n8n Workflow: Google Sheets Leads → OpenAI Review-Ready Email Drafts

Turn Google Sheets leads into OpenAI-ready, reviewable email drafts—automatically

This n8n workflow pulls leads from your Google Sheets, validates eligibility, gathers evidence from provided notes or optional social sources, then uses OpenAI to generate strict JSON subject/body email drafts and upserts them into a Drafts review sheet—keyed by lead_id.

What this workflow does

• Runs manually and reads configuration (mode: demo/provided/social, seller details, OpenAI model, and Google Sheets document/tab names).
• Loads leads either from synthetic demo data or from the Leads tab, and reads existing rows from the Drafts tab to avoid overwriting completed drafts.
• Validates each lead: required fields, status = new, contact_allowed = TRUE, valid LinkedIn/X identifiers, and no duplicate lead_id—then processes only up to the configured maximum eligible leads.
• Collects evidence:
  • Demo/Provided mode: uses source_notes/source_url supplied in the sheet or demo inputs.
  • Social mode: fetches recent LinkedIn posts via Apify and recent X posts via the X API.
• Generates drafts:
  • Demo mode: creates a synthetic draft.
  • Other modes: calls OpenAI Chat Completions and requests strict JSON output (subject, body, and evidence IDs).
• Validates the draft schema (including citations/evidence IDs) and upserts a review row into the Drafts tab.

Use cases

• Sales/SaaS teams who want scalable personalization from a Google Sheets lead list.
• Automation engineers building a review-before-send email drafting pipeline.
• Operators testing outreach quality using demo/provided/social evidence modes.

Technical details

• Google Sheets (Leads tab, Drafts tab upsert keyed by lead_id)
• n8n nodes: if, set, code, sticky note, http request, google sheets
• OpenAI Chat Completions with strict JSON schema output
• Apify for LinkedIn evidence; X API for X evidence

Setup: Import the workflow and run the default demo to validate the flow end-to-end.