How to Set Up Your First Automation in ASH

Automation sounds like something you need an engineer for. In ASH it is not. The workflow builder is no-code, which means you describe what should happen in plain terms — when this occurs, do that — and ASH handles the rest. If you have never built one before, this guide walks you through your first automation from start to finish. Set aside five minutes and follow along inside your own account.

The two halves of every automation

Before you click anything, understand the shape. Every automation has two parts: a trigger (the event that starts it) and one or more actions (what happens as a result). That is the whole mental model. In ASH your triggers include a lead being created, a lead's stage changing, or a lead going inactive. Your actions include creating a task, sending an email template, enrolling the lead in an email sequence, sending an SMS template, or notifying the owner. Pick one trigger, attach one action, and you have a working automation.

Step one: choose your trigger

Open the automations area and start a new workflow. For a first build, choose lead created — it is the easiest to understand and the easiest to test, because you can fire it yourself by adding a lead. This trigger means "run this workflow every time a new lead enters the account," regardless of which source it came from.

Step two: add an action

Now decide what should happen. The most universally useful first action is create a task — specifically, a first-response task for the lead's owner. This is the automation equivalent of a sticky note that never falls off the monitor: the moment a lead arrives, a follow-up task exists, assigned and waiting. Select the create-task action and give the task a clear title such as "Call new lead — first response."

A quick note on the send-message actions. Sending an email template or an SMS template is just as easy to wire up, but email marketing and SMS are Enterprise-plan features, and SMS templates should be DLT-ready for Indian delivery. If you are on Enterprise, a welcome email is a lovely first action too. If you are not, stick with the task — it works on any plan and teaches you the same mechanics.

Step three: test it before you trust it

Never leave an automation untested. The cleanest way to check your work is to create a test lead yourself and watch what happens:

• Add a new lead with your own details, or a clearly-labelled test contact.
• Confirm the task appears, assigned to the right owner, with the title you set.
• If you wired an email or SMS action, confirm the message went to the test contact and reads correctly with any {{name}} personalisation filled in.

If something did not fire, re-open the workflow and check that the trigger and action are both saved and the automation is switched on. Small misconfigurations — a workflow left in draft, a missing owner — are the usual culprits.

Where to go next

Once your first automation runs cleanly, the pattern repeats for everything else. Swap the trigger to lead inactive and the action to notify owner, and you have a stale-lead alert. Swap to stage changed and enrol the lead in a sequence, and you have stage-based nurturing. For a ready-made list of ideas worth copying, read 7 automations every sales team should turn on, and see the full toolkit on the features page. Your first automation is the hard one; every one after it takes a minute.