Research Automation with n8n, Apify, Relevance AI, and Perplexity
Client: AI-Powered Sales Enablement Team
Industry: B2B Sales Intelligence / Marketing Automation
Platform: n8n, Apify, Perplexity API, Relevance AI, OpenAI, Google Sheets, Gmail
Time to Build: 15+ hours
Time Saved: 6–8 hours per week
Consulting Partner: Lumio Consulting
Project Overview / Problem
A client came to me with a time-intensive problem: they needed to prepare personalized reports on individual prospects and their companies for sales enablement. This included reading LinkedIn profiles, recent posts, company background, and TrustPilot reviews—then distilling that data into pain points and actionable insights for their sales team.
Their manual process took 45+ minutes per lead and was inconsistent in quality, depending on who was doing the research.
The client wasn’t trying to replace their SDRs—they just wanted a consistent and scalable way to generate insights and tailor messaging across their outbound campaigns.
Goals of the Automation
The objective was to build a fully automated pipeline that could:
Scrape public LinkedIn profile content (posts, job history, education)
Enrich company background via Perplexity AI and TrustPilot reviews
Generate a tailored profile summary and list of likely pain points
Automatically compile and email a clean HTML report to the sales team
Solution Overview / Step-by-Step Breakdown
This automation was built entirely in n8n, with a multi-step process that combined web scraping, AI enrichment, and report generation.
Step 1: Scrape the Prospect Profile
Using Relevance AI, we scraped LinkedIn profile content including:
Recent posts
Job history
Educational background
Step 2: Research the Company
A Perplexity API call was used to summarize the company’s background, extracting:
Recent updates
Industry positioning
Competitive insights
We also used Apify to scrape 1–3 star TrustPilot reviews and parse them into meaningful categories.
Step 3: Analyze & Summarize with GPT
We fed all the scraped and enriched data into OpenAI (GPT-4) to:
Write a combined person + company profile
Identify likely pain points and suggest tailored solutions
Step 4: Generate the Report
We converted all insights into an HTML-formatted report using a custom template and emailed it directly to the sales team with a subject line including the prospect’s name.
Challenges
A few technical and strategic roadblocks came up during development:
Rate-limited sources: LinkedIn and TrustPilot required careful pacing and fallback logic to avoid failed requests.
Multi-source data parsing: Normalizing posts, reviews, and education history into structured prompts took significant prompt engineering.
Model context limitations: Feeding long scraped data into GPT required chunking and smart summarization to stay within token limits.
Email deliverability: HTML formatting needed to be light, readable, and clean to avoid spam filters when sent via Gmail.
Results/Outcome / Time Saved
This automation reduced research time from 45+ minutes per prospect to under 2 minutes, thanks to step-by-step automation and minimal manual review.
In just the first month of use:
Time savings: 6–8 hours per week
Report quality: more consistent and detailed than human-generated briefs
Personalization: pain points and summaries felt custom-built, without actually requiring a writer
Client Feedback
““We used to spend half an hour researching each lead before outreach. Now it’s all there—clean summaries, company context, even pain points we hadn’t thought about. Tom made it easy for us to scale research without losing the human touch.””
Additional Improvements
Since the initial rollout, we’ve added:
A Slack integration that posts the report directly into the sales channel
A fallback routine that retries failed scrapes or AI calls without breaking the full run
The ability to tag reports by region, industry, or campaign for batch analysis later
Tools, Plug-ins, and Platforms Used
n8n – Core orchestration and scheduling
Relevance AI – LinkedIn profile scraping
Perplexity API – Company research summaries
Apify – TrustPilot review scraping
OpenAI (GPT-4) – Custom summaries and pain point extraction
HTML Generator – Dynamic templating for email-ready formatting
Gmail API – Email delivery
Slack (optional) – Notification and sharing
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