Who can use this: Any team member
Available on: Gong Engage
Ideal for: Sales rep
A flow is a sequence of steps for managing your interactions with contacts and leads: It automates your outreach and tracks the status of those interactions. You may know flows by another name, such as sales sequences or cadences.
What a flow contains
A flow can contain email, call, LinkedIn, and task steps. Each step is one outreach action, and when a step becomes due Gong creates a to-do so you can work on it. Learn more about flow step types.
How a flow runs
When a contact or lead is added to a flow, the flow assignee gets a to-do reminding them to do the next step. Each person in a flow has a flow status that shows their stage, for example "In progress", "Paused" or "Bounced", and that status can sync to your CRM.
Every flow has a ruleset that determines how the flow behaves, including what happens when someone replies, books a meeting, or their email bounces. Rulesets are created and managed by admins. Learn more about flow rulesets.
Company flows can also have automations that add people to the flow automatically.
Whether someone can be in more than one active flow at a time is configured by your admin. You can remove a person from a flow yourself, and the flow's ruleset can also remove them automatically.
Note:
When a person is in multiple flows, pausing one flow does not pause the others. Only the flow that triggered the pause is affected.
Example of a flow in action
A new lead is added to your CRM, and an automation rule adds them to a flow. Step 1 is a call, and when the lead doesn't answer they move on to step 2, a manual email. The lead replies to that email, so the flow pauses according to its ruleset and you get a Response to-do. From there you can reply, resume the flow, or remove the lead. Learn more about managing people in a flow.
The flow library
To open the flow library, from the left sidebar, click Assets, and select Flows. Your admin controls who can create, edit, and use flows.
The library is divided into four sections:
Your flows: Flows you create for yourself, including any company flow you duplicated and saved with changes.
Company Flows: Flows available to everyone in your company.
Shared with you: Flows that other team members have shared with you.
Archive: Flows you have archived and can restore.
Learn more about sharing flows with your team.
Frequently asked questions
Can a contact be in more than one flow at the same time?
It depends on your company settings and the flow's ruleset. When your company allows multiple active flows and the flow is not set to exclusive, a person can be in several flows at once. If the company setting restricts multiple active flows, or the flow is exclusive, they can only be in one flow at a time.
What is the difference between pausing a flow and removing someone from it?
Pausing stops the flow temporarily. The person stays in the flow, and you or a ruleset can resume them from where they left off. Removing takes the person out of the flow entirely, and if they are added back later they restart from a selected step, which is step 1 by default. Already-sent emails cannot be recalled after removal.
When does Gong automatically remove someone from a flow?
An overdue flow to-do eventually expires. When it does, Gong dismisses the to-do and removes the person from the flow, and their flow status reads "To-do expired". A person is also removed when you remove them manually, when a ruleset removes them on bounce, CRM change, or account-level action, or when they are deleted from your CRM.
What happens when a contact replies to a flow email?
Gong detects replies within a 14-day window and pauses the originating flow, generating a Response to-do. Replies that arrive outside the 14-day window are not recognized as a reply to that flow. How the flow handles the pause depends on your ruleset configuration.
What happens when a contact in a flow sends an Out of Office reply?
Gong snoozes the current to-do for every flow that person is in until the return date detected in the message, and their flows are not paused. When Gong can't detect a return date, nothing is snoozed and the flows continue as originally scheduled.