Prospect profile: definition, example, and data to record for prospecting

What is a prospect profile?#

A prospect is a potential customer, not yet a customer. Here, it is a business location (an auto repair shop, a restaurant), not a person.

A prospect profile is also called a sales prospecting sheet. It has the same structure for every prospect, and serves a single purpose: deciding whom to call and what to tell them. It comes before the sale: a customer profile, by contrast, tracks someone who has already bought.

Example of a filled-in prospect profile, field by field#

The example below is fictional. The auto repair shop does not exist, the SIRET number (the French ID of a business location) is deliberately fake, and the dates have no year. You can copy this profile template as is into Excel or a document, and replace the shop's contact details with those of your prospect.

In Excel or Google Sheets, create one column per field and one row per prospect. Keep the date of the next callback separate from the action to take: you can then sort your follow-ups by date.

The SIRET number identifies one specific location, not the activity. Check that you have the one for the location you are calling, not just the company's headquarters. If you start from a name, here is how to find a company's SIRET number for free.

Why the headquarters SIRET number is not enough

The first nine digits of the SIRET number are the company's SIREN number (the French company ID); the last five make up the NIC (the location's internal classification number). According to Insee (France's national statistics office), the NIC contains no code for the activity or the location. In a Scalon test conducted on October 14, 2026, involving 2,420 companies in France found on Google, the correct SIRET number differed from the headquarters' number for more than 1 in 6 companies.

The "actual activity" row exists for the same reason, next to the NAF code (the French activity classification code, also called APE code; it gives the main declared activity). The code says what the company declared, not what it does today. An auto repair shop may have stopped doing bodywork without changing its code.

Three rows separate a useful profile from a decorative page.

The reason. "Yes" is not enough. The reason says in one sentence why the business fits your target, and a colleague can challenge it.

The source and its date. Every piece of data includes its source and date. Information without a source cannot be checked; information without a date does not tell you whether it is still true.

The next action and its scheduled date. It turns information into work, even if it is "do not call back before June." A profile without a next action is a forgotten profile.

The other fields can be found in any free template. These three take extra effort, and make the page useful.

How do you create an effective prospect profile?#

To create an effective prospect profile, start from the decision it must support: whom to call, and what to say. Take the fields of the template and, for each one, ask whether it helps you choose whom to call, prepare the conversation, or plan what comes next. Drop the others: one page gets reread before every call; three pages do not.

"Auto repair shop" is not a reason; it is a line of business. "Independent shop, two lifts, open Saturday, not part of a carmaker's network" is one. It says what you saw, and what you will say when you open the call.

Building these pages by hand takes time: you have to open the online map, the website, the business directory, then copy the information over. On a long list, that time adds up fast. Measure the time you spend on this work before deciding what to keep.

Using the profile during the call and the follow-up#

It is mainly useful at three moments.

Before the call, reread three rows: the reason, the signals, the last exchange. They give you your first sentence, a statement of fact rather than a question: "I saw that you work on all makes, are open on Saturdays, and take appointments by phone." Then ask the question written in the profile. Our cold calling script walks through the full call that starts from this fact.

During the call, write down what your contact says, word for word if possible. An objection recorded in the prospect's own words is easier to address in the follow-up.

After the call, date the exchange and write down the next action. The routine is the same for a call, an email, or a visit. It helps you keep track of the business relationship.

During a prospecting campaign, these profiles also help you measure performance. Count the sales activities at each stage. You can see where prospects stall in your sales cycle and the conversion rate from each stage to the next.

They promise nothing about the result; they show where the sales reps' work gets stuck.

Prospect profile, customer profile, prospect list: what is the difference?#

A prospect profile describes a single prospect, on one page. A customer profile describes a customer you already have: purchase history, customer relationship, after-sales service; a prospect who signs moves from the first to the second.

A prospect list brings all your prospects together, often in several hundred rows; each profile describes just one. You fill in a profile before a call; you build the list before a campaign, and that is a separate job: choosing the target, the sources, the volume. Our guide to the B2B prospect list explains how to build or buy it.

Prospecting spreadsheet, Excel, or CRM: where should you keep your profiles?#

Your profiles can live in three places, depending on your volume and the size of your team.

A document, one page per prospect. That is the form of the template above. Handy for preparing a call, painful as soon as you need to compare twenty prospects.

A prospecting spreadsheet, one row per prospect, in Excel or Google Sheets. Each column carries one field. You see the whole file at once, sort by next-action date, and filter by area.

A CRM (customer relationship management, software for managing customer relationships). This CRM software keeps the history of every exchange, sends reminders, flags duplicates, and shares records among sales reps.

As a guideline, a spreadsheet is enough while you handle prospecting on your own and every row has a date for the next action. A CRM takes over when follow-ups get forgotten, or when several sales reps work the same database. Setting up a CRM takes time: it is justified when the spreadsheet is no longer enough.

A prospecting spreadsheet isn't good simply because its fields are filled in. A good prospecting spreadsheet has a reason, a source, and a date in every row. A well-kept spreadsheet beats prospecting tools where fields stay empty.

A CRM does not make the profile useless: the profile sets what to record, the CRM says where. Without a profile, sales teams each fill in the fields their own way, and the data can no longer be compared.

Written reason, source, date: Scalon provides a list of businesses where every row carries these three elements. Still building this by hand? The page Scalon for field sales reps and teams that prospect by phone or email describes how to receive a free, no-commitment sample of 100 qualified businesses.

Where does prospect profile data come from, and which data should you avoid?#

The data in a prospect profile comes from four sources, and each one is recorded next to the data it supplies.

• The business directory: SIREN number, SIRET number, declared activity, creation date.
• The business's website: services, hours, brands the business works with.
• Its online listing and public pages on social networks: photos, up-to-date hours, signs of recent activity.
• The qualification call: what your contact tells you directly.

Simply recording more data does not improve the profile. In practice: record only the information useful for prospecting, note the source of any data that identifies a person, and record any refusal of further contact in the profile so you do not follow up with that person again. The details of the CNIL guidelines are in the collapsed section below.

A profile focused on the business location contains no names: just an address, a line of business, and a headcount range. Fields that identify a person are different: the manager's name, an email address identifying an individual, or a direct phone number.

These fields fall under personal data protection. According to the CNIL, a company's contact details (main phone number, generic email address) are not, in principle, personal data; a person's name or individual email address is. Record them only if they are useful for the call.

What the CNIL guidelines say

The CNIL has published guidelines on customer and prospect files. They say that only data "necessary to carry out the intended purpose" may be collected.

Of the categories in this text, two concern a prospect profile. "Professional life": "Occupation, economic category, activity." "Business relationship tracking": interactions, comments, person in charge.

These categories match the activity, history, and contact person rows of the table. The guidelines specify that they have "no binding force": they are pointers toward compliance, not a law.

Two rules from the same guidelines apply to data that identifies a person.

If the data comes from a partner, you inform the person "at the time of the first communication." You give them the information required by Article 14 of the GDPR (the EU General Data Protection Regulation), that is, the list of what you must tell them about how their data is used, and "the source of the data used."

If a person objects to prospecting, the request must be honored "in every case." The guidelines state this rule for cases where you rely on legitimate interest (a legal basis under the GDPR, meaning a ground for using personal data). Record the opt-out in the profile so you do not follow up with the person again.

Update a prospect profile, then delete it on time#

Data ages. The manager changes, the business closes, the phone number is no longer assigned. Information that is true in March can be false in September. Our CRM follow-up guide measures this pace in the Sirene registry: over two years, 1 business location in 6 closed.

The simplest rule: update the profile at the end of every exchange, with the date. The guidelines ask you to take "all reasonable measures" to ensure the data is accurate. Updating after every exchange is one.

This data cannot be kept forever either. Take a prospect who did not become a customer. Their data "may be kept for a period of three years from the date it was collected […] or from the last contact initiated by the prospect."

In other words, the clock restarts when the prospect gets back in touch with you; your own follow-up does not count. The CNIL specifies that clicking an email link to the featured product counts as contact. Simply opening an email does not.

After the three years, without a positive and explicit response from the person, the guidelines provide for deleting the data or archiving it. The template's two rows, collection date and last contact from the prospect, are enough to spot the rows to purge. With no contact from them, the collection date is the one that counts.

Two limits to keep in mind. These guidelines serve as a reference: they expressly state that they are not binding. They apply to data about people; a "business location" field with no person's name or named contact falls outside their scope.

Method#

The figure on headquarters comes from the test Scalon published on October 14, 2026 in Find a company's SIRET number. We used the Annuaire des entreprises (the French government's free business directory) to look up 2,420 companies in France that we had found on Google and whose correct SIRET numbers we already knew. For 18% of them, the SIRET number for the location differed from the one for the company's headquarters. The other figures in the article come from the sources below or are illustrative examples.

Sources#

• SIRET, définition, Insee
• Donnée personnelle, CNIL
• Référentiel relatif aux traitements de données personnelles mis en œuvre aux fins de gestion des activités commerciales, CNIL
• Find a company's SIRET number by its name, for free, Scalon (test of October 14, 2026)