Intro to Manual Steps

Intro to Manual Steps

In this video, I’ll walk you through all the manual actions you can now embed within your sequences, which will also appear in your personal task dashboard. If you’ve used sequencing tools like Outreach before, this experience will feel familiar and intuitive. For sales reps, this opens up a hybrid approach—letting you automate outreach while still incorporating high-touch, manual interactions where it counts.

To begin, let’s take a look at a newly created sequence. When we click the plus button to add a step, instead of just choosing an automatic email, we now have the option to insert a manual email step. This creates a task that appears on your task dashboard, requiring you to personally review and approve the message before it’s sent. You can assign a priority level to the task—urgent, high, medium, or low—and then choose how the task is assigned. By clicking the pencil icon, you can customize task ownership. One option is to assign the task to the mailbox owner, which means the task goes to the user linked to the sending mailbox. Alternatively, you can manually select a specific user to receive the task.

In play-based enrollments, routing via mailbox owner is typically best practice. If the person was added to the sequence via a manual enrollment—say, by a rep using the Chrome extension—then the enroller is usually the best person to handle that manual step. However, you can still opt to assign the task to a static user or back to the mailbox owner if needed. Once your routing logic is configured, you’ll write the draft of the email. A common and effective use case for a manual email is outreach to a senior executive. These high-value prospects often require more personalized messaging, and this step gives you a chance to review their profile on the day of sending and tailor your note based on real-time context—like company news or funding announcements.

Beyond manual emails, you can also add a manual phone call step. This is a great option if you prefer cold calling or use it as a core part of your quota strategy. Like with emails, you can prioritize the call and include any relevant notes for context. Another versatile manual action is the creation of a general task. This is perfect for any custom activity—such as sending a prospect a gift via a platform like Sendoso, or following up with a DoorDash gift card. It gives you flexibility to build non-email, non-call interactions directly into your sequences.

Finally, Unify supports three types of LinkedIn-related manual steps. You can view the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, send them a connection request, or send a direct LinkedIn message. All three of these steps help build a multichannel touch pattern and are especially useful for breaking through when traditional email isn’t getting engagement.

That covers all the manual steps currently available in Unify sequences. In the next video, we’ll explore how these steps appear in your task dashboard—giving individual reps a clear view of what’s next and enabling growth leads or automation strategists to orchestrate and oversee these workflows at scale. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you in the next session.