Pause a workflow using various triggers

Workflows will automatically pause by themselves when you receive a reply. However, sometimes you may want a workflow to pause if something different occurs.

For example:

• If someone books a meeting with you
• If their lead or opportunity status changes (i.e. You moved them to Qualified or Not Interested)
• If they call you back in Close

In any of these instances, we can set this up as a Zap.

What you will need

• A Close account and your API key
• A Zapier account that allows multi-step zaps

How this integration works

This Zap can use any number of triggers to pause a workflow. The most important element in the trigger itself will be to have an identifier to find the contact or lead.

Step 1: Decide what will trigger the pausing of the workflow

It's fairly common to include a link to book a meeting in your email outreach. Our sales team includes a Calendly link in their email workflow. So for our example, we'll set up a Zap that will pause any email workflows once a meeting is booked.

In this case, we're going to select Calendly as the trigger application, and choose Invitee Created as the trigger.

Invitee Created trigger from Calendly

Step 2: Find the contact that triggered the zap

The first step after the trigger is to find the contact that triggered the zap. For this we'll use the Close search step for Find Contact.

Find Contact search step in Zapier

In this example, we'll use the contact's email address.

Searching for the contact by email address.

Now that we have the contact, we'll move on to the next step.

Step 3: Decide if you're pausing a specific workflow or all workflows

When pausing a workflow, you can pause a specific workflow for a specific contact, or all workflows for all contacts within a lead. So let's say for example you have various workflows running on a lead with multiple contacts. If one of those contacts books a meeting, what would you want to happen?

• Pause all workflows on all contacts on that lead
• Only pause the workflow for the contact that booked the meeting

Step 4 (Option 1): Pause all workflows on the lead

If you opt to pause all of the workflows on the lead, you use the Create Bulk Subscription Action action.

When configuring our bulk action, we'll specify Pause as our action type.

Since this is a bulk action that would normally be taken on multiple leads, the configuration will ask us for a Query. This could be a Smart View or a custom search. In this example, we're going to specify a Custom Value and use the Lead ID from Step 2 as a way to ensure that only this particular lead will return in the query results. Since we're trying to pause all of the workflows on the lead in this case, we'll choose Contact in the Contact Preference field.

Step 4 (Option 2): Only pause a specific workflow for a specific contact

We'll use the Contact ID we found in Step 2 to find our workflow subscription.

Searching for a workflow subscription using a Contact ID

Now that we've found the workflow subscriptions for this contact, we'll use the Update Email workflow Subscription action.

We'll use a custom value in the Subscription field, and use the Subscription ID we found in Step 3. We'll also specify that the new status should be Paused.

Configuration for pausing our workflow subscription

Click Continue and test your action step.

Step 5: Turn your zap on!

Once tested, all you need to do is select "Finish" and turn the zap ON.