hello and welcome to the first video of the beginner course for Anan in this course we will be covering all of the

basics that you need to know to get started with anidan in this video we'll be covering

an introduction to automation my name is Maxim and I'm a marketing and data content creator as

well as instructor for l a French training company I've been working with inen for over four years now built over

100 workflows and trained 500 students at improving their marketing and data automation today we're going to be

talking about an introduction to automation why do we need automation what is it what are the Core Concepts

what is a workflow as well as some best practices to help you get started first of all why do we need

automation the whole reason we need automation is to make datadriven decisions when we take decisions based

on feeling or intuition it is subject to interpretation it is subjective this makes it difficult to estimate estimate

and justify the return on investment and often incurs wasted resources whether they be budgetary or time

related however when we take a data driven approach this makes it much more logic driven and objective it'll improve

your Capac capacity to report and increase your visibility on Roi as well as requiring fewer

resources human resources budgetary and in terms of time automation is the key to being data

driven when tasks are executed manually we have a lot of wasted time we have human error from repeated low value

tasks as well as High human resource requirements this leads to low employee happiness and

retention no one is happy to be doing low value tasks for example copying data from one spreadsheet to

another however when we start to integrate automation we gain much more predictability and data

availability increased employee efficiency because each employee can now Focus their efforts on much higher value

tasks this leads to higher Roi and lower needs for human resources so what is

automation let's start with the definition automation is a predictable set of predetermined actions that

transfers data from one point to another so this is a very wordy definition instead of breaking it down like this I

would like to show you an example here we can see an example of a workflow so we have a form submission

when the form is submitted we check what kind of company is submitting the form if we cannot find a company we ignore if

it's a low value company we can add the person submitting the form to an email sequence if it's a high value company we

can add the information to a Google sheet and if it's an ideal customer then we can give this information to an

account manager ASAP so as you can see here we have a predictable set of predetermined

actions depending on which kind of company is submitting the form we have a very predictable set

of actions that need to be executed and we have a data transfer from one point to another the starting

point being the form submission and depending on what kind of company is submitting the the form we're going to

be transferring the data to either an email tool a Google Sheets or for example slack to notify the account

manager as you can imagine if we do not have a predictable set of predetermined actions and depending on the kind of

company we weren't able to say if it's this kind of company we do this if it's that kind of company we do that then we

wouldn't be able to create an automation because we would have to have some kind of human

intervention again if we do not have any data transfer then we're not really automating anything um so the data

transfer explains itself I'd like to cover some Core Concepts of automation that are

important to understand before building your first workflows the first thing I'd like to

talk about is a trigger a trigger is what starts an automation so from the example that we looked at earlier we can

see that the trigger was the form of submission when we're going to be drawing out these automations we're

going to see that the trigger is not going to have an entry Arrow only an exit Arrow there are many different

kinds of triggers a trigger can be manual so executed manually it can be scheduled so every minute every day at

8: a.m. once a month at 400 p.m. or it can be linked to applications that we can trigger workflow when we receive a

Webb hook when a property is updated in the CRM or when for example a form is submitted under the form

submission um block you can see an example of an n n node um here the nen form trigger this allows you to trigger

a workflow when a form is submitted using the native Inn form trigger then we have filtering filtering

is what allows us to allow or block certain types of data from following specific paths based on certain

conditions so using the example from earlier here we can see depending on the kind of company whether there is no

company a low value company a high value company or if the company is an ideal customer we're going to be sending that

company down different paths underneath you can see the fil node in naden the filter node allows you

to as its name indicates filter data based on predetermined conditions so here for example we could say if we had

no company then we wouldn't continue the workflow because there is nothing to do if we have no

company another important thing to understand is actions or apps actions allow you to interact with applications

on the web this is what you're going to be using most of the time when building automation we can take a couple of

examples so with Google Sheets you might want to update rows create a sheet or get a spreadsheet um if you're using

Dropbox you can upload a file get a file create a folder move a file from one folder to another if we're using slack

you can send a message get a message get a user get all of the messages from a specific Channel

if we're using Salesforce which is a CRM we can get a company get a contact create a lead associate a lead to a

company this is going to depend highly on which kinds of apps you're using every app is going to have a different

set of actions that you can use for it so what is a workflow we looked at the example

earlier with the form submission then the different paths depending on the kind of company and

then different actions most workflows are going to follow a similar template they're going to start with a trigger so

the trigger is what starts or launches the workflow it could be every day at 8:00 a.m. or when this happens or when

launched manually then we're going to be either sorting filtering formatting

transforming or segmenting the data um so this could be if this then that only if this then that or change this to that

this is when we're going to be able to look at all of the filters that we created earlier or make modifications to

the data to then send to the actions which are going to be usually the last parts of your workflow either updating

for example a Google sheet sending an email or notifying a person let's say through a slack

message i' like to quickly cover some automation best practices before starting any automation

you need to make sure that you are mapping it out so when someone is going to come to you and ask I would like to

automate this task or if you have an idea I would like to automate this task the first step that you're going to want

to do is map it out correctly mapping out a process before building it is going to ensure that you have visibility

on one do you have an understanding of the task of the predictable set of actions that the task

represents two it's going to give you more visibility on the different tools apps or actions that are going to be

used three is going to give you more visibility on the feasibility um nothing is worse than spending half an hour an

hour or two hours building an automation to then realize at the end that it actually isn't

possible mapping out the workflow is also going to help you estimate the workload how long is it going to take me

to automate this task and finally sometimes mapping out the workflow is going to show you where you might need

some human intervention if the task you want to automate cannot be mapped out into a

predetermined set of actions then you might need some human intervention in that workflow um in the advanced course

we'll cover how you can use AI to sometimes relieve the need for human intervention so how do you map an

automation the first thing you want to do is create a flowchart and there are many different ways you can create this

flowchart you can use Meo fig Jam or any other tool and when you want to do is you want to list every different part of

the process as an individual block then working left to right you're going

to want to link these different blocks with arrows depending on how they interact so if we

take the example from earlier we start the workflow with a form submission so we're going to create a first block call

it form submission then the next step in the automation is we need to to filter depending on which kind of company so

here we create a block what kind of company and from that block we create all of these different arrows depending

on what kind of company and what the different options are then we're going to link these this question to the final

actions so adding an email to a sequence or adding the data to a Google sheet or sending the information to an account

manager these Maps can be a lot more complicated than the given example and especially

for those much more complicated examples it is very much worth taking the time to map it out if while mapping it out you

realize that something is unclear then this is something that you need to make sure that you understand before starting

building the workflow because again it would be a shame to get to the end and realize that it actually isn't

feasible this was the first video for the naden beginner course in the next video we will be covering web Hooks and

apis two very important Notions that you need to understand before building your first nen workflows thank you and see

you in the next video