How We Automated a Lead Flow for a SaaS Company Using n8n

The before-state: four tools, five handoffs, and no SLA

Marketing leads arrived through Typeform, got dumped into a shared inbox, and were manually copy-pasted into HubSpot by an SDR who also guessed territories. Enrichment happened occasionally in Clearbit when someone remembered. Sequences were written once and left untouched for months. If a lead bounced or was a duplicate, nobody noticed until a rep complained. That meant a median 42-hour delay before a human reached out.

Leadership asked Zyphh for a flow that would be always-on, fully logged, and self-healing. The non-negotiables: no vendor lock-in, zero PII sent to OpenAI, and a measurable lift in sales-qualified leads within 30 days.

Design principles we set before touching n8n

• Every record is enriched or quarantined. No naked emails enter HubSpot.
• Fast lanes before fancy lanes. Route the ICP immediately; nurture everyone else automatically.
• Observable by default. Every node logs to Slack and ClickUp with latency and error context.
• Versioned content. Sequences live in Git; n8n only references the latest approved version.

The architecture in five stages

1) Trigger & intake

Typeform submits to a dedicated webhook URL in n8n. We validate the payload, normalize phone and country codes, and immediately score form completeness. Leads below 60% completeness are quarantined with a Slack alert.

2) Enrichment & validation

• Clearbit: company size, industry, tech tags, funding round.
• Hunter + NeverBounce: MX checks and SMTP pings to keep bounce rate under 0.5%.
• Domain blocklist: free email providers and competitors are filtered out.
• Deduplication: HubSpot query on domain + email hash before creating any record.

3) Scoring & routing

We built a weighted score (fit + intent + recency) tuned with historic closed-won data. If score ≥ 78, the lead is instantly assigned to the right AE with territory logic. Scores between 55–77 go to an SDR queue with a short, personalization-first sequence. Anything under 55 enters a nurture track and syncs to the newsletter.

4) Messaging & sequencing

n8n calls a prompt-managed OpenAI endpoint for three subject-line variants constrained to 6 words each. Body copy is templated with dynamic fields and sent via SendGrid with delivery monitoring. If a reply hits the shared mailbox, n8n tags the HubSpot record, pauses the sequence, and alerts the owner in Slack.

5) Analytics & resilience

Every run logs latency per node and success status to a ClickUp dashboard. If any service exceeds a 2% error rate in 30 minutes, alerts fire and the flow automatically falls back to a simplified text-only sequence to keep SLAs intact.

Implementation timeline

• Days 1–3: Discovery, data audit, and ROI baseline. We pulled six months of lead data to set conversion and bounce benchmarks.
• Days 4–7: Built the v1 n8n graph, wired enrichment, and added guardrails. Launched to a 20% traffic slice.
• Days 8–12: Added scoring, routing, and AE-specific Slack notifications. Uptime monitors + log drains to ClickUp.
• Days 13–18: Rolled to 100% traffic, optimized copy variants, tuned thresholds, and cut average latency from 11s to 4.2s.
• Days 19–28: Handoff, playbooks, and a one-hour livefire test with Sales + RevOps.

Results after 45 days

The SLA for a first touch dropped from 42 hours to 3.8 hours median. SQL volume increased by 148 per month, and the win-rate on routed ICP leads rose 5.6 percentage points. SDRs reclaimed 40 hours per month previously lost to copy-pasting and deduping. Bounce rate landed at 0.4% thanks to validation. The CFO now gets a weekly ROI email with booked meetings, pipeline dollars influenced, and a projected payback curve that shows break-even in month four.

Guardrails that kept quality high

• Dual writes to a staging object in HubSpot for auditability before committing to the main Contacts object.
• Redaction of free-text answers before passing anything to OpenAI for subject line variants.
• Automatic pause if enrichment returns a high-risk industry list defined by Legal.
• Weekly replay of 100 random runs to ensure scoring drift stays under 5% from the baseline.

What made the ROI obvious to leadership

We tied every automation step to a business metric: speed-to-lead, meetings booked, pipeline created, and cost per meeting. By week two the CFO could see $41,700 in projected quarterly pipeline lift from the partial rollout. With fully loaded engineering cost of $18,400 for the project, payback was forecast at 3.2 months. That clarity is why we insist on instrumentation before creative prompts.

Hand-off and change management

We didn’t just ship a workflow; we shipped enablement. A Loom library shows each node’s purpose, a runbook covers incident response, and a “what changed this week” digest goes to RevOps. Sales leaders got a 45-minute training on how to give feedback without breaking the flow. Everything lives in ClickUp, including a one-click rollback to the previous version.

If you want to copy this playbook

Start with the data layer: get enrichment and validation right, then score ruthlessly. Use a single orchestration tool (n8n or Make) to avoid orphaned automations. Keep sequences versioned in Git. Add observability before fancy AI copy. And decide your fast-lane criteria with Sales at the table—nothing kills trust faster than a bot sending junk to an AE.