The Scenario
You are a demand generation manager. Next Monday is a company-wide blackout week — no outreach, no sequence emails, no LinkedIn touches. Product is doing a major launch and leadership does not want any sales noise during it.
You have six Reply.io sequences that need to be paused by Friday EOD. Your Excel workbook has a SequenceToggle tab: column A is sequence name, column B is 'start' or 'pause'.
The bad version:
- Open Reply.io, go to the Sequences tab
- Find the first sequence by name
- Click the three-dot menu, click Pause
- Go back, find the next sequence
- Repeat
- Accidentally pause the wrong sequence because two have similar names
- One sequence keeps running through the blackout
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the sequence control list and applies every start or pause action in one pass.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Look at column A (sequence names) and column B (start/pause) in my Excel SequenceToggle tab and apply the corresponding start or pause action to each Reply.io sequence, writing the outcome in column C.
SheetXAI reads the list, looks up each sequence by name in Reply.io, applies the action, and writes 'paused', 'started', or the error into column C. Six sequences. One prompt.
What You Get
A completed sequence control run with column C showing the outcome per row:
- 'paused' — the sequence was active and is now paused
- 'started' — the sequence was paused and is now running
- 'already in that state' — the sequence was already at the requested state
- Error message — if the sequence name did not match
Every action is logged per row. If one name did not match exactly, you see the error before the blackout starts.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Sequence control workbooks change close to the deadline. SheetXAI handles edge cases in the same prompt.
When sequence names are approximate
You typed the names from memory and are not certain they match exactly.
For each row in the SequenceToggle tab, search Reply.io for sequences whose names contain the text in column A. If exactly one match is found, apply the start/pause action from column B and log the result in column C. If multiple matches are found, write all matching names in column C and take no action.
When some sequences should only be paused if they have active contacts
You do not want to pause a sequence that nobody is enrolled in — it will restart cleanly after the blackout without action.
For each row in the SequenceToggle tab where column B is 'pause', check how many contacts are actively enrolled in that Reply.io sequence. If the count is greater than zero, pause the sequence and log 'paused — N contacts held' in column C. If zero, write 'skipped — no active contacts' in column C.
When you want to confirm before applying changes
You want to preview what would change before committing.
For each row in the SequenceToggle tab, look up the Reply.io sequence's current state and write it in column C. Do not apply any changes yet — I want to review the current state first before confirming.
When you need to generate a re-start list for after the blackout
You want a ready-to-run list to reactivate sequences Monday morning.
Pause all sequences in the SequenceToggle tab where column B is 'pause'. Log the result in column C. Then write a second block below the original rows listing the successfully paused sequences with column B set to 'start', so I can run the restart from this same workbook after the blackout.
The pattern: instead of hunting through the Reply.io UI sequence by sequence, you maintain the control list in the workbook and apply changes in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a list of sequence names and desired states, then ask it to apply the changes in Reply.io. The Reply.io integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-update contact statuses from a workbook or the Reply.io in Excel overview.