This guide builds a workflow from scratch: find companies that look like your best customers, keep the strong ones, and send them to your CRM. It takes about five minutes, using the Assistant to do the heavy lifting.
Before you start
Connect the CRM you want to export to. See Connect your tools.
Have a customer domain in mind to search from.
Step 1 — Describe your goal
Click New workflow from the Workflows browse page, then type your goal into What do you want to automate? — something like *"Find companies that look like my best customers, keep the ones over 50 employees, and send them to my CRM."* Press Enter.
The Assistant creates a new workflow and starts building: a schedule trigger, a sourcing step, a filter, and a CRM export step, chained together on the canvas.
Step 2 — Review what it built
Give the workflow a clear name at the top, like *Lookalike sourcing to CRM*. Click through each step the Assistant added:
The sourcing step needs one of your best customers' domains — the Assistant leaves this blank since it's specific to your business.
The filter should already reflect the condition you described (for example, over 50 employees) — check it matches what you meant.
The CRM export step needs your provider picked, if you have more than one connected.
Step 3 — Fill in the blanks
Open each step flagged red and fill in what the Assistant couldn't guess: the seed domain, the CRM provider, any field mappings. For everything else the Assistant can do and can't guess for you, see Build with the Assistant.
Step 4 — Publish
Click Publish changes in the top bar. If any step still needs setup, it's marked in red — finish those, then publish. You'll see a "Published" confirmation.
Your workflow is now saved. Flip the Live toggle on to let it run on its schedule, or click Trigger workflow to run it once right now.
Step 5 — Watch it run
Open the Activity tab to see records flow through. Each row is one company; each column shows which step it reached and its status.
Prefer to build it by hand?
Click Build from scratch on the New workflow page instead of describing a goal. It opens a trigger picker first — choose Schedule, Webhook, Manual, or a CRM/Leads event, grouped the same way as in the builder itself — and Ocean starts you on a blank canvas with that trigger already set. Add every step yourself from there; useful once you want finer control, or you're building something the Assistant hasn't seen before. See The workflow builder for the canvas mechanics: adding steps, configuring them, and connecting them in order.
Other ways to start a workflow
From a segment: open a segment's Workflows tab. If a workflow already sources that segment, it's listed there so you don't build a duplicate; if not, click Start a workflow and Ocean pre-fills the Start card and a Companies from segment step for that segment, so you only need to describe what happens next (or build the rest yourself).
From a template — see Start from a template.
What's next
Start from a done-for-you setup instead next time — see Start from a template.
Let AI qualify records for you — add an AI research step.
Route records down different paths with Route and Branch.
Learn how drafts and publishing work.