🔴  THE PROBLEM

A client's sales team was spending hours manually sourcing leads — visiting directories, copying contact data into spreadsheets, and manually entering records into their CRM. The process was slow, inconsistent, and pulled salespeople away from actual selling. They needed a repeatable, automated system that could source, clean, and deliver qualified leads directly into their pipeline without manual effort.

🔧  WHAT I BUILT

I built an end-to-end lead generation automation using Apify as the scraping layer and n8n as the orchestration engine:

• Apify Actor configuration for targeted scraping — pulling leads from relevant directories and platforms based on configurable filters (location, industry, company size)

• Data cleaning and normalization in n8n — deduplication, field standardization, and validation to ensure only complete, usable records moved forward

• Enrichment layer that cross-referenced scraped data with additional sources to fill gaps in contact information

• Automated CRM ingestion — clean leads pushed directly into Go High Level or Airtable with correct pipeline stage, tags, and owner assignment

• Google Sheets output for clients who preferred a spreadsheet-based review step before CRM import

• Scheduling logic to run scraping jobs on a defined cadence — delivering fresh leads automatically without manual triggering

✅  THE RESULT

The client's sales team went from spending 3–4 hours per week on manual lead sourcing to receiving a curated, deduplicated lead list automatically delivered to their CRM on schedule. Lead data quality improved through consistent validation, and sales reps could focus entirely on outreach and closing instead of data entry. The system was fully self-running after setup, requiring only periodic filter updates as target criteria changed.