How To Build a Sales Workflow That Lands Deals Every Time

What is a Sales Workflow?

A sales workflow enables you to systematically target individuals and organizations to generate leads and close deals.

It is interchangeable with outreach workflow, and just like its counterpart, it is essential in B2B sales and outreach because it allows you to target the right people with the right message at the perfect time.

Before we dive in, here are common misconceptions about sales workflows to avoid:

• Quantity over quality
  • The more outreach messages you send, the better your chances of success — this is simply not true. Focusing solely on quantity without considering quality can be counterproductive. Outreach is a highly-personalized and targeted project to embark on. Sending one generic message to hundreds of people won’t get you anywhere.
• Automation over personalization
  • Just because you automate communication doesn’t mean it can’t still be personalized. We’re all about embracing automation to improve processes and productivity.
• Same approach for everyone
  • You can never meet all your prospects’ needs with the same standardized approach and messaging. Tailoring your messages and overall approach to their specific pain points significantly improves your chances of success.
• Immediate results
  • This is the case for anything but especially outreach; you can’t expect immediate results. It’s possible to witness quick wins such as a lead replying after your first LinkedIn message. however, building relationships and closing deals take time. A lead answer is only the first step, you haven’t made the sale yet.

Why do you need a sales workflow process?

A sales workflow allows you to increase efficiency by automating core processes, from lead generation to closing deals. A well defined process comes with several benefits:

Generate more leads

One of the primary benefits of having a well-defined workflow is that it’s easier to identify and target leads.

By having a framework in place, you can use sales segmentation to narrow down your prospects and create highly targeted campaigns that will help you generate more qualified leads.

Improve follow-ups

A sales workflow allows you to set up automated follow-up sequences for all of your campaigns.

If you’re in sales, marketing, or even growth, you know the importance of follow-up emails.

Increase sales

Sales workflows also help you close more deals through proper lead nurturing and guiding them through the sales funnel.

Through personalized communication, you can address their pain points, highlight how your offering solves their pain points, overcome objections, provide additional information, and eventually build trust in order to close the deal.

8 essential steps to create a sales workflow

Now that you know why a sales workflow is important look at the key steps you should take when creating one.

1. Define your sales goals

Start by setting your goals clearly: What do you want to achieve through this project? Do you want to increase revenue by acquiring new customers, for example? Or are you looking to enter an entirely new market?

Regardless, you should start small and achievable but stay ambitious. A suitable sales objective could be booking 10 sales calls in a given period of time.

But, remember, outreach is a lengthy process, so you can aim to try and meet this objective in a month or quarter.

To help you draft initial goals, you can follow the SMART framework:

• Specific: Pinpoint what you what to accomplish
• Measurable: Set measurable goals
• Achievable: Break down large goals into smaller, achievable ones.
• Relevant: Make sure your goals align with your long-term business objectives.
• Timely: Establish a timeline and deadline for your goal

2. Define your target audience

Let’s start broad and narrow it down to the person you’ll send messages or emails to. As a company, you most likely have identified your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs). They are the people that fit specific characteristics you’ve defined as the most valuable customers.

Once you have your list of companies, it’s time to create the list of the people you’ll actually talk to. You want to focus on decision-makers and understand their roles, responsibilities, pain points, motivations, buying behaviors, etc.

This information will help you tailor your messaging and outreach efforts to resonate with each persona.

3. Map your sales approach

Map out your approach to meet your goals, considering product nature, industry, and target audience. You know your audience better than we do:

• What will trigger their interest when discovering your solution?
• What approach would you like to first experiment with?
• Booking a demo directly or inviting them to a webinar?

Once you’ve defined your approach, it’s time to choose the most suitable platforms.

• Do you know how your ideal customers like to be contacted?
• Is it through LinkedIn messages or emails, or both? For instance, if you’re in the B2B sector, 70-80% of your leads come from LinkedIn alone, so be active with quality content.

There are many ways to incorporate both platforms into your workflow; you could start with LinkedIn and use emails as a fallback if you cannot get through to your audience.

In this case, we ensure that we can send them our introduction message. We can’t send them anything if they don’t accept our invitation. We always use a connection request message on a LinkedIn path because we’re already getting the lead to take action.

By adopting this multi-channel approach between LinkedIn and Email, we’ve been able to have a 33.8% reply for now (as this campaign is still running).

We’ve received answers through both channels, and we’ve been able to qualify our leads accordingly on LaGrowthMachine.

4. Write your outreach messages

It’s now time to get cracking with your messaging and the sales copy for each of your messages.

Regardless of the platform, here’s a recommended structure for each message: Introduction, Follow-Up and Call to Action

In a sales sequence, you’ll always start with an introduction message:

• Introduce yourself and why you’re reaching out to them briefly. Establish credibility and context, so state relevant credentials and establish rapport.
• Personalize the message by mentioning something specific about their work, achievements, or recent activity.
• Clearly communicate your value proposition. Highlight how your product or service can help solve pain points. This can also demonstrate you’ve done your research well.
• Prompt the recipient to take a specific action with a CTA. This could go from scheduling a meeting to simply asking for their thoughts. Make the call to action clear, concise, and easy to follow.

For example:

Follow-ups messages are all about balance, whether it’s the level of information you share throughout your messages or the frequency in which you send them.

Here’s a structure to inspire the follow-up section of your sequence:

• A reminder of the previous contact: Jog their memory by recalling previous interactions.
• Express interest: Remind them why your offer or request would be valuable to them based on your previous communication.
• Value reinforcement: Reiterate how beneficial your proposition is.
• Additional Information: If you have any new information, updates, or relevant resources to share, include them in this section. This is really helpful when you’re announcing a new feature for instance!
• Call-to-Action: Clearly state your call-to-action. Regardless of the actual CTA, consider potentially including a time frame to create a sense of urgency. If you ask them to inform you about their upcoming availability, be more specific: “this week or the beginning of the next one, before the end of the month.”

5. Launch your sales workflow

Start with building your workflow (how many messages, from which platform etc.). Then, add your copy adapted to the different platforms.

Here are a few additional tips to make sure it all goes smoothly:

• Add variables to personalize your copy, such as the lead’s first name and company name.
• Import the targets you got from earlier (you can go old school and use CSV. files, or import them directly into La Growth Machine from your LinkedIn or Sales Navigator accounts once they’re linked)
• Make sure to add them in a unique audience name (to stay organized)
• Most importantly, review and/or (ideally) test it with internal profiles before launching

6. Automate your sales workflow

Before you hit launch, set up automation so your sales workflow runs reliably at scale. The goal is to route tasks, trigger the right messages at the right time, and keep your CRM in sync— without manual busywork.

What to automate:

• Triggers and branching: Define when each step fires (connection accepted, email opened/replied, no response after X days), and branch the path accordingly (e.g., if LinkedIn request is ignored, fall back to email).
• Data enrichment and deduplication: Pull job title, company size, and verified emails; prevent duplicates entering the same sequence.
• CRM sync and ownership: Auto-create/update contacts, apply lifecycle stages (MQL/SQL), assign owners round‑robin, and push notes/tags from replies.
• Safety and pacing: Respect platform limits, insert human‑like delays, detect Out of Office and auto‑resume later, and pause sequences on reply or bounce.

7. Analyze the results of your workflow

Now that you’ve launched your sales workflow, the real fun can begin — gathering data!

It is essential to monitor its progress, evaluate its effectiveness, and make necessary adjustments to optimize your results.

Here are our top tips:

• First keep in mind the size of your audience, how are your open rate and reply rates looking? Over time, you can gather which channels and messaging provide the best results. This analysis is critical to identify areas of strength and opportunities for refinement.
• If the channels you’ve been experimenting with provide promising results compared to your historical data, continue to double down on those.
• Keep optimizing your strategy. Once you’ve successfully maintained these channels, you can expand onto other potential outreach channels.

8. Refine and iterate:

Regularly refine your sales workflow based on the insights gathered from data analysis and feedback.

Assessing its overall effectiveness and optimizing is a continuous effort. So optimize your messaging, targeting strategies, and follow-up processes. Experiment with new subject lines or new connection messages on LinkedIn.

Here are some common issues and how to solve them:

• Double down on what people are answering. If 50% of your answers feature a negative response, depending on the answer itself, you might not have contacted the right person. This means you need to rethink your sales segmentation.
• Maybe your audiences are too big. Here’s what can give it away: lack of deliverability and personalization. As a result, you’ll be met with a lower reply rate.
• Your copy might not be resonating with your audience on the chosen channel. For example, some people would rather receive content in an outreach project on LinkedIn and directly receive sales-focused messages by email.
• Finally, the timing with which you send your messages might not be ideal. So experiment with different days and times to find when your target audience is most responsive. Have you taken into account the time zone they might be in, for example?

Overall, there aren’t hundreds of variables that you need to understand in depth. If you’re not getting the results you’d like, a good place to start is either in your segmentation or your copy.

Final Thoughts

Building a sales workflow holds significant potential for business growth and success. By implementing a well-defined one, you can achieve various benefits, including generating more leads, increasing sales, boosting brand awareness, and building valuable relationships.

Remember that this is an ongoing process. Continuously evaluate and refine your approach based on data, feedback, and market dynamics.

By staying proactive and focused on building meaningful connections with prospects, you can consistently drive business growth and achieve your sales goals.

Ready to create and execute a sales workflow that lands deals every time? Sign up for La Growth Machine for free today and automate your sales outreach, manage your leads, and optimize your campaigns.