Steps are the building blocks of a workflow. Each does one job and hands its results to the next. Steps are grouped into five layers, and most workflows use them in this order.
Start with these five
Most workflows only need a handful of steps. Before browsing the full library, these cover the majority of first builds:
Company search or People search — bring records in.
Filter — keep only the ones that matter.
Send companies to CRM or Send people to CRM — get the results where you work.
Notify — hear about matches in Slack as they happen.
The rest of the library is here for when you need something more specific — AI research, routing, scoring, and so on.
The layers
Sourcing brings records into the workflow.
Companies from segment — pull companies from a saved segment.
Recommendations — pull the top companies from a segmentation's recommendations, best fit first.
Company search — find companies matching a search.
People search — find people matching a search.
Company lookalikes — find companies that look like a seed domain.
People lookalikes — find people who look like a seed person or company.
Find people at company — find people at each incoming company.
Find buying committee — find the people at each company who best fit your buying committee.
Intelligence enriches and scores records.
AI research — research each record with an AI prompt.
Text — compose a value from earlier steps, no AI and no credits.
Segment fit — attribute each company to your segmentation and score it.
Enrich email and phone — reveal a person's email and phone number.
Crawl website — get each company's page content as markdown.
Google search — search the open web for each record.
Compare websites — compare two domains and label the match.
Job postings — read each company's open job postings.
Flow controls what happens to each record.
Route — send each record to the first matching branch.
Branch — send each record down every branch.
Filter — keep only records that match your conditions.
Delay — pause before the next step.
Parse JSON — read fields out of JSON text.
Activation does something with the results. Generate CSV link leaves a file for someone to go find, and Summarize run only prepares a summary for another step to send, so neither one on its own gets the result in front of anyone. Ocean warns you ("No one sees these results") if you try to publish a workflow that ends in either alone — pair it with Notify or another delivery step to clear the warning. See Publish, drafts, and versions.
Send email
Records: companies and people
Records flow through a workflow as either companies or people. Most steps work on one or the other: you can't send companies to a step that expects people. The builder only offers steps that fit what's flowing at that point, and greys out the rest.
Two steps change the type: Find people at company and Find buying committee take companies in and produce the people found at each. See Companies vs people in a workflow.
Cost
Sourcing, enrichment, and AI steps cost credits per record or per result. Flow steps and notifications are free. Each step shows its cost on its card. See Credits in workflows.