Sales: Gmail lead follow-up automation from Sheets CRM

Context

A 12-person sales team using Sheets as a lightweight CRM. No budget for Salesforce seats for every rep.

Challenge

• Follow-up dates lived in Sheets; emails were sent one-by-one from Gmail.
• Reps forgot touches after busy weeks — no audit trail of what was sent.
• Mail merge add-ons broke when volume exceeded a few dozen rows per day.

Approach

1. Mapped pipeline stages to email templates with personalization tokens from sheet columns.
2. Time-driven trigger every morning reads rows where Next Touch = today and Status = Open.
3. Gmail thread search stops sequence when a reply is detected.
4. Sent log written to a History tab for manager visibility.

Solution

Container-bound Apps Script with GmailApp.sendEmail(), template Docs for HTML bodies, and Script Properties for rate limiting. Runs entirely in the client's Workspace.

Outcome

• Follow-up compliance improved — managers see daily sent counts in one sheet.
• Reps reclaimed ~8 hours/week previously spent on manual Gmail copy-paste.
• No per-seat CRM tax; script cost was a one-time build.

Technical approach

Morning time-driven trigger → filter sheet by date/status → merge template → GmailApp.sendEmail → append History row → optional Slack digest to manager.

Lessons learned

Always log sends to a sheet. Build stop-on-reply early — sequences without it annoy prospects. Keep templates in Docs, not hard-coded strings.

Related on this site

• Workspace automation →
• Email from Sheets guide →
• Gmail automation guide →