Prospecting

Flowtly Editorial Team4 min

Prospecting is the half of Sales that happens before a customer exists. A list of companies, worked one at a time, with everything you did to each one recorded against it.

Lists and progress

Companies are grouped into lists, and a list shows how far through it you are — worked against the total, with a Campaign complete state when nothing is left. The point of the counter is to make the work finite: a prospecting list you can finish is one people finish.

Where a company stands

Each company sits at one of three stages:

  • New — untouched.
  • Contacted — you have reached out.
  • Qualified — worth turning into a deal.

The stage moves as you log what happened, rather than being set by hand for its own sake.

Logging what happened

Opening a company shows its contacts, its notes, and a timeline of everything logged against it. Each entry has a type:

  • Message sent, Reply received, Bounced
  • Call, Meeting
  • Invite sent, Invite accepted
  • Follow-up, Unsubscribed, Other

Each is attributed to a channel — email, phone, LinkedIn, event, or other — so "we tried them twice" can be read as how twice.

Quick actions cover the common outcomes without opening a form: Contacted, Replied, Bounced, Qualify, and Do not contact.

Do not contact is a lock, not a label

Marking a company Do not contact stops further logging against it: This company asked not to be contacted — logging is locked.

It is enforced rather than advisory, which is the only way a suppression request survives contact with a busy list. Treat it as final.

What comes next

A qualified company becomes a customer and a deal in one step. See Converting a prospect.

Example use cases

  • Work a list of companies you have never contacted, and see how much of it is left.
  • Log a call and a follow-up against the same company, and read them back in order.
  • Record that a company asked not to be contacted, and have that respected automatically.
  • Separate the companies that replied from the ones that bounced.
  • Qualify a company and hand it to the pipeline without retyping its contacts.

Connection map

Part ofDerived fromRefers to
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
lead-list contains lead. lead-activity logged against lead. lead converts to deal. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty. deal sits in pipeline-stage. deal closed with lost-reason.containslogged againstconverts tobecomessold tosits inclosed withPProspect list — A finite group of companies to work through. It tracks how many are done against the total, so the work has an end.Prospect listPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectAActivity — One recorded contact with a prospect — a call, a message, a reply, a bounce, a meeting — attributed to a channel.ActivityDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.DealCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartySStage — A step in the pipeline, carrying a probability. That probability is what weights the pipeline total — which is a measure of quality, not a forecast.StageLLost reason — Why a deal was lost, chosen from a fixed list so the answer can be counted later rather than re-read.Lost reason