Sales prospecting template that works

Most people asking for a sales prospecting template want one of two things: a spreadsheet to keep track of who they've contacted, or the words to put in the email. You need both, and the spreadsheet is the one that decides whether you're still doing this in six weeks.

I do the outbound for LiveDocument myself. Not a team, not an agency, me, in the gaps between everything else a founder is meant to be doing. So the template below is built for someone with limited time who needs the process to survive a bad week, not for a sales floor with a manager walking the aisle.

The tracker, and the columns that earn their place

Open a spreadsheet. Nine columns, and resist adding more.

Company, contact name, role, the channel you're using, the trigger (why them, why now), first touch date, last touch date, status, next action date.

The two that people skip are the trigger and the next action date, and they are the two doing the work.

The trigger is one line explaining why this person is on your list at all. "Posted about hiring a second AE", "their careers page lists three open roles in customer success", "used to work at a company that already buys this". If you cannot write that line, they're not a prospect, they're a name, and a list of names is what turns outbound into spam.

The next action date is what makes the tracker a to-do list instead of a graveyard. Every row always has a date in it. On Monday you filter for anything due this week, and the work tells you what it is instead of you having to decide.

Status stays crude on purpose. Not contacted, contacted, replied, meeting booked, no. Four states plus a no. Anything more granular is a reporting fantasy at this scale.

The first email

Short, specific, one ask. The shape I use, with the variable bits in brackets:

Subject: [their company] + [the specific thing]
Hi [name],
Saw [the trigger, in six words]. Usually when that happens, [the specific problem it creates] starts eating into someone's week.
We [one sentence on what you do, in their language, not yours]. [One line of evidence, or nothing at all if you have none yet.]
Worth a quick look, or is this not a priority right now?
[your name]

Four things about that. The subject line is not clever, because clever subject lines get opened and then punished. The first line is about them and proves you did ten seconds of work. The middle is one sentence, because two sentences of product is the point where people stop reading. And the ask gives them an easy no, which gets you more replies than a question that only works if the answer is yes.

The thing I'd change about my own emails, if I'm honest, is that I still write them slightly too long. Everyone does. Cut the sentence you're most proud of and it usually improves.

The follow-up that actually gets replies

One email is not prospecting, it's a lottery ticket. Three to four touches over two to three weeks is a sensible range for most B2B outbound, and the follow-ups need to carry something new rather than nudging.

My second touch, four or five days later, adds one piece of proof or a specific example from their world. My third, a week after that, is two lines: a genuinely useful link with no ask attached. The last one closes the loop politely: "I'll stop here, but if this becomes relevant in a few months, I'm easy to find."

In my experience that last one gets more replies than any of the others, which says something slightly bleak about how outbound works.

The call opener, if you're phoning

Say who you are, admit it's a cold call, ask for thirty seconds. "Hi [name], it's Cameron, this is a cold call, can I have thirty seconds to tell you why and you can tell me to go away?" The honesty buys you the thirty seconds. Then use them on the trigger and the problem, not on your company's founding story.

Running it weekly so it doesn't rot

Templates fail because nobody runs them on a schedule. The routine that has survived for me is twenty new prospects added on a Monday morning, follow-ups cleared daily in a twenty-minute block, and one Friday review where anyone who's had four touches and gone quiet moves to a ninety-day list.

Small volume, done every week, beats two hundred emails in a burst followed by three weeks of nothing. My longer write-ups on the sales prospecting process and building a prospecting plan cover the strategy layer, and everything I've put together for sales teams sits in one place.

Where the template stops helping

The template gets you to a reply and then to a meeting. What happens next is where most small teams lose deals, and no spreadsheet column fixes it.

You have a good call, they ask you to send something over, and you send a PDF. Then nothing. You genuinely do not know whether they opened it, whether they got past the pricing page, or whether they forwarded it to the person who actually decides. The tracker says "sent proposal". It does not say "read proposal".

That's the problem I ended up building LiveDocument for: attach a short video walkthrough to the document so the person reading it gets your explanation rather than forty pages of text on their own, and see which pages they spent time on. It's not a CRM and it won't run your sequence, so the tracker above is still yours to keep. It just replaces "sent and hoping" with something you can act on.

Frequently asked questions

What should a sales prospecting template include?

A list with a trigger column and a next action date, a first touch email, at least two follow-ups that add something new, and a weekly routine for working it. The routine is the part people leave out and the part that decides whether the rest gets used.

How many prospects should I add per week?

Twenty well-researched prospects a week beats two hundred scraped ones, especially if you're doing this alongside another job. Volume without a real trigger line is just noise with your name on it.

How many follow-ups is too many?

Three to four touches over two to three weeks is a reasonable ceiling for most B2B outbound. After that you're not being persistent, you're being a problem. Close the loop politely and put a reminder in for three months.

Should I use email or LinkedIn for prospecting?

Whichever one your buyer actually reads, which you find out by trying both and watching reply rates rather than by reading an opinion piece. In my experience email gets the meeting and LinkedIn gets the warm-up, but that varies enormously by market.

If the bit after the meeting is where things go quiet for you too, that's what LiveDocument was built to fix.