Action Plans

On this page

• How Action Plans work
• The seven plan types
• Creating a plan
• Every action step, and when you’ll see it
• Timing and firing order
• Webhook steps
• Plans shared from an Enterprise account
• Troubleshooting

1How Action Plans work

An Action Plan is a reusable sequence of steps. Each step performs one thing — send an email, send an SMS, place an automated call, assign a user, fire a webhook — and each step carries its own timing.

You build the plan once. From then on, whenever a contact is launched onto that plan, the steps run against that contact on the schedule you defined, measured from the moment they were launched (or, for date-based plans, from the event date).

2The seven plan types

The plan type determines where the plan appears in the menu, what it can be attached to, and — for two of them — which action steps are even available inside it.

Plan type	Built for	Attaches to
Connection Plans	First contact with a brand-new lead. Typically short, under a month.	A Lead Source
Conversion Plans	Moving an engaged contact forward through your sales process. Typically 1–3 months.	A Sales Cycle
Retention Plans	Long-term nurture of current, past, and lost customers. Typically 6–12 months, spaced further apart.	A Sales Cycle
Event Plans	Anchored to a specific date — appointments, follow-ups, event promotion. Comes in two forms: driven by a date field on the contact, or set manually per contact.	An event date
Seasonal Plans	Also date-anchored, but designed to run against groups — conferences, promos, seasonal pushes.	An event date
Parallel Trigger Plans	Runs outside the contact’s single active-plan slot, so it can run at the same time as whatever plan they’re already on.	Runs alongside the active plan
Masscom Plans	Mass communication sends. Restricted to broadcast-safe step types only — see below.	Requires the Masscom add-on

3Creating a plan

Every plan type is created the same way. From the relevant plan menu, add a new plan and fill in:

1. Action Plan Name — how it appears in the plan list and in reporting.
2. Draft mode — leave the plan in Draft while you build it. A plan in Draft can’t be launched, which is what stops a half-finished sequence from reaching a real contact.
3. Next Plan — optional. When this plan finishes every step, the contact is automatically launched onto the plan you pick here. This is how a Connection Plan rolls into a Retention Plan when a lead never replies.
4. Lead Source or Sales Cycle — which one you’re asked for depends on the plan type. A Lead Source on a Connection Plan means every lead arriving from that source is engaged immediately. A Sales Cycle on a Conversion or Retention Plan sets the contact’s Sales Cycle the moment the plan activates.
5. Event date — only on date-anchored plan types, and it changes how timing is interpreted (see below).
6. Save the plan, add your steps, then switch it from Draft to Ready using the toggle above the plan name.

4Every action step, and when you’ll see it

The Action Type dropdown is not the same for everyone. Some steps are always present, some are hidden inside Masscom Plans, and some only appear once a matching add-on or integration is enabled in Settings.

Always available

Step	What it does
Email	Sends a pre-written email at the scheduled moment.
SMS	Sends a pre-written text at the scheduled moment.
Contact Reminder	Reminds a user to reach out to the contact on a set day. This one is a nudge to a human, not an automated send.
Tag	Adds or removes tags on the contact, so later filters and plans can react to them.
Google Sheet	Pushes the contact’s data to a Google Sheet as the plan runs.
Mailbox Power	Triggers physical mail through the Mailbox Power integration.
Webhook	Calls an external system. Covered in detail below.

Available in every plan type except Masscom

Step	What it does
Assign User	Assigns an account user to work the contact directly, or unassigns one.
Automated Call	Schedules a call so a user speaks with the contact at a set point in the sequence.
Change Contact Type	Moves the contact from one type to another. The defaults are Clients, Employees, Partners, Vendors, and Other — and those labels can be renamed for your account.
Proposal Invoice Status	Reacts to a proposal invoice being paid, so a plan can branch on payment.
Remove Seasonal/Event Actions	Clears any pending steps the contact still has queued from Seasonal or Event plans.
Remove Parallel Trigger’s Actions	Clears pending steps queued by a Parallel Trigger Plan.
ThumbTack / Sales Chatz	Hand-offs to those integrations.

Appears only when the matching add-on is enabled

These are switched on under Settings → Add-Ons (or by your account’s configuration). Until then, the option simply isn’t in the dropdown.

Step	Requires
Task	Tasks enabled — and not available in Masscom Plans
ServiceTitan — send data	The ServiceTitan integration
ClubReady — New User Push	The ClubReady integration
Dispatch.me Integration	The Dispatch.me integration
Jules — Virtual Scheduler	The Jules virtual scheduling add-on
Sendjim	The Sendjim integration
Talent+ AOR	The Talent+ add-on
Remove Masscom Action	Masscom marketing enabled
No Actions Running	A specific white-label configuration

5Timing and firing order

Each step is either Immediate or delayed. A delay is a number plus a unit, and the available units are minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months — so a nurture step three months out is a single step, not ninety daily ones.

Repeating a step

A step can be marked as repeating. When it is, ClientTether schedules it as four occurrences rather than one — it is not an open-ended loop. If you need a different number of touches, add the steps individually.

Date-anchored plans

Event and Seasonal Plans measure from the event date rather than from launch, which gives each step three possible positions:

• Immediate — sends as soon as the contact is launched onto the plan.
• Before the event — fires at the interval you set ahead of the date.
• After the event — fires at the interval you set following the date.

6Webhook steps

A Webhook step calls an external system as part of the sequence. It takes the same base settings as any other step — a name, whether to notify, and its timing — plus the request itself.

Field	What to put in it
Method	GET to retrieve, POST or PUT to send.
URL	The endpoint, per the receiving system’s own documentation.
Header	Any headers that system requires — typically authentication.
Payload Style	Form Data or JSON. Match whatever the receiving endpoint expects; the wrong one is a common cause of silent failures.
Payload	Key/value pairs. A value can be a fixed constant, or a Token that resolves to data unique to the contact on the plan.

When a webhook fails

A failed send doesn’t disappear quietly. ClientTether records it three ways:

1. A Notification is generated so someone knows.
2. The failed attempt is written to the contact’s History Notes.
3. The attempt is logged in the Webhook Monitor, with the detail needed to diagnose it. You’ll find it under the Hello {Your Name} menu.

If an integration “stopped working,” the Webhook Monitor is the first place to look — it will usually tell you whether the request left ClientTether at all and what the endpoint answered.

7Plans shared from an Enterprise account

An Enterprise account can push its Action Plans down to sub-accounts and lock them, so the wording and cadence stay consistent across locations.

When plans are locked, a sub-account user can still view a plan’s contents — the plan opens read-only rather than in the editor, and clicking a step name reveals what that step does. What they can’t do is change it. If a sub-account user tries to work with locked plans, ClientTether tells them plainly: “Your Enterprise Account has locked the Action Plans.”

8Troubleshooting

A step never fired

Check, in this order: the plan is set to Ready and not still in Draft; the contact was actually launched onto the plan; and, on date-anchored plans, that the step’s “before” window hadn’t already passed when the contact was added.

I launched the contact onto the plan and nothing happened

If the contact was already on that same plan, launching it again does nothing at all — ClientTether sees no change and exits without re-running any steps. It fails silently, with no error. To genuinely restart a sequence, move the contact to a different plan first, then back.

The email went out in the middle of the night

That’s the day/week/month timing rule above: those delays fire at a set time of day, defaulting to midnight. Open the step and give it an explicit send time.

Steps fired in the wrong order

Steps sharing a timing tier run in list order. Reorder them by deleting and re-adding, and give genuinely sequential touches distinct delays instead of stacking them all as Immediate.

An action type is missing from the dropdown

Two likely reasons: you’re in a Masscom Plan, which hides eight step types by design, or the step depends on an add-on that isn’t enabled under Settings → Add-Ons.

An integration stopped receiving data

Open the Webhook Monitor and check for failed attempts. Confirm the Payload Style matches what the endpoint expects, and remember that only flat data is sent.

9Related pages

• Templates — the email and SMS content your steps send.
• Tokens — personalizing a message or a webhook payload per contact.
• Triggers — launching plans automatically from contact activity.
• Settings → Add-Ons — enabling the integrations that unlock extra step types.