How-To

Automate Lead Qualification in 90 Minutes....

· Originally on LinkedIn

Just Gmail, an AI scorer, and Slack.

Just a quick heads-up: I have no skin in the vendor game. This is pure thought leadership based on my own experience - no paid promotions, no commercial bias, just honest insights.

Let me define every sales rep’s nightmare:

A VP at a Tier-1 account we’d been chasing for two years finally hits “reply” on a Thursday evening. On Friday, the team misses the notification. By Monday morning, they’ve signed with our biggest competitor. Two years of work, lost in a 72-hour silence.

The email was sitting right there. In the inbox. Scored perfectly by any human standard. But no one had flagged it as urgent. That was the moment I decided to stop relying on human attention as the first line of lead qualification.

“What if every email that arrived got instantly read, scored, and routed to the right place — before any human touched it?”

Here is exactly how I built that system. It took 90 minutes. It costs nothing to start. And it has already changed how our team operates.

What This System Does

Every time an email arrives in your inbox, this recipe runs automatically in the background:

  • It reads the email and extracts the sender name, company domain, subject, and body.
  • It checks whether the sender is a real business contact (not a Gmail or Yahoo address).
  • It passes the email to Claude AI, which scores the lead from 0 to 100 based on seniority signals, buying intent, industry fit, and email quality.
  • It routes the result to Slack and, for the hottest leads, directly to your email inbox.

The whole process takes under 30 seconds from the moment the email arrives.

What You Need

Four things, all free or already in your stack:

  • A Rube.app account - this is the platform that wires everything together. Free tier available at rube.app.
  • A Gmail account - the inbox where your leads arrive.
  • A Slack workspace - where the scored results get posted.
  • 60-90 minutes of uninterrupted time.

How to Build It: Step by Step

I am going to walk you through each step exactly as I built it. Do not skip the test phase at the end - it saves you from embarrassing yourself in production.

Go to rube.app and sign up. Once you are inside, you will see a chat interface. This is where you describe what you want to build, and Rube figures out the technical wiring.

Your first job is to connect Gmail and Slack. Type each of these into the Rube chat, one at a time, and complete the authorization link that comes back before moving to the next:

Here is my list of Apps:

The Rube app marketplace offers over 500 to 600+ different applications that can be connected to AI models for automation. Rube will return an authorization link for each. Click it, log in to the app, and return to Rube. When you see status: ACTIVE next to both, you are ready to build.

Now paste the full recipe prompt into the Rube chat. This single prompt builds your entire workflow. I will walk through what each part does after you paste it. Copy the prompt below in full and paste it directly into Rube:

While Rube constructs the recipe, here is what is happening under the hood at each step.

The Filter

The very first thing the recipe does is check whether the email came from a business domain. Personal domains like Gmail and Yahoo almost never belong to enterprise buyers. This filter exists so you do not waste AI processing on newsletters, cold spam, or your cousin asking for restaurant recommendations.

The Extraction

The recipe pulls four pieces of data from every email: the sender name, the full email address, the company domain, the subject line, and the first 500 characters of the body. These five variables are what the AI scorer works with.

The AI Scorer

This is the intelligence layer. Claude reads the extracted data and evaluates it across four dimensions:

The scorer returns a JSON object with five fields: the numeric score, the tier label, a one-sentence reason for the score, the single strongest signal it found, and a risk flag if something looks off about the lead.

The Router

The recipe reads the tier field and sends the lead to the right destination. Hot leads trigger both a Slack post and a direct email to your inbox. Warm leads go to Slack for human review. Cold leads get a brief log entry.

When Rube finishes building, it will show you the full recipe structure before saving. This is your chance to catch anything that does not look right. Check three things before you confirm:

  1. Your email address appears in the HOT path. If you see [YOUR EMAIL] still as literal text, Rube did not substitute it. Type your email address in the chat and ask Rube to update it.
  2. Your Slack channel name is correct. If the channel does not exist yet, create it in Slack first, then come back and confirm.
  3. The scorer step uses Claude as the LLM. If Rube defaulted to a different model, ask it to switch to Claude.

When everything looks right, confirm and save.

This step is non-negotiable. Run three test emails before activating the recipe for real.

Test 1: The Hot Lead

Send yourself an email from a work email address (not Gmail). Write a subject line like “Evaluating options for Q2 — budget approved” and a body that mentions your company name, a budget figure, and a deadline. This should score 70 or above and trigger both the Slack post and the email to your inbox.

Test 2: The Warm Lead

Send another email from a work address with a vaguer subject like “Interested in learning more” and a short body asking for information. This should land in the 40 to 69 range and appear only in Slack.

Test 3: The Filter

Send an email from a Gmail or Yahoo address. The recipe should stop at Step 1 and produce no output at all. If a Slack message appears, the filter is not working and you need to check the condition node in Rube.

Activate the recipe in Rube. For the first week, compare every score to your own gut feeling. This is how you learn whether the AI is aligned with your actual ICP. The number to watch is simple: of all the leads the recipe tagged as HOT, how many converted to a real meeting? If that number is above 50 percent after one week, the scorer is well calibrated. If it is lower, the intent signals section of the prompt likely needs adjusting to match the actual language your buyers use. Common adjustments in the first week:

  • Adding industry-specific keywords to the intent signals list, for example measurement, attribution, or CPM if you are in advertising technology.
  • Lowering the HOT threshold from 70 to 65 if you are missing too many borderline leads.
  • Adding a nurture email sequence on the COLD path if you want to stay in touch without manual effort.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Here is a real example of what lands in your Slack channel when a hot lead arrives:

And simultaneously, this arrives in your email inbox:

Your team sees this within 30 seconds of the email arriving. No manual review. No one has to decide whether it is worth reading. The AI already made that call.

What Comes Next

This is the foundation. Once it is running smoothly, there are two natural upgrades:

Add {any B2B Vendor} for Enrichment

Instead of guessing company size from a domain name, ZoomInfo (just an example) gives you headcount, revenue band, confirmed job title, management level, and the company’s tech stack. When that data feeds the scorer, a lead that scores 65 on email signals alone might jump to 85 with firmographic confirmation. ZoomInfo offers a trial and their API connects to Rube through the same RUBE_MANAGE_CONNECTIONS command.

Add Salesforce Routing

Once a lead scores HOT, the system can automatically create a Contact and Opportunity in Salesforce and assign it to the right account executive. No copy-paste, no data entry, no delays. The scorecard lands directly in the CRM notes field so the AE walks into the first call fully briefed.

“This is not about replacing your sales team. It is about making sure they spend their time on the right leads at the right moment.”

The Short Version

If you read nothing else, here is what matters:

  • Every inbound email now gets read and scored in under 30 seconds.
  • Hot leads reach you immediately, before your competition can respond.
  • Your team stops triaging email and starts selling.
  • Setup takes 60-90 minutes. No code. No paid subscriptions to start.
  • The whole thing runs inside Rube.app using Gmail and Slack you already have.

Try It This Week

Go to rube.app, connect Gmail and Slack, and paste the recipe prompt. By the time you finish your coffee, every new lead in your inbox will be scored, ranked, and waiting for you.

If this was useful, share it with your sales ops lead. They will thank you.

Questions? Drop them in the comments. I read every one. Follow Evgeny Popov for more automation hacks.