Choosing the Trigger for Your Playbooks
Learn when to target a Playbook at accounts vs users vs organization vs activity (tasks, notes, etc)
When creating a Playbook in Vitally, you'll see these options:
You have the option to select between your hierarchy, notes, tasks, or custom objects. Depending on the trigger rules you'll want to choose from and what you're trying to accomplish will depend on your selection. In this article we'll go over Users vs Accounts as an example.
Your selection here determines whether our system will apply the playbook's automated actions to either accounts or users or organizations (that match your playbook's rules). There's a big difference in functionality based on your selection!
For example, let's say you build a playbook with these conditions:
Account rules | User rules |
Overall health score > 7.0 | Last NPS score > 8 |
Let's also say your Playbook has an action to automatically send an email to whoever has the Playbook applied to them. Depending on whether your Playbook targets accounts or users, the functionality is quite different:
If it targets accounts | If it targets users |
The Playbook will send an email to accounts the moment the account's health score is greater than 7.0 and the account has at least 1 user with a last NPS score greater than 8. Which users at the account get the email? You control this when configuring the email action via the TO option (you can select Account owners, All users, or Specific users that match an extra set of filters). | The Playbook will send an email to users the moment the user's account has a health score greater than 7.0 and the user's last NPS score is greater than 8. |
Above, notice how targeting accounts doesn't necessarily prevent users with NPS scores <= 8 from getting an email, but targeting users does. Why is that? Because when targeting accounts, you are telling Vitally that the output of the playbook is to impact/affect the account - not necessarily a specific user.
To elaborate, let's say that the action is to instead add the account to a segment (instead of sending an email). If your playbook's conditions are the same - there's 1 account rule and 1 user rule - Vitally needs some way of looking at the account and going "should we add this account to this segment?". We answer that question by looking at the account's users and going "is there any user with a last NPS score greater than 8?". If so, the account gets added to the segment. That same process occurs when targeting accounts with a "Start a conversation" action.
Q: What should I do if I want to send emails based on user activity?
A: If you want to send specific users specific emails for exhibiting specific behaviors, then 99% of the time, you'll want the playbook to target users and not accounts. Since targeting users gives you complete control over the exact set of users that get your email, then that's likely the way to go.
Q: Why would I target accounts with an action to "Start a conversation"? Should I always just target users?
A: Definitely not. Since Vitally works with B2B companies almost exclusively, there's plenty of valid cases for saying "I need to email this company". For example, let's say you want to auto-engage accounts the moment all users at the account stop using your product for 7 days. However, you don't want to engage ALL those users, just the primary owner at the company that bought your product - perhaps you want to check in with that person to see if a team-wide onboarding session should be scheduled.
In that case, targeting the account is 100% the right way to go. To make sure that the primary account owner is the only one to get the email though, you'd select that option when configuring your email action:
