Ran my first real outbound push from a spreadsheet for 3 months before a customer spelled it out for me
I was cold emailing about 200 leads a month from a Google Sheet and thought I was doing fine. One of my early buyers, a guy at a logistics company in Dallas, asked me on a call why his company name was spelled wrong in the subject line and why I sent him the same pitch twice in one week. I went back through the sheet and realized I had no idea who had replied, who had bounced, or who I was bothering a second time. That was the moment I admitted my whole sales process was basically me guessing in the dark. How are you all tracking replies and follow ups once you get past the first few dozen leads?
Oof, the double email in one week is rough but the misspelled company name in the subject line is what really got me. That is like showing up to a first date with the wrong person's name on a birthday card. Been there though, my old sheet had leads marked "sent" with no note about who replied, so I just kept blasting away at people who already told me no. What finally worked for me was adding three simple columns: date sent, replied yes or no, and a follow up date so nothing slipped. Sounds dumb but it cut my angry replies way down once I stopped treating the sheet like a to do list from 2019.