Entrepreneurship

Automating Sigma's Business Workflows

Overhauled Sigma Solve’s automation infrastructure revamping our Apollo.io account to run personalized outbound email campaigns targeting CEOs, founders, and VPs in health & fitness, logistics, manufacturing, and retail; built a dynamic org chart web app that pulls employee data from Google Workspace, filters out non-employees, and answers queries like “Who does Jane Doe report to?” in plain English; and automated our leave reporting process by ingesting daily HRMS spreadsheets from Google Drive, parsing them with n8n and Google Apps Script, and serving up natural language leave queries (e.g., “Who was on leave June 13?”) in a friendly web interface.

My Role

Product Management Intern

Duration

3 months

Tools

Apollo.io, n8n, Google Workspace, Google Apps Script

Overview

Challenge

Sales & Marketing Automation: Sigma had no systematic process for outbound sales outreach. The Apollo.io account sat dormant, and prospects received one-off emails, yielding negligible engagement.

Operations Automation: Sigma’s 300+ employees lacked a searchable, up-to-date org chart. Manual management was error-prone and provided no self-service lookup.

HR Ops Automation: HR manually uploads leave reports and fields ad-hoc email requests for leave summaries, an inefficient process prone to delays and human error.

Solution

Sales & Marketing Automation: I reconnected Apollo.io to our marketing inbox, built segmented lead lists of 1,000 contacts (across different verticals), crafted an email sequence with A/B subject-line tests, and scheduled automated sends over a two week cadence.

Operations Automation: In n8n, I created a workflow to fetch all Workspace users, filter actual employees, and output a clean JSON file to Drive. Then, I wrote an Apps Script web app (code.js + index.html) that reads the JSON, renders a hierarchical chart with search for “reports to” and “manages” queries, and auto-deploys on each data update.

HR Ops Automation: I designed an n8n workflow to detect new leave files in Drive, parse and normalize data (From/To dates, names), and drop structured JSON. A Google Apps Script web app then reads the JSON and answers a broad set of queries (e.g., leave dates per person, future leave requests, rejected leaves) in a clean table.

Research

Sales & Marketing Automation: Analyzed competitor outreach examples and open-rate benchmarks. Watched YouTube videos to understand how to automate sequencing in Apollo.io.

Operations Automation: Reviewed Google Workspace Directory schemas to identify relevant user fields. Consulted n8n community recipes for filtering and file-write nodes.

HR Ops Automation: Analyzed common HR leave report questions. Explored n8n date-filtering logic and JSON formatting techniques.

Design

Sales & Marketing Automation:

I architected the campaign end-to-end: writing and templating emails in Apollo.io and setting up automated step-triggers.

Operations Automation:

I structured a two-stage pipeline:

Data Extraction: n8n connects to Workspace, filters and transforms user records, and drops a JSON file to Drive.
Web App Rendering: Apps Script reads JSON, builds a hierarchy view in HTML/CSS/JS, and handles natural language queries via simple parsing logic.

HR Ops Automation:

I structured the pipeline as follows:

n8n fetches the latest spreadsheet, normalizes columns, filters date ranges per query, and writes JSON to Drive.
Apps Script web app ingests JSON, parses the user’s natural language query, executes the rule engine, and renders results in an HTML table.

Results

Sales & Marketing Automation:

Achieved a 25% open rate and 5% reply rate across 1,000 emails.
Generated qualified conversations, seeding pipeline for different verticals.
Established a repeatable playbook for future outbound campaigns.

Operations Automation:

Deployed daily refreshing org chart accessible company-wide.
Cut lookup time from minutes to under 5 seconds.
Empowered the C-suite and other employees to self-serve reporting structure queries.