BDR Automation

A research-and-outreach workflow for business development: it identifies contacts at a target company, gathers business signals such as funding, leadership changes and expansion, has Gemini analyse them, and prepares a personalised first draft for a person to review.

Good outreach depends on context — knowing what is happening at a company and why it might matter now. Gathering that context by hand for every account is slow and repetitive, and it competes directly with the time a business development representative has for actual conversations.

The workflow splits the job into steps a machine can do reliably — finding contacts, collecting signals, summarising them — and keeps judgement with people. Make.com orchestrates the flow, Apollo supplies contact data, and Gemini 2.0 Flash turns the collected signals into analysis and a draft message. Nothing is sent automatically: the output is a draft for a human to review.

• 01Mapped the manual research process into automatable steps
• 02Built the workflow in Make.com
• 03Connected Apollo for contact identification
• 04Designed the Gemini analysis and draft-writing step
• 05Kept a human review step before any outreach

• 01Automate research and drafting, not the relationship
• 02Base personalisation on concrete signals — funding, leadership, expansion — rather than generic templates
• 03End with a human review step: the system prepares, people decide

Automation in sales is easy to get wrong: fully automated messages tend to feel automated. The interesting design question is where to draw the line between what the system prepares and what a person should decide.

A working Make.com workflow that turns a target company into researched context and a personalised outreach draft, ready for review.

• Make.com

  Workflow orchestration

• Apollo

  Contact data

• Gemini 2.0 Flash

  Signal analysis and drafting

Where the business background and the technical work meet: understanding a sales process well enough to automate the right parts of it.