Work / Sales ops automation
Sales ops automation
The Situation
A B2B sales team with HubSpot, a website form, and a small SDR group was losing inbound leads in the gap between form submit and owner assignment. Enrichment lived in a spreadsheet. Scoring was tribal knowledge. Follow-up timing depended on whoever saw Slack first. They did not need another AI demo — they needed glue that ops could read and change.
The Constraint
CRM data had to stay under their control. Reps would ignore a black-box score. Auto-sending personalized email at volume was off the table without approval. The first workflow had to ship in weeks, not a quarter-long platform rewrite — and still be maintainable by their ops lead after handover.
What we did
We mapped the sales stack and ranked jobs by hours saved vs build effort. First path shipped end to end: form webhook → normalize and dedupe → enrich with soft-fail → score into A / B / C with three reasons → assign by territory → write HubSpot deal/contact → Slack the owner with a deep link. Ambiguous or incomplete records went to a human-review branch instead of inventing a score.
We used n8n for orchestration (visible graph, sub-workflows for enrich / notify / error alert) and a small LLM step only on messy free-text “what are you building?” fields, behind a fixed rubric and a monthly spend cap. Rejected: one giant agent canvas, auto-merge of soft duplicate matches, and replacing their ESP with n8n. Email stayed in their sequencer; n8n only decided when to start, pause, or request approval on a drafted first-touch.
Before go-live we built a short evaluation set from anonymized historical leads, an error workflow to Slack with replay notes, and a runbook for pause / rollback of field mappings. Hosting: [self-hosted on their cloud / n8n Cloud — pick one]. Stack on the wire: n8n, HubSpot, Slack, enrichment API, OpenAI for the text step only.
The trade-off
We deferred full pipeline hygiene and multi-sequence orchestration until intake and routing were trusted. That meant fewer “AI” headlines in week one, and a boring workflow that actually assigned owners. Auto-send for A-band was left behind a feature flag until the approval path proved clean for two weeks of live traffic.
Outcome
| Metric | Value | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time from form submit to owner notify | 3 min 40 sec median (p95: 6 min) | n8n execution logs | - |
| Share of leads auto-routed without human review | 78% | n8n + HubSpot | - |
What we would do differently
Lock the HubSpot field contract in a shared sheet before building nodes — two mapping rewrites came from fields that “everyone knew” but were not written down. Add the nightly stale-deal hygiene pass earlier; it is unglamorous and it stops deals rotting while the flashy intake path gets all the attention.
Ready when the work has to be right the first time.
A 30-minute scoping call with a senior engineer, designer or growth lead. You will leave with a written view of scope, risks and a realistic timeline, whether or not you hire us.
12 years40+ shipped products6 industries
Karachi and Sharjah