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Every workflow starts with one trigger. The trigger decides when the workflow runs and what data it starts with — a meeting and its context, or the Salesforce record that just changed. You pick the trigger first, then build the steps that act on it.

Meeting triggers

Two triggers fire around a meeting on a connected calendar:
  • Meeting started — fires when a meeting begins. To deliver something before the call, set a minutes before offset (up to 1440 minutes / 24 hours) so it fires that far ahead of the scheduled start.
  • Meeting ended — fires when a meeting finishes.
Both make the full meeting context available to later steps — the title, the host, the accounts and contacts on it — so a workflow can summarize the call, brief the owner, or post to the account’s channel. Meeting workflows must start with a filter. Every calendar event counts as a meeting, including out-of-office blocks and placeholders, so the first step after a meeting trigger has to be a filter that narrows to the meetings you actually care about — for example, external customer calls. A plain-English condition or a structured one both work.

Scheduled trigger

The scheduled trigger runs a workflow on a recurring timer instead of on an event. Use it for digests, sweeps, and anything that should run at a set time rather than in reaction to something. Set:
  • Frequency — hourly, daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, or a custom interval.
  • Time — the time of day it runs (for daily, weekly, and monthly).
  • Day for weekly, or days of the month for monthly.
  • Interval — for a custom frequency, run every N minutes or hours.
  • Timezone — the timezone the schedule runs in.
A scheduled run has no meeting context, so it pulls the data it needs with a Find Records step — for example, find open deals every Monday morning and message the owner of each.

Salesforce triggers

Two triggers start a workflow directly from Salesforce, so the follow-up work happens on the event rather than on a timer:
  • Salesforce record created — fires when a new record of an object you choose is created. It begins once that object has synced at least once.
  • Salesforce field changed — fires when a specific field on an object you’re watching changes value. It fires inline as the record syncs, so pick a field Clearskies is actively syncing.
Either way, the record that fired the trigger is available to every step that follows, so the workflow can read its fields, run an agent over it, message a channel, or write back.

How to choose a trigger

  1. In the workflow builder, add a trigger and pick its type.
  2. For a meeting trigger, add a filter as the first step and set a minutes before offset if you want it to fire ahead of the meeting.
  3. For a scheduled trigger, set the frequency, time, day, and timezone.
  4. For a Salesforce trigger, pick the object to watch — and, for field changed, the field.
  5. Build the rest of the workflow, referencing the trigger’s data in later steps.

In practice

  • Meeting ended on external calls → summarize and post the recap to the account’s Slack channel.
  • Meeting started, 15 minutes before → DM the owner a pre-call brief.
  • Scheduled, Monday 9:00 AM → find open deals and send each owner a nudge.
  • Salesforce field changed on Opportunity Stage to Closed Won → draft the kickoff email and create the onboarding record.
  • Find & filter records — pull data mid-run and gate whether a run continues
  • Loops — act on every record in a set the trigger or a find step produced
  • Actions — what the workflow does once it fires
Questions? We’re here to help at support@clearskies.cc