Most B2B lead-gen setups bleed money in the same place: the gap between a form submission and the first reply. A lead fills out your form at 2:14pm, your CRM batches it, a notification surfaces an hour later, and by then they've already talked to someone else. Harvard Business Review's research on speed-to-lead, replicated for over a decade since, put the number plainly: contact a lead inside five minutes and you're roughly 7x more likely to convert than if you wait an hour. This playbook is the system that closes that gap, and four others around it.
It walks the whole funnel: capture, score, route, nurture, convert, then feed the results back into scoring every week. Not theory. Exact formulas, real email copy, an importable set of n8n workflows, and dashboard specs you can build against. Implement it end to end and you're looking at roughly three weekends of work, running on $50 to $100 a month at SMB scale.
The part everyone skips
Scoring. Every lead that lands gets a single number, 0 to 100, computed at capture and recomputed as new signals arrive. The composite is 40% FIT (do they match your ICP), 30% INTENT (are they actually asking for what you sell), 20% ENGAGEMENT (what they did on your site and in your emails), 10% URGENCY (now, or someday). Each axis breaks down into point allocations you can hand to a workflow tonight: industry match worth up to 15, a stated budget signal up to 10, a "this quarter" timeline worth 7 against 0 for "just exploring."
That number drives one decision: what happens next. 80 and up pings a rep in under a minute with a five-minute contact SLA. 60 to 79 drops into a five-touch nurture sequence. 40 to 59 gets the newsletter and a re-score next quarter. Below 40, you suppress them and send a polite "wrong fit" reply with a referral elsewhere. No more treating every lead like it's equally worth your time, because it isn't.
The nurture sequence is written out in full, five emails across 21 days, each one short, useful, and ending with a single question. The first delivers what they asked for. The last is honest: "I'm going to stop reaching out unless you say otherwise." You get the subject lines and the body structure, not placeholders.
You're buying the system, not a pile of pre-built flows you can't read. The scoring math, the routing tree, the SLA architecture, the iteration loop that reads your closed-won data and adjusts the weights. The n8n starters are there to save you setup time, but the patterns extend to whatever stack you already run.