Gmail Lead Capture to Google Sheets w/ OpenAI & Telegram Alerts

Turn new Gmail inquiries into Google Sheets leads—and alert your team on Telegram using OpenAI

This n8n workflow automatically polls your Gmail inbox every 5 minutes, extracts structured lead details with OpenAI, upserts one lead per sender into Google Sheets, and sends Telegram alerts for “hot” inquiries based on budget or urgency.

What this workflow does

• Polls Gmail on a 5-minute interval using your configured search query for new inquiry emails.
• Filters non-leads by excluding newsletters, auto-replies, bounces, and ignored senders.
• Pre-cleans the email body (trims/cleans content) before any AI processing.
• Uses OpenAI for information extraction to confirm the email is a real inquiry and extract fields such as service, budget, deadline, and a short summary.
• Validates and normalizes results by sanitizing spreadsheet-formula text, parsing budget into a number, normalizing phone, and scoring priority as hot or normal.
• Upserts into Google Sheets (sheet name: Leads) using the sender’s email as the unique key.
• Sends Telegram alerts for hot leads, including an HTML-safe message and a link back to the original Gmail message.

Use cases

• SaaS and service businesses capturing inbound requests without manual copy/paste.
• Sales teams routing only high-priority Gmail inquiries to Telegram for immediate follow-up.
• Operators maintaining a clean CRM-like pipeline in Google Sheets with one row per sender.

Technical details

• Gmail: polled workflow (every 5 minutes) to detect matching inquiry emails.
• OpenAI: prompt-driven extraction of lead fields and inquiry classification.
• Google Sheets: appends or updates a lead row in sheet “Leads” with columns including key, received_at, name, email, company, phone, service, budget, currency, deadline, summary, subject, priority, gmail_link.
• Telegram: sends hot-lead alerts with a Gmail link.
• n8n nodes/logic referenced: Gmail Trigger, if, set, code, telegram, and supporting workflow steps (including a sticky note for guidance).