Try OnsaI’ll be honest: I’m a bit of a disaster when it comes to manual admin. If a task requires me to spend 20 minutes “stalking” a prospect on LinkedIn or manually typing notes into a CRM, there is a 100% chance I will find a way to procrastinate. In this post, I’m going to show you how I reclaimed my sanity by building a meeting intelligence engine that does the heavy lifting for me.
We’ve all been there. You have a back-to-back schedule, and you’re jumping into a Discovery Call with a “VP of Something” at a “Company You’ve Barely Heard Of.” You have two choices: go in blind and look like an amateur, or spend your lunch break frantically Googling their recent Series B funding.
Most sales reps spend about 20% of their week just preparing for meetings or cleaning up the mess afterward in HubSpot or Salesforce. That’s a day a week lost to the “Admin Tax.” I decided to stop paying it. By using N8N (an open-source automation tool) and a few AI legos, you can build a system that delivers a “cheat sheet” to your inbox before the call and logs everything after it.
Here is exactly how I built my workflow. It’s not as intimidating as it looks, and it saves me about five hours of grunt work every week.
Most people try to do this with just a basic Google search, but the results are usually noisy. I like Firecrawl because it actually “crawls” the prospect’s site and recent news, pulling out the context that actually matters for a sales call—like a recent product launch or a shift in their market positioning.
When I jump on a call now, I’m not asking, “So, what does your company do?” I’m saying, “I saw you recently expanded into the EMEA market; how is that affecting your sales ops?” That’s the difference between a vendor and a partner.
Building this in N8N is a fantastic Saturday project if you’re a tinkerer like me. It gives you total control over the logic. But I also realize that most sales leaders don’t have the time to debug a JSON error at 10:00 PM on a Tuesday.
That’s exactly why we’re building Onsa.ai. We took the core philosophy of this workflow—eliminating manual research and CRM friction—and turned it into a seamless, “it just works” experience for sales teams who want the power of AI without the setup headache.
P.S. If you do build this yourself, make sure your OpenAI prompt specifically tells the AI to “keep it brief.” There’s nothing worse than an automated memo that’s longer than the actual meeting.
A: Not necessarily, but you do need to understand “if-this-then-that” logic. It’s a low-code tool, meaning you’ll be dragging and dropping blocks, but you might need to copy-paste a few snippets of JSON here and there.
A: N8N can be self-hosted for free or used via their cloud for a small fee. Your main costs will be OpenAI API credits and Firecrawl, which are usually just a few cents per meeting. It’s significantly cheaper than hiring a virtual assistant.
A: Absolutely. N8N has a native Microsoft Outlook integration that works almost exactly like the Google Calendar trigger.