Workflows

A workflow is a sequence that runs on its own. Email the customer, wait five days, and if nobody replies, email again. Sonora starts it, keeps track of where every customer is in the sequence, and picks it back up days later without you remembering to.

Every workflow has three parts: who it runs for, what starts it, and the steps that follow. You build it once. From then on it runs a copy for each customer who qualifies — Sonora calls each of those a run.

You can build one by describing it in plain English and adjusting it by chat — see building one by describing it. The rest of this page is what the pieces mean, which is useful whether you write a workflow yourself or ask Sonora to.

Workflows and actions

An action is one thing to do today, sitting in your queue. A workflow is a sequence that plays out over time, and it can put actions in your queue along the way.

Use an action when the answer is “someone should look at this now.” Use a workflow when the answer is “reach out, then follow up if we hear nothing, then tell the account owner.” The follow-up is the part an action can’t do on its own.

What starts a workflow

Under Starts on, pick one of four:

When a customer matches conditions. Health turns at-risk, ARR crosses $100k, a renewal comes inside 60 days. Sonora watches for the moment a customer becomes a match and starts one run then. It does not start another every hour while they stay that way. If they stop matching and later match again, that’s a fresh start. You can switch this to Repeatedly while matching when you do want it to keep firing.

On a schedule. Daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly — or once, at a date and time you pick. A scheduled workflow can also carry conditions, so “every Monday, for enterprise accounts only” is one workflow.

From the Run button. Nothing automatic. You pick the customers and start it yourself.

From the API. Your own systems start it — an n8n flow, a usage alert, a CRM rule — by naming an account and the people at it, plus any values the email should use. See the Workflows API guide.

One thing worth knowing: the conditions are checked when a customer enters. A workflow triggered by “ARR over $100k” checks everything downstream once, at the moment they cross. If you want to act whenever health changes, make health the trigger — not a step further down.

What a step can do

• Email — Sonora writes it. Whether it goes out on its own or waits in someone’s queue is a workflow setting, not a per-step choice — see below.
• Create a task — a to-do for a teammate, with the context attached.
• Post to Slack — into a channel you pick.
• Generate a QBR deck — built for that customer, filed as a task with a download link.
• Re-check something — run an enrichment again and branch on the answer. “Still at-risk after two weeks?” is one step, not two.
• Branch on the customer’s own data — send different follow-ups to enterprise and SMB.

Every step has one wait, shown at the top of it: Wait 5 days, then. It’s how long to hold after the step before it. Type it the way you’d say it: 5d, 1 week, 30m. When an email branches on the reply, the wait on its if no reply step is how long to wait for an answer — “wait 5 days, then (if no reply) follow up” — and a reply before then takes the if replied path straight away.

Workflow settings

Some choices belong to the whole workflow rather than one step, so they live together behind the gear in the editor’s toolbar. Set them once and every action follows.

• Send automatically — off by default. Every email is filed as a draft for a person to review and send, and the run waits at that step until they do, so a five-day clock starts from the real send rather than from when the draft appeared. Turn it on and the workflow sends its own email, with nobody reviewing it first.
• Reply in the same thread — on by default. After the first email, each later one replies inside that thread, which is what keeps the sequence together in the recipient’s inbox.
• Stop emailing people who reply — on by default. Once someone answers any email in the workflow, every later step stops writing to them — not just the one following up on that reply — and the sequence carries on for everyone else. An out-of-office doesn’t count as an answer. The exception is a “replied” branch: once the workflow acts on the answer, the steps after that branch email them again, which is what they are there for.
• Stop the others once one person replies — off by default, and only relevant when a step emails several people in parallel. Turn it on when one answer should end the outreach for the whole account.
• From, Email type and Writing voice — who the mail is from, whether it’s transactional or promotional, and the style it’s written in. A sequence has to agree on these: replies are threaded by sender, and one unsubscribe can’t cover two kinds of mail. (Open and click tracking stays a per-step choice, under a step’s Advanced settings.)

Nothing Sonora generates for you can email a customer on its own. Templates and the AI builder cannot turn Send automatically on — that is a switch only you throw.

Replies

A workflow stops writing to someone who already replied. If three people at an account got the first email and one wrote back, the follow-up goes to the other two. A step can also branch on the reply, so “they answered” and “we heard nothing” lead to different places.

Reply detection needs Gmail, and it follows your mail import rather than arriving instantly. Expect it within the import’s cycle, not within the minute.

Examples

At-risk escalation. When a customer’s health turns at-risk, re-check in two weeks. If they’re still at-risk, email their champions. If they’ve recovered, the run ends quietly.

Usage-drop win-back. When product usage falls by half over two weeks, email the customer. If there’s no reply in five days, task the account owner to reach out.

Renewal outreach. When a renewal is within 60 days, email the customer to open the conversation, and build the QBR deck for the owner to review.

Monthly outcome summary. On the 1st of every month, send each customer a personalized recap of what they actually used.

All four ship as templates you can start from and change. Renewal outreach and the monthly summary are always there. At-risk escalation needs a health score configured, and usage-drop win-back needs a product-usage metric — until those exist in your workspace, those two templates don’t appear in the gallery.

Building one by describing it

You don’t have to assemble a workflow step by step. The box at the top of the Workflows page takes a description and builds the whole thing — trigger, steps, waits, branches:

When a renewal is 60 days out:

• email the champion
• wait 5 days
• if no reply, follow up and flag the owner

You get back a real workflow, laid out and ready to look over. Write it the way you’d brief a colleague. Bullets, rough timing, and “if they don’t reply” all work; you don’t need to know what Sonora calls any of it.

Then keep talking to it. Build with AI in the editor opens a chat that changes the workflow you’re looking at, one request at a time — “make the wait three days instead,” “add a Slack post to #cs-alerts at the end,” “only do this for enterprise accounts.” Each change lands on the graph where you can see it. The conversation stays attached to the workflow, so you can reopen it later and pick up where you left off, or just ask what a step does.

Two things worth knowing about how it behaves:

• It won’t quietly substitute. If you ask for something that needs a health score or a usage metric your workspace doesn’t have, it says which one is missing instead of picking a different one and looking finished.
• It can’t turn on sending. Everything it writes waits for review. Turning on Send automatically is a change you make yourself, on purpose.

If you’d rather not start from a description, browse templates or start from scratch — both land in the same editor, and you can bring the AI in at any point.

The editor

However you started, the editor shows a trigger at the top and steps connected below it, with branches forking where a step has more than one answer. Click any step to configure it by hand.

Preview before you activate. Pick a few customers and trace the draft through the graph. You see what each step would produce for each of them — including the email text — and nothing is sent.

Draft, active, archived

A new workflow is a draft. It saves, it previews, and it contacts nobody. It only starts running when you activate it, and the editor asks you to confirm.

Active means it’s live and enrolling customers. You can pause it at any time.

Archived stops the workflow completely. New runs stop starting, and any run already in flight is cancelled where it stands, so its remaining steps never run. Drafts it already put in your queue stay there for you to send or dismiss, but the workflow will not send them for you or carry on to the next step. Editing is the gentler option: a run already going finishes on the version it started on, so a mid-sequence customer never switches graphs underneath you.

Watching what happened

The Runs tab lists every customer going through the workflow, which step each one is on, and how it turned out: In progress, Completed, Failed, or Cancelled. Open a run to see the same graph annotated with what actually happened at each step — what was sent, who opened it, who replied.

Alongside that, Sonora tracks whether each run got a response, bounced, or heard nothing, which is a different question from whether the sequence finished.

The same numbers are available outside Sonora. Connect Claude (or another MCP client) through Model Context Protocol and ask how a workflow is performing, which accounts replied, or who met its goal.

Sonora also caps how much mail one workflow can send in a day and in an hour. Past the cap, sends are held and go out as room frees up — they’re never dropped. If you need more headroom than the default, ask us to raise it for your workspace.