A prospecting workflow is what you do on Tuesday, not what's in the doc

Build it around one unit of work

The most useful thing I ever did to a prospecting workflow was stop thinking in stages and start thinking in batches.

A stage-based workflow asks you to move individual prospects forward, which sounds fine and means you spend your day context-switching between research, writing and chasing. A batch-based workflow gives you one job at a time and lets you get into it. Build twenty-five accounts. Then write twenty-five openers. Then send. Then, separately, work the replies.

The unit of work I settled on was twenty-five accounts, because that was roughly what I could research properly in a sitting without the quality falling off a cliff by account fifteen. Yours will be different depending on how much research each account actually needs. The point is to pick a number and let it define the rhythm, rather than letting the rhythm be defined by whatever's most urgent.

Once you have a unit, the week plans itself. Mine ran roughly: Monday build the batch and do the research, Tuesday and Wednesday write and send, Thursday follow-ups on the previous batch, Friday clear the CRM and pull anyone who's gone quiet for long enough. Friday was the part I skipped most often and regretted most reliably.

Every stage needs an exit condition you can check without thinking

The thing that kills a prospecting workflow isn't the sending, it's the ambiguity. A prospect sits in "engaged" for five weeks because nobody defined what leaving "engaged" looks like, and the pipeline slowly fills with people who replied once in March.

So write an exit condition for each stage, and make it something you can check in two seconds without a judgement call. Not "no longer a fit". Something closer to: no reply after four touches across fifteen working days, out. Replied but no meeting booked within ten working days, back to the nurture list. Explicit no, out and tagged so you don't hit them again next quarter.

They don't have to be clever. They have to be checkable on a Friday afternoon when you're tired, because that's when you'll be doing it. If a rule needs you to be sharp, it will not be applied.

The version of this I'd start with is embarrassingly simple: a column for stage, a column for last touch date, and a filter that shows you anything stale. I've written a longer take on the strategic layer above this in sales prospecting process, and there's a ready-made structure in prospect tracker template if you'd rather not build the sheet yourself.

Decide who you're building the workflow for before you build it

A workflow built for one person is a rhythm. A workflow built for three people is an interface, and the two are not the same thing.

The interface version needs one more property: someone else has to be able to pick up a half-worked account and know what's been done. That means the notes have to be structured, not prose. When I was working solo I could get away with a note that said "spoke to ops lead, keen but no budget until Q1". The moment a second person touched the same account, that note was useless, because they didn't know which ops lead, when, or whether keen meant anything.

If it's just you, don't build the interface. It's overhead you'll abandon in three weeks, and you'll feel bad about abandoning it, which is worse than never having built it. The ideal prospect definition matters more than the tooling at that scale anyway, and client prospecting covers the solo end of this in more detail.

The handoff that quietly breaks is the document

Every prospecting workflow I've built has had the same soft spot, and it's not at the top of the funnel. It's the moment a conversation goes well enough that you send something. A one-pager, a short proposal, a deck, a scoping doc.

That's where the workflow stops being a workflow. Up to that point every stage has an observable event: sent, opened, replied, booked. Then you attach a PDF and the next observable event is however long the prospect takes to reply, if they ever do. You don't know if it was read, forwarded to the person who actually decides, or opened once on a phone in a taxi. So your follow-up is a guess, and the polite chase four days later is a guess dressed up as a process.

I spent years on that end of it. Send a deck on a Friday, spend the weekend wondering whether anyone got past slide two, then send "just checking you got this" on Monday like that was a plan.

That specific gap is what I ended up building LiveDocument for. You attach a short recorded walkthrough to the PDF or image, share it as one link instead of an attachment, and you get page-level engagement back: which pages held attention, what got revisited, when it was opened. That turns the vaguest stage in the workflow into one with an actual trigger. It is not a CRM, not a sequencer and not a data provider, so it doesn't replace anything in the top half of your stack. And if the document genuinely doesn't need explaining, a plain attachment is fine and you don't need us. The case for the link version is that the documents which stall are usually the ones nobody was there to talk through.

Write the workflow down somewhere ugly

Last thing, and it's the least interesting advice in the post. Put the workflow somewhere you'll actually see it, and keep it short enough to read in twenty seconds.

Mine was a pinned note with six lines in it. Not a Notion wiki with a table of contents. A wiki is where workflows go to be admired. A pinned note is where they go to be followed, and the difference in adherence is not subtle.

If you're prospecting into the UK, one boring thing is worth an hour of your time before you start rather than after: the rules for contacting business contacts are different from the rules for contacting individuals, and sole traders and some partnerships count as individuals. The ICO's guidance on electronic and telephone marketing sets out the split, including the point that consent has to be knowingly and freely given and that a pre-ticked box does not count. The ICO can take enforcement action, so this is the one part of the workflow where "we'll tidy it up later" is a bad plan.

Common questions