Get Started with Automation
Welcome to Make! This guide introduces you to the world of automation, showing you how to create efficient workflows that save time and reduce manual effort. Discover the power of automating everyday tasks and complex business processes.
Automation is about leveraging technology to perform tasks automatically, freeing up your valuable time and resources. It helps reduce errors, improve efficiency, and allows for easy scaling of workloads without adding manual steps. With Make, you can connect your favorite applications and create custom automations without writing any code.
What is Make?
Make is a powerful automation platform designed to connect various applications and services, enabling you to automate workflows and tasks. It empowers you to automate processes like a developer, even without coding expertise.
Explore the possibilities with Make to enhance your business operations by automating diverse tasks. Examples include notifying sales teams of new leads, sending automated welcome emails to new employees, managing prospect data, and generating reports. Make also excels at handling complex end-to-end processes for smoother business operations, such as employee onboarding or customer query management.
To automate tasks, you need to communicate with different applications and systems. This communication is facilitated by APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which are sets of rules and protocols that allow software applications to interact. Make simplifies this by orchestrating API calls, integrating with over 2,000 applications.
Create Your First Scenario
The best way to understand Make is through hands-on experience. This guide will walk you through creating your first Make scenario—an automated workflow designed to send notifications to a sales team. By the end, you will grasp Make's core concepts and be ready to build your own scenarios.
A scenario is a sequence of modules that dictate how data is transferred and transformed between apps and services. For this guide, you will build a notification system that connects a marketing team's prospect entries in Google Sheets to Slack notifications for the sales team.
What you'll build:
- Monitor a Google Sheet for new prospect entries.
- Send Slack notifications to the sales team when new prospects are added.
What you'll need:
- A Make account (Create one here)
- A Slack account and workspace (Sign up for Slack)
- A Google account (Create an account)
These accounts are free to create. While this guide uses Slack and Google Sheets, you can adapt these steps to your preferred applications.
Step 1: Plan Your Scenario
Successful automation begins with a clear understanding of what needs to be automated. For any Make scenario, the first step is to identify the applications to connect and the actions to perform.
Define the applications you'll connect:
- Check application availability in Make (e.g., Gmail, Slack, Google Sheets).
- Verify your access to these applications (e.g., Slack workspace admin rights, Google Workspace account).
- Ensure you have the necessary permissions for specific Google Sheets or Slack channels.
Outline the specific actions needed:
- Identify the trigger for the scenario (e.g., a new email, form submission, or spreadsheet row update).
- Determine the information that needs processing (e.g., contact details, order information).
- Define what should happen with this information (e.g., create a new contact, send notifications).
For the sales notification scenario:
- Applications: Google Sheets, Slack
- Trigger: New row added in Google Sheets
- Actions: Send Slack notification to the team
