Every freelancer I know loses leads in the same quiet way: the message lands, you're heads-down on client work, and by the time you look at it two hours later the person already hired someone else.
You don't need a 27-node lead automation platform. You need one workflow that does exactly three things, in ~10 minutes:
- Receive the inquiry
- Score it with GPT (budget fit + readiness)
- Ping you on Slack with both the raw message and the AI's read on it — so you decide what to send
That's it. No auto-replies, no pretending an LLM is your sales rep. The whole point is that a human approves before anything goes out.
Here's the free workflow, code on GitHub:
https://gist.github.com/dilandustandup/dbb4059a319bc87a5c2b3b72f9f34d7f
What the 3 nodes actually do
1. Lead Webhook — listens on POST /lead. Any form, any site, any tool that can POST JSON gets here: your landing page, a Typeform, an API, whatever.
json
POST https://your-n8n/webhook/lead
{
"message": "Hi, I run a small law firm and need someone to build 3 automations.",
"budget": "500"
}
Top comments (1)
Scoring is great; the part that saved me money was a hard 15-minute human ack SLA before any model ranks the lead. If I can’t send a short “got it, I’ll reply with next steps by X,” I don’t let automation touch it — speed without a human handshake just trains people to ghost polished replies.
When you score, do you weight budget language higher than timeline clarity, or the other way around?