Run AI-scored cold email outreach and follow-ups with Ollama and Gmail

Who is this for?

This workflow is built for founders, sales teams, solopreneurs, and agencies who want to automate outbound sales without expensive tools. Perfect for anyone doing cold email outreach who wants AI-powered personalization at scale.

What it does

The workflow runs three automated flows:

Flow 1 — New Lead Processing (8 AM weekdays):

• Reads new leads from Google Sheets
• Scrapes the lead's website to build a research dossier
• AI scores each lead (0–100) on company fit, role fit, timing signals, and engagement potential
• For leads scoring 40+, AI generates 3 personalized cold emails with different angles
• Sends Email 1 immediately and saves all 3 emails to the sheet
• Low-fit leads are marked as skipped

Flow 2 — Follow-up Engine (every 2 hours weekdays):

• Checks for leads that need follow-ups
• Sends Email 2 after 3 days, Email 3 after 7 days
• Automatically marks sequence as complete after Email 3
• Skips leads that have already replied

Flow 3 — Reply Detection (every 2 hours weekdays):

• Searches Gmail for replies from active leads
• Filters out your own sent emails to avoid false positives
• When a reply is found, marks the lead as "replied" and stops the sequence
• Sends a Telegram alert with the reply preview

Setup steps

1. Google Sheets — Create a spreadsheet with columns: Lead Name, Email, Company, Website, Role/Title, Status, Reply Date, Reply Subject, Reply Snippet, and email tracking columns (see sticky notes in the workflow for full list)
2. Gmail OAuth2 — Connect your Gmail account for sending emails and searching replies
3. Ollama — Install locally and pull your preferred model (e.g., ollama pull mistral). You can also swap for OpenAI or Anthropic
4. Telegram Bot — Create via @BotFather, get your bot token and chat ID
5. AI Lead Scorer prompt — Edit the system prompt with your product, ICP, and scoring criteria
6. AI Email Writer prompt — Edit with your name, company, value prop, and one specific result
7. Sender name — Update the sender name in the Extract Emails code node (line 12) and Find Follow-ups code node (line 9)
8. Gmail address — Set your sending Gmail address in the Filter Active Leads code node (line 10) and Check Reply Results code node (line 10)
9. Test — Add a test lead with status "new", run the research flow manually, verify emails generate correctly, then enable all schedules

Requirements

• Self-hosted n8n (uses Ollama nodes)
• Ollama running locally with at least one model installed
• Google Sheets OAuth2 credentials
• Gmail OAuth2 credentials
• Telegram Bot credentials

How to customize

• Adjust the scoring threshold (default 40) in the Extract Score node to be more or less selective
• Change follow-up timing (default 3 and 7 days) in the Find Follow-ups code node
• Modify cron schedules on any trigger to match your timezone and preferences
• Swap Ollama for OpenAI or Anthropic by replacing the LLM nodes
• Add a LinkedIn enrichment step before the dossier builder for richer research
• Customize email tone and sign-off in the AI Email Writer system prompt