n8n for Architecture Business Development: Templates for Opportunities, Inquiries, Follow-Up, and Billing

Most small practices run business development from an inbox and a spreadsheet. The work is not hard to describe: notice an opportunity, log an inquiry, follow up, bill the work. It fails when a step depends on someone remembering. The n8n templates below turn each of those steps into a workflow that runs whether or not anyone remembers. Each entry says what the template does as published and what a practice changes.

This page is one part of a larger map. The full list of 24 templates across every AEC job is in n8n for architecture and construction firms. Where a job has a step-by-step walk-through, it is linked under the heading.

Find and route opportunities

Walk-through: Find and route opportunities, step by step.

Smart RSS feed monitoring with AI filtering, Baserow storage, and Slack alerts (fit 4 of 5). Polls a set of RSS feeds, uses an AI agent to filter out items already seen or off-topic, and posts only the new qualifying items to a Slack channel while logging them in Baserow. What a firm changes: Swap the RSS sources for AEC opportunity feeds (SAM.gov, state e-procurement RSS, association bid boards), change the AI filter prompt to score by discipline/geography/project size, and route the Slack alert to the BD channel; Baserow can stay or be replaced with the firm’s CRM contact/deal log.

Generate RFP proposal drafts from Google Drive with Groq AI, Salesforce and Slack (fit 3 of 5). Watches a Google Drive folder for new RFP documents, extracts the requirements with an LLM, drafts a proposal in Google Docs, opens a matching Salesforce opportunity, and notifies the team in Slack. What a firm changes: Point the Drive watch at the folder where downloaded RFP/RFQ PDFs land, tune the extraction prompt to pull scope/fee-type/submission-deadline fields relevant to AEC procurement, and swap Salesforce for HubSpot/Pipedrive/Zoho to open the opportunity record.

Automate Your RFP Process with OpenAI Assistants (fit 3 of 5). Pulls questions out of an incoming RFP form and answers each one automatically using an OpenAI Assistant trained on the company’s own knowledge base. What a firm changes: Load the assistant’s knowledge base with the firm’s qualifications, past-project boilerplate, and standard SF330/SOQ answers so it can auto-draft responses to owner questionnaires; route the draft to a principal for review via Slack before submission.

Turn inquiries into CRM records

Walk-through: Turn inquiries into CRM records, step by step.

Capture leads in HubSpot from Typeform (fit 4 of 5). Fires on a Typeform submission, creates the contact in HubSpot, filters for interested prospects, moves qualified ones to an opportunity stage, and emails them via Gmail. What a firm changes: Swap Typeform for the firm’s website inquiry/contact form (Jotform or a Webflow form), map fields to project type/budget/timeline instead of generic lead data, and adjust the HubSpot pipeline stage names to match the firm’s BD stages.

Typeform Lead Capture to HubSpot with Scoring and Slack Alerts (fit 4 of 5). Captures a Typeform submission, dedupes/updates the contact in HubSpot, scores the lead with custom logic, and alerts sales in Slack with the priority tier. What a firm changes: Replace the scoring function with criteria that matter for AEC intake (project budget range, delivery method, is it an RFP vs. direct hire, geography), and route the Slack alert to whichever principal covers that market sector.

Qualify High-Budget Leads: Typeform to HubSpot, Google Sheets & Slack Alerts (fit 4 of 5). Checks each new form lead’s stated budget against a threshold, and for anything above it, updates HubSpot and logs to Sheets, then pings the sales team in Slack. What a firm changes: Replace the budget field with the firm’s minimum-viable-project-fee filter so only leads worth a principal’s time get flagged, and route to whichever team owns that project type.

Smart Lead Qualification & Routing from Typeform to HubSpot with Data Enrichment (fit 3 of 5). Takes a form submission, enriches the contact/company via Hunter.io and Abstract API, scores it, and routes hot leads to HubSpot as Qualified while cold ones get logged for a later nurture re-check. What a firm changes: Drop the consumer-lead enrichment APIs (or swap for a firmographic source relevant to owners/developers) and adjust the qualification thresholds to distinguish direct-hire inquiries from unsolicited RFP notices; keep the Wait+re-check loop for slow-moving public-sector leads.

Follow up without relying on memory

Walk-through: Follow up without relying on memory, step by step.

Send HubSpot deal follow-ups with Gmail, Slack, and Google Sheets (fit 4 of 5). Sends a timed sequence of follow-up emails to new HubSpot deal contacts, watches for replies, alerts Slack on engagement, and logs outcomes to Sheets while updating the deal stage. What a firm changes: Re-time the sequence to match AEC sales cycles (weeks, not days), swap the email copy for proposal-follow-up language, and map the deal-stage updates to the firm’s pipeline (e.g., Proposal Sent → No Response → Interview Scheduled).

Automated lead follow-up system with Gmail, Google Calendar & Sheets sync (fit 3 of 5). Runs hourly to find leads that haven’t booked a meeting or haven’t replied in 24 hours, sends a booking-link follow-up email, and holds a placeholder calendar slot. What a firm changes: Point the Sheet (or swap for a CRM query) at open proposals/RFP submissions instead of raw leads, and change the no-reply window to days rather than hours to match how slowly owners/agencies respond.

Generate & send quotation PDFs from Pipedrive to DottedSign for e-signature (fit 3 of 5). When a Pipedrive deal reaches a chosen stage, builds a PDF quote from an HTML template, attaches it back to the deal, and sends it out through DottedSign for signature. What a firm changes: Trigger on a stage like ‘Fee Proposal Approved,’ swap the HTML template for the firm’s standard AIA-style agreement/fee proposal, and keep or replace DottedSign with whichever e-sign tool the firm already uses.

Time and billing to invoice

Walk-through: Time and billing to invoice, step by step.

Client billing detail collection & invoice generation with Gmail and QuickBooks (fit 4 of 5). Emails a client to collect missing billing details through a hosted form, then finds or creates them in QuickBooks and generates and sends the invoice. What a firm changes: Trigger the intake form from an approved fee milestone or time-and-materials cutoff instead of a manual request, and map the invoice line items to the firm’s phase-based billing (SD/DD/CD/CA) structure.

Automate QuickBooks invoicing & customer creation from Airtable sales orders (fit 4 of 5). Triggers when a sales order in Airtable is marked ready, creates the customer in QuickBooks if needed, generates the invoice via the QuickBooks API, and writes the result back to Airtable. What a firm changes: Replace the Airtable sales-order base with a project-fee/milestone tracker (or the firm’s PM tool export), and trigger on ‘milestone approved’ instead of ‘order confirmed.’

Publish portfolio and news

Automate newsletter creation & client delivery with GPT-4O, Google Sheets (fit 2 of 5). Generates newsletter content from a topic queue in Sheets with GPT-4o, saves it to Drive, and emails the approved version to a client distribution list on a schedule. What a firm changes: Weakest fit of the set , no CMS/portfolio-publish step (no Webflow/Framer node) so it only covers the ‘newsletter delivery’ half of job 8; would need a Webflow/Framer publish trigger bolted on to close the loop from portfolio update to newsletter/social post.

Before you import one

Read the template page and its node list. Check which accounts it needs. If you do not have an n8n account yet, n8n Cloud is the hosted option. Import into a test workspace, replace the source with yours, rename fields to the words your office already uses, and send notifications to the one person who owns that job. Run it beside the manual process for two weeks before switching the manual one off.

Disclosure: DataDrivenAEC may earn a commission if you subscribe to n8n through links on this page. Template behaviour is described from each template’s published page; we have not run these workflows.