00:00
Good evening, Adam here. today I’m going to run through how to automate followups in Monday. I’ll show a real basic way to do it and then a more advanced way to do it. Both using automations. Essentially the purpose of a follow up. Follow up could be used in multiple different contexts. One to be to follow up with someone outside the organization, another to remind yourself to follow up essentially. I’m going to show you how to basically ping internally to do a follow up rather than pinging someone outside the organization as to whether or not they perceive something. Because I think that’s most of the time a cleaner way to do it. In case you forget to click the button that you’ve received it, then you’re going to be sending unnecessary things or emails to somebody outside the organization. Let’s do a follow up automation and I’ll show you what I mean.
01:00
Our first group is going to be our, let’s just say for the purposes of this demonstration, we’re sending an invoice to somebody and we want to remind ourselves to follow up in a week if we haven’t received it. This is going to be new requests and then we’re going to have a follow up group or what’s called a sent group because we’ve sent it out and then our last group will be complete. I’m going to delete these, make it nice and clean. Essentially what we’re going for is we’re going to send an invoice, number one invoice to Bob. We’re going to send the invoice and it’s going to have the Sent column. If we haven’t received it in a week, we’re going to get a reminder to follow up with Bob, where’s your invoice? Once we get it’s going to go to the complete column.
02:04
All right. Let me show you how to do this. First off, we need a way to move this request between columns. We’re going to do this pretty simply by changing these labels. We’re going to have a working on it. We’re going to have a sent and then we’ll have a done. First off, we need to automate moving it to the sent column. To do that we’re going to do when we change the status to sent, then let’s move it, move the item to the cent column. So that’s easy enough. If we do that, we’re just going to hit sent. And there it goes. Now here’s the more complicated part. We don’t want to just have it sent. We want to push a date out a week to remind us to fall up in a week. To do that we’re actually going to make this more complicated.
03:08
So let us duplicate. We’re going to have when it moves to sent, rather than just be moved to sent, we’re going to set the date. You always have to set the date first and then you can push the date to a date in the future. You can’t just pick a future date for whatever reason, but it’s just an extra click, it’s not a big deal. You’re going to set the date today and then you’re going to push the date, meaning increase the date by one week. So now turn that one off. I’ll show you what this does. Now when you send it, so your invoice goes out to Bob and then it’s now a week from today, June 22. So okay, easy enough. Now we want to set it up so that when the date comes and it’s still here, it’s still in the sent column, we want to be notified to follow up.
04:12
To do that we’re going to create another automation. This time we’re going to do when data arrives instead of the status changes. The data arrives and I’d recommend saying it for 08:00 A.m., sometimes there’s of lag right at 09:00 A.m., which has a tendency to occasionally make automation skip. The data arrives, and this is the important part, the status is not done. Or you can just say sent either way. You can say, you say it’s not done or it is sent. What you’re going to do is you’re going to notify. Notify is what gives you the little arrow inside of Monday and you can set it to email you as well if you want it to. We’re going to set it to notify myself. You can make a custom message. You can just say item name which is going to be the invoice is overdue, please follow up with the client vendor.
05:30
Once you do that, this does it. Now you’re going to get a notification to follow up. This is the way I’d recommend doing it. Finally you can do the last. Automation is easy. This is sort of my favorite automation. When you change it, your items are done. It gets moved to the done column, move to complete. And this is sort of tricky. You can actually set the date today. The reason I do this, I’ll show you why this is fun. Dates today and when the date basically this is to clean up your list. You don’t have to go through an archive when the date is today at 08:00 A.m., then you’ll archive quickly through that. Let me walk through all four again and I will do it. I’ll leave this on the screen for a second so you can copy if you like. I’ll show how it’s going to work in practice.
06:53
Let’s do another request, an invoice to Susan. When you send it’s going to get moved to the Sentcom. It’s going to send that a week when it gets to June 22 at 08:00 A.m.. It’s going to give me a notification that will show up in this notifications bar. When you click on Done, it’s going to move the complete column and it’s going to change it today’s date and then it’ll Archive. Well, actually I have to modify this slightly. It’s already past 08:00 A.m., so we’re going to change this to one day after. So now tomorrow it’ll archive. That’s how to do a real basic automation. It’s a follow up automation. You can do a more complicated follow up automation, which I’m not sure that people want me to go into. It’s already an eight minute video, but I’ll give a real basic breakdown. You could actually have it automatically email the person.
08:17
Let’s just say Susan’s email address is Susan@gmail.com. Let’s move back up here. So her email address is Susan@gmail.com. You can create another automation where the date arrives at 08:00 A.m. Only when it’s in the Sent column. Then you can email. You’re going to say please pay, or I guess follow up on the invoice. If this is your invoice board, please remove payment. Thanks. You can basically send it to your textcom. This is going to pull the email address from that text column I just created and I’m going to send it to my Gmail account. Now this is automatically, if it’s been a week, hasn’t been paid still in the Sent column, it’ll send an email saying, please pay. Let me reiterate again, only set it up this way if you are pretty sure that you’re not going to forget to move it from Sent to complete.
09:51
Otherwise poor Susan is getting an extra email for an invoice. She’s already paid. I am more of the preference to, if it’s going outside the organization, to not automate that last step. I personally would only automate up and to that point internally, but externally I think you should have another layer of follow up, layer of review to make sure that it actually needs to go out. Because whoever is assigned to this task, if it’s me, I should look at my workboard, I should see that this is due today and then I can send the email follow up and you can still say the emails are here if you like to, or you can save them somewhere else in some CRM software. You can definitely do that all within this board if you set up a specific client board and pull information from there. That is way beyond the scope of what we’re talking about today.
10:46
We’re just talking about follow ups. I hope this was useful. I know eleven minute video is a bit on the longer end and went through a couple of things that were not exactly follow ups or yeah, not exactly follow ups, showing how to set up a board to allow for follow ups. Let me know if that was helpful. If you think this was too long, if you just wanted me to just show the dates, show the pings for the notify. I’m always looking to improve my content. I haven’t been doing this for very long, so let me know if this format works, if I should make it shorter, if you want me to go into more detail, let me know, and I’ll be happy to try out different things and try to make these videos the best they can be. Thanks for watching. Bye.