Getting the best out of Zyan

What good looks like across the platform — the habits that stop the most common mistakes before they happen, grouped by the area they apply to.

Everything on this page comes from the same place: something that went wrong for somebody, often enough that it is worth doing differently from the start. None of it is difficult. Most of it is about doing one thing in the right order.

Before you go live with anything public

Verify a sending domain before your first real client

An invite, an auto-reply or a report link that arrives from your own domain lands in an inbox far more reliably than one from a shared platform address — and it is the first thing a new client sees. SettingsEmail identity.

Check the status pill, not the button you just pressed. A form or booking page reads Published the moment you publish it, and Live only once the domain and the hosted pages switch are both in place. The Share tab tells you which one you are on.
Open the preview on the real host. The admin preview follows your admin theme, so a form pinned to light can still look dark in the editor.
Set the slug before you share it. Changing a link slug breaks every link you already sent. Decide it once.

Leads

Map the fields that matter. An answer that is not mapped to a lead column never reaches the lead. Map Name, Email, Phone and Company on every form.
Keep dedupe honest. Merge returning visitors matches on email or phone. If neither is mapped, it has nothing to match and you get duplicates.
Agree a tag casing convention on day one. Tags are never lower-cased, so SEO and seo are two tags and they will split your filters forever.
Set an SLA your team can actually hit. An unrealistic first-touch SLA puts every lead in the Attention lens, which makes the lens useless. Remember the lens is wider than the clock — it also gathers unassigned leads and follow-ups that are due.
Check the routing pool before you trust auto-assignment. A pool of zero means new leads quietly stay unassigned.
Keep the capture token server-side. Anyone holding it can create leads in your workspace. Put your own small endpoint in front of it if your form posts from a browser. The publishable key that rides in the headers is the opposite: it is meant to be public, and leaving it out is why a call fails before the token is read.
Rotate in the right order. Rotating a token kills the old one instantly. Update every caller first.

Clients and portals

Deactivate rather than delete. Deleting a portal wipes messages, requests, tasks, files and discovery answers. Deactivate revokes access and keeps everything.
Pick the portal kind first, then adjust the sections. Clicking a kind pill rewrites every section toggle from that kind's preset, so hand-edits made first are lost.
Hiding a section is not the same as silencing it. Turn off the matching client notification category too, or the client still gets the emails.
Give a website its own portal if it needs its own services. Entitlements live on a portal, and a website without one inherits from the client's first.

Projects

Use the preset stage values. Project bucketing reads the status text, so a free-typed status can land a project in the wrong place.
Add checkpoints. Completion is computed from them. A project with no checkpoints has nothing to report and shows zero.
Never rely on a password-protected notes folder as your only copy. There is no recovery path if the password is lost.

SEO and content

Fill the research brief properly before spending. A niche and primary services written as search terms — not sentences — is the difference between a useful research run and one that parks.
Set a monthly SEO budget. Blank means paused everywhere, not unlimited.
Pin competitors once. Then Keyword Gap has defaults and you stop typing domains in every time.
Run setup and research before you turn autopilot on. With no cached opportunities the topic chooser falls back to generic topics.
Leave the desktop app open and bound if you prefer the desktop runner. Otherwise drafts sit waiting, which looks like a failure and is not one.
Re-send for approval after you edit a post. Otherwise the client approved a version that no longer exists, and the row locks with Content changed.

Outbound and messaging

Save the physical mailing address once. Sends and sequence activation both refuse without it.
Know what your sender can measure. A Gmail or Microsoft mailbox does not report opens. If open and click rates matter, send from the marketing domain.
Respect the warmup ramp. A mailbox's effective cap is lower than the number you typed, on purpose. Raising the typed cap does not raise the ramp.
Read the skip breakdown before you send an announcement. It tells you exactly how many people each channel will actually reach, and why the rest are skipped.
Remember the master pause has an edge. It covers the Zyan outreach plane. Smartlead is paused in Smartlead, and a stopped Smartlead campaign cannot be restarted.

Voice agents

Publish the draft. Campaigns only offer published versions, and a draft that was saved but never published is the most common reason an agent seems not to exist.
Fill the disclosure wording. Preflight blocks without it.
Use cold transfer. Warm transfer is selectable but does not work.
Run preflight before you plan the day. It names every blocker at once instead of one per attempt.
Read the Block reason column when leads are not being dialed. It is almost always a calling window, a cooldown, or a daily cap, and the dialer is deferring rather than failing.

Ads and automations

Step big budget changes up gradually. Money guards reject oversized changes server-side, so forcing the row in the UI achieves nothing.
Enable the automation. A saved automation is a draft until you enable it, and a step with a disconnected integration blocks publishing.
Copy a webhook address the moment it is shown. Rotating invalidates the previous address immediately, so plan the swap rather than discovering it.

Team and money

Grant the permission, then check the plan. A permission cannot unlock a feature your plan does not sell.
Press Save on the permission grid at least once. An unsaved grid shows an amber notice and is doing nothing.
Set the payroll timezone before your first pay run. Everything — payday dates, digests, reminders, clock times — falls back to UTC until you do.
Watch the credit balance. Included credits do not stack month to month, and pack credits expire after 60 days.
Have a suspended member sign out. Their existing session carries the old role until it refreshes.

When something is not working

Work down the list in this order

Is it in your plan? Do you have the permission? Has an owner armed it? Is the outside service connected? And finally — is it built? That order resolves most of it without a ticket, and What to expect walks the same five rungs in the same order.