Objective
The purpose of this article is to provide guidance on how to set up and use branching conditions in triggers. Branching conditions allow admins to build advanced actions by adding logically unique conditions, or branches, to the same trigger.
Applies To
- Outreach Admins
Notes
- Triggers can have a limit of 30 branching conditions.
- Prior to setting up branching conditions, it is important to note that main and branching conditions and actions have a specific order of evaluation and execution:
- Branching conditions are evaluated only after the main conditions are evaluated to be true.
- But actions are not fired until all conditions (main and branched) have been evaluated.
Overview
Admins can create branching conditions linked to specific actions. Once set up, the trigger will fire the action associated with the branch, only when the condition associated with that specific branch is met.
For example, instead of creating multiple triggers for different languages, admins can set up one trigger and a unique branch per language. The trigger will fire the action specific to the branch language.
Procedure
Configure Branching Conditions
- Log in to Outreach.
- Click Administration Settings.
- Navigate to Workflow Automations > Triggers.
- Click Add trigger or select an existing trigger.
- Complete the setup of the trigger. To learn more about how best to set up your trigger, please refer to the How to create an Outreach trigger article.
- Navigate to Add action or advanced logic.
- Select Add branching logic.
- Complete setup of the branching logic.
- Click Save.
When to set up branching conditions
Branching conditions are relevant when you want the same main Action to happen on the same Object, when a specific Event occurs, but you want to perform different secondary actions on the basis of additional conditional evaluations.
Let’s take an example by creating a new trigger. The objective of this trigger is to:
- Goal: Put a prospect into a sequence
- Main action/condition: The trigger needs to fire:
- Every time a prospect is created or updated
- The company is in the Finserv space
- Indefinitely
- Branching action/condition: The prospect must be put in sequences appropriate to their:
- Country
- Vertical
- Persona
Example
- Configure base logic of the trigger.
- Set up any common conditions that must be met irrespective of the branching conditions. In this case, the Account must be in the ‘Finserv’ industry and the Prospect must be a ‘Decision maker’.
- Define the variations in your branching conditions. In this example, the variation will be on the basis of where the company is located.
- Navigate to Add action or advanced logic.
- Select Add branching logic.
- Add all variations.
FAQs
Q. Why should I use branching conditions?
A. Branching conditions are a great tool for situations where the same main workflow goal needs to be achieved but catered to one or few specific variations inside a company's business processes (e.g. customer segments). Instead of creating distinct Triggers for each scenario, admins have the option to simply create those variations inside of the same Trigger. This should directly improve the day to day trigger management experience for the admins.
Q. What are some of the common variations I can use?
A. Generally speaking, your branching conditions should follow however you segment your business today. Some of the common conditions our customers use include variations like - industry type, company verticals, segments, languages, country and so on. Or in a very workflow specific way like - results of a call disposition, value of a specific custom field, generation of task, and so on. These are just some ideas, the best branching conditions are the ones that align closest to your business needs and reduce your triggers count.
Q. How many branching conditions can I add?
A. You can add a total of 30 branching conditions per Trigger.
Q. Do branching conditions provide additional conditions or actions?
A. No. The condition categories and actions in the branching conditions are the same conditions available in the trigger’s main condition and actions.
Q. What logical operators do branching conditions provide?
A. Branches have the same logical operators as the main condition - IF, OR and AND.
Q. How are branching conditions evaluated?
A. Branching conditions are evaluated only after the main conditions have been evaluated but before any action is fired. Which means that the individual branches of a trigger will be evaluated if and only if the main conditions are true. At the end of the evaluation, all eligible actions (main and branched) are fired.
It is important to note that this means triggers should not be designed where action values become prerequisites for branched conditions. Examples of bad setups:
- When the main condition is true → set a prospect custom field to “Inbound” → Branch 1 condition checks whether the prospect custom field is equal to “Inbound”.
- The condition in branch 1 will not be evaluated as true since the main condition’s action is not fired until all conditions (main and branched) have been evaluated.
- When branch 1 condition is true → put the prospect into the “NAM high engage” sequence → Branch 2 checks whether the prospect is in sequence “NAM high engage”
- The condition in Branch 2 will not be evaluated as true because Branch 1’s action will not fire until all branches are evaluated.