Pause a sequence using various triggers

Sequences will automatically pause by themselves when you receive a reply. However, sometimes you may want a sequence to pause if something different occurs.

For example:

If someone books a meeting with you
If their lead or opportunity status changes (i.e. You moved them to Qualified or Not Interested)
If they call you back in Close

In any of these instances, we can set this up as a Zap.

What you will need

A Close account and your API key
A Zapier account that allows multi-step zaps

How this integration works

This Zap can use any number of triggers to pause a sequence. The most important element in the trigger itself will be to have an identifier to find the contact or lead.

Step 1: Decide what will trigger the pausing of the sequence

It's fairly common to include a link to book a meeting in your email outreach. Our sales team includes a Calendly link in their email sequence. So for our example, we'll set up a Zap that will pause any email sequences once a meeting is booked.

To start, we'll click "Make a Zap!"

Now we'll choose the trigger application, as well as which specific trigger to use. In this case, we're going to select Calendly, and choose Invitee Created as the trigger.

Invitee Created trigger from Calendly

Step 2: Find the contact that triggered the zap

The first step after the trigger is to find the contact that triggered the zap. For this we'll use the Close search step for Find Contact.

Find Contact search step in Zapier

In this example, we'll use the contact's email address.

Searching for the contact by email address.

Now that we have the contact, we'll move on to the next step.

Step 3: Decide if you're pausing a specific sequence or all sequences

When pausing a sequence, you can pause a specific sequence for a specific contact, or all sequences for all contacts within a lead. So let's say for example you have various sequences running on a lead with multiple contacts. If one of those contacts books a meeting, what would you want to happen?

Pause all sequences on all contacts on that lead
Only pause the sequence for the contact that booked the meeting

Step 4 (Option 1): Pause all sequences on the lead

If you opt to pause all of the sequences on the lead, you use the Create Bulk Subscription Action action.

When configuring our bulk action, we'll specify Pause as our action type.

Since this is a bulk action that would normally be taken on multiple leads, the configuration will ask us for a Query. This could be a Smart View or a custom search. In this example, we're going to specify a Custom Value and use the Lead ID from Step 2 as a way to ensure that only this particular lead will return in the query results.

Bulk Subscription action configuration

Since we're trying to pause all of the sequences on the lead in this case, we'll choose Contact in the Contact Preference field. We won't want to receive an email time this completes, so we'll select No in the Send Done Email field.

Bulk Subscription action configuration continued.

Step 4 (Option 2): Only pause a specific sequence for a specific contact

This option will result in more Zaps

If you choose this method, you will need to create this pausing zap for each new sequence you create. Keep this in mind if you expect to have a large number of sequences.

Find Email Sequence Subscription search step in Zapier

We'll use the Contact ID we found in Step 2 to find our sequence subscription.

Searching for a sequence subscription using a Contact ID

Now that we've found the sequence subscriptions for this contact, we'll use the Update Email Sequence Subscription action.

Update Email Sequence Subscription action step in Zapier.

We'll use a custom value in the Subscription field, and use the Subscription ID we found in Step 3. We'll also specify that the new status should be Paused.