# Build an AI SDR That Finds, Researches and Reaches Out to Leads for You

**URL:** https://community.make.com/t/build-an-ai-sdr-that-finds-researches-and-reaches-out-to-leads-for-you/114295
**Category:** Knowledge Hub
**Tags:** google-sheets, ai, ai-agent, apify
**Created:** [September 2, 2026, 9:30am UTC](https://community.make.com/t/build-an-ai-sdr-that-finds-researches-and-reaches-out-to-leads-for-you/114295 "2026-09-02T09:30:00Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![CodexSolutions](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.make.com/codexsolutions/32/16574_2.png) [@CodexSolutions](https://community.make.com/u/CodexSolutions)
#### Post date: [September 2, 2026, 9:30am UTC](https://community.make.com/t/build-an-ai-sdr-that-finds-researches-and-reaches-out-to-leads-for-you/114295/1 "2026-09-02T09:30:00Z")

</div>

You add one line to a Google Sheet something like _dental clinics in Dubai_. Everything after that happens on its own.

It finds those businesses on Google Maps, opens each one’s website and reads it, scores every business out of 10, writes a personalised HTML email to the good ones, sends it, and logs the result. Businesses with no email but a valid phone number get filed separately for a call instead of being silently dropped.

Sharing the whole build here, including the parts that didn’t work first time.

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 ![image](https://europe1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/uploads/make/original/3X/4/4/4485ec568accdf5915ff319378c9baa164ef2a8d.png)

## How it finds the leads

**Google Sheets — Watch Rows** watches a `locations` sheet and picks up new rows, two per cycle. Whatever sits in column A becomes the search query.

**SerpApi — Search Google Maps** runs that search and returns local businesses with name, category, address, phone, website, rating and review count.

**Iterator** splits `local_results` so every business becomes its own bundle. Everything after this point runs once per business — this is the step that turns one search into twenty leads, and it’s the one people forget.

## How it researches them

**Apify — Scrape Single URL** opens `{{11.website}}` with the stealthy Firefox crawler and returns the page text. This is what lifts the quality of the scoring. A Google Maps listing tells you a business exists; the website tells you what they actually do and whether they’d care about what you sell.

## How it decides and reaches out

This is the part worth talking about, because I built it twice.

**Version 1** looked like most tutorials: two `AI Tools > Ask` modules, two `AI Tools > Extract` modules to pull clean fields back out of the AI’s text, a router, and filters on every branch. Roughly ten modules doing the thinking.

**Version 2** is one AI Agent with a defined response structure and three tools.

The **response structure** — four fields, so Make maps them straight out with no Extract step:

```auto
score number 1–10
contact_email a real email, or NONE
email_subject the subject line
email_body email-safe HTML

```

Its **three tools** :

- **Send qualified email** → Gmail, body type Raw HTML
- **Log emailed lead** → Google Sheets, `Emails`
- **Save phone lead** → Google Sheets, `Lead with phone`

Its **rules** , written as plain sentences in the instructions rather than as filter conditions:

- Score 7+ **and** an email → send, then log
- Score 7+, no email, has phone → save the phone lead
- Score below 7, or no usable contact → call nothing
- Never call both lead paths for the same business

## What actually caused me trouble

**Vague tool descriptions mean skipped tool calls.** My first description for the email tool explained _what it did_. The agent kept not calling it. Rewriting it to describe _when to use it_ — “when the business has a valid email address and the score is 7 or higher” — fixed it immediately. Describe the situation that triggers the tool, not the action it performs.

**The agent will invent an email if you let it.** Adding “never invent one, return NONE when no email is visible” to the instructions wasn’t optional. Without it I got plausible-looking `info@` addresses that didn’t exist.

**Gmail body type has to be Raw HTML.** Otherwise the styled CTA link arrives as visible HTML source in the recipient’s inbox. Obvious in hindsight, twenty minutes gone.

**Watch the trigger limit while testing.** Two rows per cycle with an iterator behind it is already up to ~40 businesses per run, each with a website scrape and an agent call. Keep it low until you’re happy with the output.

**Scraping is the slow part.** The stealthy Firefox crawler is reliable but not quick. Worth knowing before you sit watching a run.

## Honest trade-offs of going agent-first

**Better:** far fewer modules, rules that read as English, and adding a new action means adding a tool instead of rewiring branches.

**Worse:** the agent can silently skip a tool call, it’s harder to debug than a filter whose value you can inspect, and it costs more tokens per business.

My takeaway use an agent where the decision is genuinely a judgement call, and keep a filter where the rule is exact and has to hold every single time. Scoring a business is judgement. “Does this string contain an @” is not.

## Two things I’m still figuring out

**Verifying a tool call actually happened.** If the agent decides not to call the logging tool, nothing tells me. Is anyone adding a fallback module after the agent to catch runs where no tool fired?

**Enforcing order between tool calls.** Send-then-log works, but I’d like more confidence that “then” is guaranteed rather than usually-true. Has anyone found a reliable pattern for this?

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## The blueprint

Here’s the full scenario if you want to pull it apart or build on it:

> **[Build Your Own AI SDR That Finds and Res - Make.com Automation Scenario](https://eu1.make.com/public/shared-scenario/3d4gLR4X0bn/build-your-own-ai-sdr-that-finds-and-res)**
>
> Automate local business prospecting with Google Maps, Apify, and AI. Research businesses, score prospects, extract emails, generate personalized outreach, and route qualified leads for email or phone follow-up.

Open it while signed in to Make and clone it into your own account. Connections never transfer with a shared scenario, so you’ll need to reconnect every module to your own accounts and repoint the Google Sheets modules at your own spreadsheet. The sheets it expects are `locations`, `Emails` and `Lead with phone`.

Happy to answer questions on any part of it.