Stop losing hot leads to Slack and a Friday spreadsheet
We built the ops layer your CRM is missing: one intake path, a score with a reason, an owner with an SLA, and follow-up that only stops when a person or a rule says so.
- Strategy
- Lead scoringCRM routingn8n
- Design
- Owner SLAsException exits
- Client
- B2B sales opsShipped in weeks
Outcomes
What changed after handoff
No more “who owns this?” meetings
Every lead arrives with a score, an owner, and a next step. The weekly sync that existed to answer that question had nothing left to do.
Follow-up that sales don’t mute
Sequences run on status, not a blind timer. Hot leads escalate. Closed or “not a fit” leads leave the drip immediately — so the automation stays trusted.
What shipped
The system in plain terms
- Forms, email, and CRM webhooks land as one lead record
- Score plus a short rationale a human can challenge
- Owner routing with a backup when someone is out
- Follow-up that exits on reply, close, or dispute
- Daily digest of stuck or overdue leads
The build
How we got there
Background
The CRM looked fine: stages, owners, next actions. Real work lived somewhere else — Slack threads, forward chains, and a spreadsheet someone updated on Fridays. Hot leads went cold because nobody owned the handoff after the first reply.
They didn’t need a new CRM. They needed the missing ops layer: one door for every inbound lead, clear scoring, automatic assignment, and follow-up that doesn’t depend on memory.
Challenges
Leads arrived from three channels in three shapes. Ownership was tribal knowledge. Follow-up happened when someone remembered to check the pipeline.
An earlier “automation” blasted the same drip to everyone. Sales muted it within weeks. The rebuild had to earn enough trust that the backup spreadsheet could die.
Sales would only trust it if:
- Every source feeds one queue — nothing falls through a channel gap
- Scores come with a reason, not a black-box number
- Hot leads escalate; dead leads stop getting nudged
Solution
n8n normalizes every inbound lead, scores it against the live offer, and routes it to the right owner with an SLA. Follow-up runs on status — so a lead in conversation never gets another automated nudge.
They kept their CRM. We shipped the glue — fixed price, full source, docs at handoff. Their team can edit the workflows after go-live. No lock-in.
Next
Got a workflow that hurts this much?
Bring us the one costing your team the most time. We’ll tell you straight whether it needs a build — or a smaller fix.