Assisted prospecting: lists, messages, tracking

What happens today

You prospect when you have time. You never have time.

Regular prospecting is what fills the order book in three months. It's also the first thing that gets postponed.

The list is a spreadsheet that ages

Duplicate contacts, outdated addresses, people already contacted last year. Every session starts with a clean-up.

The message is generic, or too long to write

Either the same text for everyone, which gets no reply, or twenty minutes per personalised message.

Nobody knows who replied

Replies land in the inbox among everything else. A follow-up goes to someone who already said no.

How it works

A clean list, a message to review, a record of every reply.

The workflow prepares, sorts and records. The choice of people, the final message and the send remain human decisions.

Step 01

The list is prepared

Your sources are gathered into a single sheet. Duplicates are removed, people already contacted or to be excluded are set aside, missing information is flagged.

Step 02

The message is prepared, in your tone

For every contact, a draft is written from your template and the available information: activity, context, reason for reaching out. You review, adjust, send or discard.

Step 03

Replies are tracked

Every reply is detected and sorted. The sheet shows who is interested, who asked to be contacted later, who declined. The next follow-up never goes to someone who replied.

What changes

Before and after: what actually changes.

You still do the prospecting yourself. You no longer spend your time preparing.

Situation	Today	With the workflow
Building the list	Copy-paste, clean by hand	Sources gathered, duplicates and exclusions handled automatically
Writing the message	Generic, or twenty minutes per contact	Personalised draft ready to review, in your tone
Sending	From the inbox, one by one	From the same mailbox, after your approval, at the pace you set
Tracking replies	From memory, in the inbox	Replies sorted, next action noted
Following up	At random, sometimes to someone who already replied	Only to contacts without a reply, at the due date you set

You stay in control

What stays in your hands.

A prospecting message carries your image. The workflow prepares, it never sends on your behalf.

Every message is reviewed

No send without your approval. You can approve one by one or approve a batch you have gone through.

You choose who gets contacted

Exclusion lists, criteria, weekly volume: the rules are yours. People who declined are never contacted again.

The legal framework is respected

Business-to-business prospecting only, a clear statement of who is writing and why, simple opt-out. We remind you of it when setting the rules.

Everything is recorded

Who was contacted, when, with which message, and what they replied: the sheet can be checked at any time.

Tools involved

Your current tools, connected together.

The workflow plugs into the tools you already use. Compatibility is checked for your case, never assumed.

n8n· orchestration

Google Sheets· shared tracking

Airtable· shared database Your mailbox· intake and detection

OpenAI· draft to review LinkedIn, directories· sources, within their rules

“A good prospecting message is written to a person, not to a list. The workflow makes that possible at the scale of a week.”Design principle

Illustrative scenario

An engineering firm, ten contacts a week.

A fictional example to show the sequence. The timings and rules are the ones you would choose.

Monday, 8 am

This week's list

Ten contacts are selected by your criteria. Two were already in the sheet, they're set aside. The remaining eight have a draft ready.

Monday, 9 am

You review

You go through the eight drafts, edit three, discard one. Seven messages leave from your usual address, spaced through the morning.

Wednesday

Two replies

One interested reply and one “not now, come back in January”. Both are sorted. The second is scheduled for January, the first is flagged for you to answer.

Following Monday

Follow-up prepared

For the five contacts without a reply, a short follow-up draft is ready. You approve four, you leave one aside.

End of month

Summary

The sheet shows 28 contacts, 6 replies, 2 meetings booked. You know what worked and what deserves adjusting.

Illustrative scenario: the timings, messages and rules are examples. They are defined with you, from your tools and the way you work. An illustration is not a promise of results.

Frequently asked

Before you ask.

Is this mass mailing?

No. Each message is individual, reviewed by you, sent from your own address, at a reasonable pace. The workflow prepares and tracks, it doesn't replace your judgement on who to contact.

Where do the contacts come from?

From your own sources: files, CRM, business cards, trade shows, professional directories consulted within their terms. We don't buy lists.

Can we prospect via LinkedIn?

The workflow can prepare the messages and track the replies. Sending on LinkedIn stays manual, in line with the platform's rules.

How many contacts per week?

As many as you can seriously review and follow. Ten to thirty well-prepared contacts beat two hundred identical messages.

Prospecting prepared.
The contact stays yours.