The Snapshot – Lead Outreach
| Industry | Education & Recruitment |
| Location | UK |
| Time Saved | 8 hours per week |
| Built Over | 3 months (iterative) |
| Tools Used | n8n, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, Slack |
The Challenge
ERIC’s team was spending 4 hours every single working day on lead outreach admin. Not on finding better leads. Not in conversations. On copying and pasting email templates, sending them one by one, manually following up with anyone who hadn’t replied, and trying to keep track of which template they’d sent to which lead.
That last part was its own problem. ERIC tested new email templates regularly to find out which performed best — but without a way to track which version each lead had received, they couldn’t draw any useful conclusions. The data was scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets, and nobody had a complete picture.
The result was a team locked into repetitive, low-value work for half of every working day. Every hour spent on copy-paste admin was an hour they weren’t spending on finding and qualifying the leads that would actually grow the business.
The Solution
We built a lead outreach automation using n8n, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, and Slack — working entirely within the tools the team already used. No new platforms to learn. No disruption to the way they worked day to day.
The workflow runs as follows:
Step one: finding and preparing the lead.
The automation reads the Google Sheet, spots new leads, and pulls the correct email template for each one.
Step two: drafting the email.
Rather than sending emails automatically — which would remove the human judgment the team wanted to keep — the workflow creates a drafted, personalised email directly inside the team’s Gmail account. The team member opens their drafts folder, reviews it, and sends. No more copying and pasting. The human review stays.
Step three: the follow-up.
After a set number of days with no reply, the automation drafts a follow-up email — and pulls in the content of the original email as a reference thread, so the lead can see the full context of the conversation. Again, it lands in drafts for the team to review and send.
Step four: tracking and notification.
Every action updates the Google Sheet automatically — status, template used, date contacted, follow-up due. When a lead replies to an email, the automation pushes an instant notification to a Slack channel, so the team can follow up while the conversation is live.
We built the workflow iteratively over three months — starting with the core email drafting, then adding template selection, then the follow-up logic — giving the team space to test and adjust at each stage before we added the next layer.
The Results
- 8 hours per week returned to the team — down from 4 hours of admin every working day
- Fully automated template tracking — every lead is linked to the exact version they received, making A/B testing meaningful for the first time
- No leads fall through the cracks — follow-ups happen automatically, on schedule, without anyone having to remember
- Instant reply notifications via Slack — the team responds to interested leads immediately, while the conversation is warm
- Zero change to existing tools — the team still works in Gmail, Google Sheets, and Slack
What This Means In Practice
Eight hours a week is a full working day. Before this automation, ERIC’s team was losing that day — every week — to mechanical admin that added no value to the business and told them nothing useful about their lead outreach performance.
The automation didn’t replace the team’s judgment. Every email still goes through a human review before it’s sent. What it takes away is the hour your team spends finding the template, copying it, formatting it, and logging it manually — work that a well-built workflow handles in seconds.
The follow-up logic is where the compounding effect is most evident. Most sales opportunities don’t close on the first contact. They closed because someone followed up at the right time. When following up requires manual effort, it gets deprioritised. When it’s automated, it happens every time, without fail.
The team at ERIC now spends their time on the work that actually moves the needle — finding better leads and having better conversations.
If your team is spending time on outreach admin that a well-built workflow could handle automatically, let’s talk.
