Built a lead triage system so hot leads stop sitting overnight

Built this over the past few days and wanted to share it here since a few people in this community run agencies and deal with the same problem.

The problem: leads come in from a few different places (forms, DMs, referrals), and someone has to manually sort through them every morning to figure out what's actually urgent. By the time that happens, a hot lead that came in at 9pm has already sat untouched for 12+ hours.

What I built: a workflow that reads every inbound lead the second it arrives, classifies it by source and urgency using Gemini, then routes it based on that classification. Hot leads ping Slack in real time. Everything else still gets logged (to a separate quieter Slack channel + a Google Sheet) so nothing falls through the cracks, but it doesn't create noise for stuff that isn't urgent.

Stack: Tally (form intake) → n8n (orchestration) → Gemini 2.5 Flash (classification) → Slack (routing) → Google Sheets (logging).

Biggest thing I learned building it: the classic mistake is treating every lead the same in your notification system. If everything pings the same way, people stop paying attention to the pings entirely, hot leads included. Splitting the alert channel by urgency (loud channel vs quiet channel) fixed that completely.

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Built a lead triage system so hot leads stop sitting overnight