Built by a sales rep, for sales reps.

The morning before

A typical prospecting morning started in Salesforce with the account list. I found the contacts in Sales Navigator, checked emails and numbers in ZoomInfo and Lusha, wrote the emails in Outlook, and sent the connection requests in LinkedIn. Then I went back to Salesforce to log everything, and I often didn't do it because it was 6 pm. By Friday, nobody could say who at an account had been contacted, on which channel, or with what result, including me. On a good day, two hours went into admin instead of selling.

The spreadsheet that worked, and the work around it

I ran my prospecting from an Excel sheet. I built the prospect lists in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, then added phone numbers and emails by hand from Lusha, Cognism or ZoomInfo. Every contact went through the same multichannel sequence: a LinkedIn connection request, two LinkedIn messages, two emails, and two to five calls. Each contact ended with a clear outcome recorded next to their name. The method worked very well. With one row per contact, I could see exactly who at an account I had reached, on which channel, and what came of it. At Amazon, we even discussed building it into an internal app, which we called Growth_SwissArmyKnife.

The problem was the work around the method. Every list was built by hand, every number was copied over, and every touch was updated manually in the sheet and then again in Salesforce. The approach was right, but the tooling wasn't. I knew it could be automated and run from a single source of truth, and that is the idea Prospect Grid is built on.

Why it belongs inside Salesforce

Sales Navigator was good for finding people, and Lusha, Cognism and ZoomInfo were good for finding contact data. None of them ran the sequence or recorded the outcome, and none of them lived where the account actually lived, in Salesforce. Sequencing tools like Salesloft and Outreach handle the sending, but they sit outside Salesforce and don't give you the account-by-contact overview that made the Excel approach work. So I kept going back to the spreadsheet, because it was the only place with the full picture.

The Excel sheet proved that the grid was the right way to prospect. Its weakness was being a second system next to the CRM. Building the grid inside Salesforce keeps the method and removes the double entry. The data never leaves Salesforce, the security model already exists, and reps work in the system they're required to use anyway.