AI Lead Generation Automation (Regional Cold Leads)
Overview
Regional Cold Leads is an internal SoftXPro automation that finds local SMB prospects by niche and city, enriches contact data, audits their websites, and sends personalized email/WhatsApp outreach in minutes. It pulls businesses from Google Maps, enriches with Diffbot, stores to Airtable, fetches Lighthouse performance scores, and routes to the best channel (email or WhatsApp) with AI-generated copy.
Behind the Project
This internal growth playbook equips our team with a repeatable way to generate qualified local leads across Canada. Via a Telegram command, the agent searches a business type in a chosen city, captures verified contact points, performs a quick site audit, then triggers tailored outreach and logs everything for follow-up.- Automate top-of-funnel discovery for local SMBs by niche & location
- Enrich leads with usable contact details and business context
- Trigger channel-appropriate, personalized outreach at scale
- Fragmented data across Google Maps listings and company sites
- Inconsistent availability of emails vs. phone numbers
- Need for fast, human-sounding copy that references each lead’s real metrics
The Solution
- Command & Parse: Telegram bot intake (e.g., /dentist Toronto), regex parsers split keyword and city.
- Source: Apify “Google Maps with contact details” actor searches {keyword} in {city}, Canada and stores up to 10 places per run.
- Enrich: Diffbot adds company description and revenue signals from the website + address.
- Store: Airtable base captures website, email, phone, socials, rating, reviews, address, city, and IDs.
- Audit: Google PageSpeed (Lighthouse) fetches performance score + total blocking time for personalization.
- Route & Message:
- If email exists → send tailored HTML email via Gmail with audit snippets.
- If no website but phone exists → generate a friendly WhatsApp opener (ARO structure) and send via UltraMSG.
- If website & phone exist → generate WhatsApp message referencing audit metrics and send via UltraMSG.
- Log: Write back message content, channel (“WhatsApp”), and timestamps to Airtable for tracking.
Trigger & Parsing
Telegram Watch Updates → regex #1 extracts first token (business type), regex #2 extracts remainder (city).
Data Sourcing
Apify Actor lukaskrivka/google-maps-with-contact-details with inputs: language en, locationQuery = {city}, Canada, maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch = 10, searchStringsArray = {keyword}.
Enrichment & Storage
Diffbot Enhance maps url, name, location → returns entity.description and entity.revenue (currency/value).
Airtable Create Record fields: website, email(s), phone, address, city, category, rating, reviews, socials (FB/IG/YouTube/TikTok/LinkedIn), placeId, description, revenue.
Site Audit
HTTP call to PageSpeed Insights v5 for Website → capture Lighthouse categories.performance.score and audits.total-blocking-time.numericValue.
Outreach Logic
- Email path (email present): Gmail module sends personalized audit email to {{Email}} with site score & blocking time placeholders.
- WhatsApp path A (no website, phone present): OpenAI gpt-4.1-mini writes a short message using ARO; UltraMSG sends to {{Phone}}; Airtable logs message + date.
- WhatsApp path B (website & phone present): OpenAI references PageSpeed metrics in the copy; UltraMSG sends; Airtable updates original record with channel, content, and timestamps.
Reliability
Branch-level Ignore handlers prevent run failures on enrichment/audit hiccups (e.g., Diffbot/PageSpeed).
Results & Impact
- Hands-free prospecting: From a single Telegram command to outreach in one run.
- Human-sounding at scale: AI messaging respects tone and context (business type, city, audit metrics).
- Data you can work with: Every contact point and message is saved back to Airtable for follow-up.
KPIs to track on the Airtable log (recommended):
- Contactable lead rate (email or phone available)
- Reply rate by channel (email vs. WhatsApp)
- Meetings booked per 100 outreaches
- Time from command → first message sent
- % leads with audit data attached (when a website exists)
