Workflows: A Neverender – The Endless Quest for Clarity in Marketing

Written by Will Riley

Marketing loves a good buzzword. We toss around terms like optimization, alignment, and engagement as if they have universal meaning—but too often, they require their own footnotes.

One of the biggest repeat offenders? Workflows.

Like Neverender by Justice, workflows loop endlessly—always evolving, never truly finished. They’re in sales, marketing, and customer experience. We automate them, refine them, and map them out endlessly. But what are they really? Are we talking about email sequences? Lead handoff processes? CRM workflows? The way work moves across a team?

That’s the tricky part—a workflow is only as good as its purpose. And that purpose is rarely simple. It’s an infinite loop of defining workflows, refining, and executing.

A Few of Marketing’s Most Overused (and Underdefined) Buzzwords

Before we break down workflows, let’s acknowledge that marketing has a jargon problem. We love words that sound impressive but often fail to communicate anything specific. Some of the worst offenders:

• Workflows – It means something moves from A to B, but unless we define who, what, and why, it’s just a word.
• Optimization – Optimize what? Speed? Cost? Conversion? If we’re not specific, it’s just an empty promise.
• Alignment – We love saying marketing and sales alignment is important, but alignment without process is just wishful thinking.
• Personalization – If it’s just {FirstName} in an email, is it really personalized?
• Scalability – Not everything needs to scale. Some things need to work first before we worry about growing them.
• Engagement – Does liking a post count? Are we measuring real interaction, or just impressions?
• Marketing buzzwords – They sound strategic but often fall flat without definition.

Workflows: The Process That Never Ends

A workflow isn’t just a tool or a tactic—it’s a structured movement of information. Whether automated or manual, every workflow follows the same basic structure:

1. Intake: Where does the process begin? What’s triggering it? (A lead form, a customer inquiry, a marketing automation action?)
2. Processing: What needs to happen to the information? Who needs to act on it?
3. Transfer: Where does the data or responsibility go next? Is it passed manually, or is it automated?
4. Output: What’s the final step? Does this lead to a report? A customer action? A follow-up?
5. Iteration: What happens next? Does this process feed another? Does it need refinement?

The key to a successful workflow isn’t just automation—it’s clarity. If we can’t explain what’s happening at each step, no amount of AI, CRM workflows, or marketing automation will fix it.

The Purpose Defines the Process

Each phase of a workflow should exist for a reason. Instead of building complex sequences just because we can, we should start with one simple question:

What’s the goal of this part of the workflow?

• Are we collecting information? → Then the intake step needs to be simple, clear, and frictionless.
• Are we moving data to the right place? → Then transfer needs to be clean, without creating bottlenecks.
• Are we expecting human action? → Then notifications and responsibilities need to be unambiguous.
• Are we automating something? → Then it should reduce work, not create new complexity.

When every phase has a clear objective, the fun begins. We can optimize, refine, automate, and improve. But if the core process isn’t solid, adding more tools and triggers will only create a more efficient mess.

The Workflow Loop: It Never Really Ends

And here’s the kicker—workflows are never finished.

They evolve as teams, data, and customer behaviors change. What worked last year might not work today. That’s why marketing workflows aren’t just something we set up and forget—they require continuous iteration.

But that’s the beauty of it. When we treat workflows not as a burden but as an ongoing process of clarity and refinement, we stop chasing a "final version" that doesn’t exist. Instead, we build systems that actually work—and that’s the real goal.

So the next time you hear someone say, "We need a better workflow," don’t just nod. Ask what phase we’re improving, what the purpose is, and what success looks like. Because when we get that right, the process might never end—but it sure gets better.