Sales prospecting: turn a contact into a tracked opportunity

Sales prospecting is the work that produces conversations you can qualify. The pipeline starts only after that: an opportunity has a problem, a stakeholder, and a next step. Treating every automatic reply as a deal is the surest way to make the CRM unusable.

Inbound and outbound are not run the same way

• Inbound. The contact came from a form, a piece of content, or a referral. Time to first reply matters more than volume. A warm lead with no follow-up within forty-eight hours cools off.
• Outbound. The contact did not ask to be approached. The cadence is a small number of touches, with a specific reason, then a stop. Another email with no new signal clogs the team and the inbox.

In both cases the exit is explicit: opportunity, nurture on a date, or lost. Nurture is not a junk column on the sales board. It is a list of leads with a return date, outside the forecast.

The door into the pipeline

A contact becomes an opportunity when both are true:

1. The buyer confirmed a problem or a project, not only that they opened an email.
2. A next step is accepted: a call, a demo, a case study sent.

Before that, the record stays a lead. BANT or MEDDIC decides whether you invest a quote. The glossary separates lead, SQL, and opportunity so the team does not drop them in the same column.

Cadence and next action

A sample cadence, to adapt:

Touch	Delay	Purpose
1	Day 0	Context and one precise question
2	Day 3	Short follow-up on the same thread
3	Day 7	Something useful (a case, a number), not a copy of the first email
4	Day 14	A closing question: continue or stop
5	Day 21	A polite exit; lead closed or postponed

Each touch is a dated next action, stuck to the thread. The follow-up and tasks guide shows how to keep that date out of a notebook. With no date, prospecting becomes a pile of sent mail.

What the board should show

Leads still in a cadence can live on a triage board (to do, waiting). Only accepted opportunities move onto pipeline columns. That split protects the forecast: you do not weight an unanswered email.

WIP limits apply to prospecting too. Twenty first touches a week that you can follow up beat a hundred sends with no second step. It is the same Kanban method, upstream of the cycle.

Colossales treats the Gmail thread as the card: prospecting and, on Pro, the pipeline share the conversation instead of a cold-email spreadsheet off to the side.

Bottom line

Prospect with a finite cadence. Create an opportunity only when a next step is accepted. Everything else stays a lead: visible, dated, and outside the number you announce.