RevOps Lead Scoring & Enrichment Pipeline

A portfolio build that demonstrates how I architect lead-routing automation as engineering, not a no-code stitch.

Five stages, all in n8n:

1. A webhook catches the form submission.
2. The email domain is sent to Apollo for company enrichment over a secure header-authenticated request (the API key lives in the x-api-key header, never in the URL).
3. The company data goes to GPT-4o-mini which returns strictly structured JSON: a 1-10 lead score plus a personalized sales hook.
4. A conditional gate routes hot leads (score >= 7) to Slack and cold leads to a CRM or sheet.
5. Slack receives a clean markdown alert with the AI's suggested opener ready to use.

End-to-end runs in under five seconds on free-tier infrastructure (Apollo's 10k credits per month, fractions of a cent per OpenAI call). Production-grade fail-safes, not a brittle no-code chain.

Two engineering details from the build worth keeping:

• API keys belong in HTTP headers, not URL query params. Apollo's developer console flags this with a deprecation notice the moment you generate a key. URL params leak into server logs, headers do not.
• OpenAI Responses API output is deeply nested. Pull from the full path output[0].content[0].text.{field} rather than flattening with an extra Code node. Keeps the workflow lean and the execution fast.