Flows is the automation canvas inside Leadistry: one page where your lead generation journey gets drawn as connected steps and then runs itself. This guide walks a first flow from empty canvas to live, and explains what each piece does along the way.
Before you start
Three things make the first flow smooth:
1. A completed search. The trigger needs a source of companies, run any search first, ideally a recurring one. 2. An email template. Saved templates and the starter gallery both work, and you can create a simple one inline while building. 3. A connected mailbox. Sends go from your own Google or Microsoft mailbox, with warm-up applied automatically.
The fastest path: describe it
Open Flows from the sidebar. On an empty flow you will see one box: "Describe what you want to happen." Type the journey as you would say it out loud:
Email new construction firms, verify their addresses first, and chase after 3 days if nobody replies.
Press Build and watch the steps appear one by one: trigger, enrich, verify, send, wait for reply, chaser, and an end for each path. AI drafts the structure; nothing is saved or sent until you act. If your searches or templates are named clearly, the draft often wires them in by itself.
Prefer ready-made? Start from a template in the left rail lists generic journeys, an intro plus chaser, a multi-touch sequence, a review request, that become editable drafts in one click.
What the blocks do
- Trigger. Where leads come from: one of your searches (with its own schedule controls right there in the panel), or a private webhook URL other tools can POST leads into.
- Enrich. Fills email, owner and website from our cache of verified records.
- Verify. Checks the address actually accepts mail. Undeliverable leads exit here instead of bouncing off your mailbox, which protects your sender reputation.
- Skip already-contacted. Dedupes against everyone you have emailed before.
- Send an email. Your template, with merge tags resolved per lead. The card shows a live preview of the subject and first line; "See full email" renders the whole thing against a sample lead.
- Wait / Wait for a reply. Timed pauses, and the branch point: a reply takes one lane, silence takes the other when the window closes.
- Branches. Split on replies, opens, clicks, any lead field, an A/B test, or AI reply triage that routes interested, not interested, and everything else.
- Send to a webhook / Wait for a webhook. The Zapier bridge, out and back in. Details in the round-trip guide.
- Notify me. An in-app ping when a lead reaches that point, put one on the interested lane.
Click any step to configure it in place; changes reflect on the card immediately. The + between any two steps inserts a new one exactly there.
Turning it on
The switch in the header is the whole ceremony. Off means drafting: edit freely, nothing moves. On means live: leads from the trigger enrol within seconds and walk the journey.
The switch refuses to flip until the flow is actually runnable, a trigger with a search, at least one email step with a template, every step configured, every path ending. If something is missing, the offending step gets highlighted and the message tells you what to fix. Amber dots mark unconfigured steps the whole time you build.
Three safety properties hold for every flow:
- Nothing sends while the switch is off. Drafting is completely inert.
- Replies stop a lead's journey instantly. Nobody who answered gets a chaser.
- Warm-up wins. A flow never exceeds the mailbox's daily allowance, however many leads are queued; the surplus simply waits for tomorrow.
Watching it run
Once live, the rail shows each flow's pulse: how many leads are in the journey and how many replied. Deliverability and campaign performance live on the analytics page, opens, clicks and replies per template, with bot filtering so the numbers mean something.
A worked example to copy
The classic first flow, and the one a web design agency runs weekly (full playbook here):
1. Trigger: recurring weekly search, e.g. newly incorporated firms in your region. 2. Enrich, verify, skip already-contacted. 3. Send: your intro template. 4. Wait for a reply, up to 3 days. 5. No reply lane: one chaser, then end. Replied lane: notify me, then end.
Type that sentence, adjust nothing, pick your search and template, flip the switch. That is the ten minutes.
Start free and build yours today.
Leadistry maintains a live database of 5 million UK companies, enriched from the Companies House register with verified websites, business emails and social profiles. We write about the craft of finding and reaching the right businesses, first.
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