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Overview

Plays are automated workflows that let you build and execute repeatable strategies. In this guide, you’ll learn the basics of how Plays work and create one from scratch.

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What are Plays?

Building scalable and effective sales, marketing, and GTM strategies requires successfully coordinating two key components:
  • Data: Countless data sources go into building scalable automations. This data is traditionally scattered across tools and databases, but Unify centralizes it in one place.
  • Actions: Researching companies, identifying decision-makers, executing multi-channel outreach, and more. Taking the right action at the right time is crucial to success.
Unify is a purpose-built system of action that solves this problem. Plays let you define a series of actions that will be taken on companies or people at exactly the right moment.

An example of a complex Play that performs account research and prospecting.

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Tutorial preview

One of the most popular use cases for Plays is to find prospects at companies that are visiting your website and enroll them in outbound sequences. This is a great example of a warm outbound campaign that targets key decision-makers at companies showing buying intent. In this guide, you’ll create a Unify Play that runs on companies visiting your website and performs the following actions:
  1. Prospect: Find new people at the company that match your buyer personas.
  2. Sequence: Enroll the new prospects in a sequence to send them emails.
  3. Sync to CRM: Sync newly found people to Salesforce or HubSpot.
This standard Play is a great starting point to understand how Plays work and kickstart your outbound strategy.

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Walkthrough

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Step 1: Create a new Play

Look for the Plays tab in the sidebar and click on it. This is where you will create and manage all your team’s Plays. To create a new Play, click the New Play button.

This is what the Plays tab will look like before creating any Plays.

When you create a Play, you will be prompted to give it a name.

Once the Play is created, you will see the Play Builder.

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Step 2: Choose a trigger

Once you’ve created a new Play, you will see the Play Builder. The first step when building any Play is to choose a trigger. The trigger lets you specify exactly when the Play should run and which companies or people it should run on. In the center of the builder, you will see an action that says Select a trigger. Click on it to show the trigger configuration panel. For this Play, choose the Website visitors template.

Select a trigger type or a template from the configuration panel.

This is where you define the criteria for companies that this Play will run on.

Here you have the option to further filter and refine the companies that this Play will run on. For example, if you only want to run this Play on companies with more than 100 employees, you can add a filter on Employee Count. You can learn more about the available filters and how to use them in the tutorial How to Create an Audience. You can always return later to add or modify filters. Click Done to finish configuring the trigger.

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Step 3: Add actions

Now that the trigger has been selected, it’s time to start adding actions. There are many actions to choose from, and you can configure them in countless ways. For this Play, we’re going to start simple and add three actions.

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Prospect for people

Start by adding a prospecting action. This action will take the company coming from the trigger and search for relevant prospects. Drag the Prospect for People action from the action list and drop it into the builder.
If you drag and drop a new action on top of an existing action, it will automatically be connected to it.

Drag and drop actions from the action list into the Play Builder.

Once added, you will see the prospecting options shown in the configuration panel on the left. Here are the most important selections to make:
  • Max. prospects per company: This is how many prospects you want to find at each company. We recommend starting with 2-4 prospects per company.
  • Personas: These are the personas to search for. You can select from existing personas or create new ones. Unify will find people matching these personas in order, so list them in order of preference.
If you haven’t defined any personas yet, you can learn how to do so in the tutorial How to Create Personas.

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Loop

Next, add a Loop action. The prospecting action will return a list of people found at the company, and the loop will run subsequent actions once for each person in the list.

Add a loop and connect it to the prospecting action.

Each action receives an input and produces an output. Actions in the Play Builder have small colored symbols that represent what type of input and output they expect. Here’s what each symbol represents:
SymbolValue
A single person record.
A list of one or more person records.
A single company record.
Plays work by connecting each action’s output to a matching input on another action. This is how data flows through the Play and how each action knows what to do. Most actions run on one record at a time. The Loop action is how you take a list of records and run actions on them one by one.

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Sequence enrollment

Now place a Sequence action inside the loop. This will enroll each person into a Unify Sequence.
Once you’ve dropped the action into the loop, you can drag it near the loop action to automatically connect them. You can also manually draw connections between the colored icons that represent action inputs and outputs.
Once added, you can configure the sequence enrollment action by routing personas to the desired sequences and mailboxes. To speed up the process, click the Add prospect personas button to automatically reuse all of the personas you selected in the prospecting action.

Configure sequence enrollment by routing specific personas to mailboxes and sequences.

Add a sequence enrollment action and connect it to the loop.

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Sync to CRM

Finally, add an action to sync each new person to your CRM. Depending on which CRM you’ve connected in Unify, you will see either a Sync to Salesforce or Sync to HubSpot action.

You can specify default field values or limit the number of people synced per company.

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Step 4: Publish and view logs

Once your Play is ready, click the Publish button in the top right corner of the Play Builder. This will activate the Play and start running it on companies that match the trigger criteria you defined earlier.

By publishing the Play, it will immediately start running on companies.

As the Play starts to run on companies, you will see them appear in the logs. Click on the Logs tab at the top of the Play Builder to view the logs.

Logs show a detailed view of every company or person a Play has run on.

Click on any company to view the details of its run, including the exact actions that were taken and the results of each action. Click on any action to view the precise inputs, outputs, and result of that action.

Click on any company to view exactly what the Play did.

Click on any action within the log details to see its results.

You can use the action logs to inspect exactly how a Play is working.

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Conclusion

Congratulations on creating a Play! Combining website intent, prospecting, and sequences into a single automated flow is a popular Play and an excellent starting point. For a comprehensive overview of Unify Plays, check out the reference guide:

Plays Reference

Detailed reference guide that covers the fundamentals of plays, the actions and triggers available to use, and more.