Every business gets leads from messy, unstructured sources: a forwarded email from a partner, a photo of a business card from a conference, or even a picture of a branded truck seen on the road. The biggest challenge is getting that information out of your inbox and into your CRM without tedious, manual data entry.
We decided to solve this by building a workflow that turns a simple Gmail label into an intelligent, automated lead capture system.
A Peek Under the Hood: The AI Inbox Assistant
Our workflow, built in n8n, constantly watches a specific label in our Gmail account called "New Pipedrive Leads". When a new email arrives there, our AI assistant gets to work.
Mission 1: The AI Reads Everything (Email & Images)
This is where the magic begins. The workflow takes the entire email—the subject, the body text, and crucially, any attached images—and sends it all to Google's Gemini Pro AI model. Whether it's a typed-out request or a photo of a business card, the AI is prompted to analyze everything for potential lead information.
Mission 2: Extracting Structured Data from the Chaos
We've instructed the AI to act as an expert "data extraction specialist". Its job is to find and pull out key details and format them perfectly as structured JSON data. It looks for:
- Organization: Company Name, Website
- Person: Full Name, Email, Phone, Job Title
- Lead: A Title and a brief summary of the context
Mission 3: Smart Entry into Pipedrive
The workflow doesn't just blindly dump data. It runs a series of checks first:
- Validation: It makes sure the extracted lead has at least a company name and a valid email or phone number.
- Deduplication: It searches Pipedrive to see if the organization already exists to avoid creating duplicates.
- Creation: If the lead is new and valid, it automatically creates the Organization, Person, and Lead records in Pipedrive, assigning it to the correct owner based on who sent the email.
Mission 4: The Confirmation Report
To close the loop and build trust in the system, the workflow sends a final summary email back to the person who sent the original message. This report conveniently lists:
- ✅ Leads Created: A list of all successful leads with direct links to their new Pipedrive profiles.
- ❌ Failed Leads: A list of any leads that couldn't be created and the specific reason why (e.g., "Existing Organization Found" or "Required phone or email is missing").
The Result: Your Inbox is Now a CRM Funnel
This system effectively turns every team member's phone and email into a powerful lead capture device. Forwarding an email or sending a photo of a business card to a specific Gmail label is all it takes to get a clean, validated, and de-duplicated record into our CRM.
It transforms a manual, error-prone data entry task into a fast, intelligent, and reliable system. The data enrichment phase is automatically triggered, learn How We Built an AI Research Agent to Enrich Leads in Pipedrive.
If your team is ready to stop typing and start automating, let's chat about the learnings.
