our help center.

In this example, we’ll need to start with a Record updated block, which means the workflow will trigger whenever a record is updated in our Deal object. This is because when our deal finally closes, we will update its status to Won. When this happens, we’ll kick off a chain of workflows.

Once you choose the Record updated block, you’ll need to configure the block and next steps in the right sidebar.

This trigger is going to be associated with our Deal object, and it will trigger any time a record’s Deal stage attribute is changed (we’ll specify the exact stage later).

Actions

We now need to set the next block in the workflow. These and every subsequent block after the trigger is called an action block. An action block executes specific tasks after a trigger is fired.

Action blocks can do things like:

• Apply logic to your workflows, such as filtering, if/else statements, and delays

• Perform calculations on attributes and records

• Create and modify records and attributes in Attio

• Take action and send data in other applications via integrations

To add an action block, click the + under the Record updated block, or you can click Select block in the Next step section.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are more block categories than before. In fact, there are 10 different categories of action blocks: Records, Lists, Tasks, Calculations, Conditions, Delays, AI, Workspace, Utilities and Integrations.

We won’t go over them all, but you can hover over each block to get a helpful tooltip or check out the article in our help center.

Conditions

For this workflow, we need to use a Condition block. Conditions control the execution of a workflow, determining what path a workflow should continue down, or if it should stop.

There are three condition blocks in Attio:

• Filter, which controls whether or not a workflow continues. Your workflow will either meet a condition to continue, or it won’t.

• If / else, which allows you to set your workflow down different paths based on certain conditions.

• Switch, which are like if / else blocks, but you can have several paths instead of just two.

We only want this workflow to move forward if the condition of a deal being in the Won stage is met. Therefore, we’ll use a Filter block to check if that’s the case.

We’ll set our condition to Updated record > Deal stage > is > Won.

This means this workflow should only continue if the new value for the Deal stage is Won. If the value is set to any other, the workflow will stop.

Our workflow now triggers when a Deal record’s stage is updated, and checks if that Deal stage is set to Won.

The next action we’ll take is to update the company record associated with this deal to indicate that they are now a customer. This involves updating their Lifecycle stage attribute (a custom object attribute we’ve created) to Customer.

To do this, we’ll choose an Update record action block, which we’ll now need to configure. Since we’re working with company records, we’ll choose the Company object.

We now need to indicate that we want Attio to automatically update the Lifecycle stage attribute to Customer if the Deal stage attribute of a Deal record is Won.

In order to accomplish this, we’ll ask Attio to check the attribute of a Deal stage by selecting Updated record > Associated company > Associated company , and then selecting Lifecycle stage as the attribute to update and set it to Customer.

The company record will now automatically be set to Customer when a Deal stage is Won.

Now we need to add the final step to this workflow to our list: adding the customer to an enterprise customer onboarding list.

To do this, we’ll add another Filter block and check if the Customer segment attribute of the company record associated with our Deal record is set to Enterprise by specifying Updated record > Associated company > Customer segment > Enterprise :

Finally, we’ll use an Add record to list block to add the company to our Enterprise Onboarding list if it meets that criteria.

In the configuration sidebar, we’ll select the Enterprise Onboarding list as input.

A window will pop up asking us if we want to grant our workflow read & write access to our list. Click Yes.

We’ll now ask Attio to add the associated company to our list by clicking Updated record > Associated company > Associated company.

Publish your workflow

Our workflow is now built! If we go ahead and click publish, we’ll get a pop-up confirming we want to publish our changes. Click Confirm.

Attio will now automatically use AI to both name and describe your workflow.

Learn more

Workflows is one of Attio’s most powerful features. Learn more about workflows in our Reference section.