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Call Log Template

Log your calls with date, contact, company, outcome and next step, see totals by outcome, then print the log or download a CSV. Pick a sales, customer service or front office log, switch columns on or off, and keep it open all day.

What to put in a call log

  • Date and time

    When the call happened. It shows which hours people pick up, and it is the first thing anyone asks when a deal or a complaint is traced back.

  • Contact, company and number

    Who you spoke to or tried to reach, and how to get them again: a phone number or an email.

  • Direction and call type

    Outbound or inbound, and what kind of call: cold call, follow-up, discovery or support. Type lets you see how many first calls it takes to get one meeting.

  • Outcome

    Connected, voicemail, no answer, meeting booked, not interested, resolved or call back later. One word per call is what makes the totals possible.

  • Notes

    What the person said, in their words where you can: the problem, the budget, the name of the other decision maker. This is the column that pays off later.

  • Next step and date

    The one thing that happens next and when. A call without a next step is a call you will have to make again from scratch.

Three logs for three jobs

  • Sales prospecting

    Outbound dials with contact, company, call type, outcome, notes and next step. The summary shows connect rate and meetings booked, the two numbers an SDR is asked about.

  • Customer service

    Inbound and outbound calls with call type, outcome (resolved or call back later) and the follow-up, so nothing promised on the phone gets lost between shifts.

  • Front office

    A phone message log for a reception desk or a small office: who called, for whom, their number and what they want, with the next step for the person who calls back.

Reading the summary: connect rate and meetings booked

Connect rate is the share of calls where someone picked up: calls marked connected, meeting booked, not interested, resolved or call back later, divided by every call with an outcome. Voicemail and no answer count as dials that did not connect. If you make 20 dials, leave 6 voicemails, get no answer 8 times and speak to 6 people, your connect rate is 6 ÷ 20 = 30%.

Meetings booked is the count of calls marked "meeting booked", 2 in that example. The summary also counts outbound and inbound calls and the calls with an open next step, so you can see at a glance what tomorrow starts with. Calls without an outcome are listed but left out of the rate.

Call log, call report or CRM?

A call log is the running list: one line per call, filled in as the day goes. A call report is a page about one important visit or meeting, written after it; for that, use the sales call report template. Tracking which activities to count, and why, is a bigger question, covered in the guide to sales activity tracking.

If your team uses a CRM, the log is where calls wait before they go in: download the CSV at the end of the day and paste or import the rows. Reps who log on paper first lose fewer calls than reps who mean to update the CRM later.

Tips for a call log you actually keep

  • Log the call before the next dial

    Thirty seconds right after the call beats ten minutes at five o'clock, when the calls run together.

  • Use the outcome every time

    A blank outcome cannot be counted. Pick the closest one and add the detail to the notes.

  • Write the next step as an action

    "Send pricing for 25 seats" with a date, not "follow up". You will know what to do without reading the notes again.

  • Keep the words the customer used

    Their phrase for the problem is what you repeat on the next call and in the proposal. Paraphrase loses it.

More on calls and activity: cold call scripts, sales activity tracking, CRM data entry, the sales call report template.

The notes column is the one that gets skipped

After the tenth dial nobody writes proper notes. Hang up, say what happened into ParrotNotes as a quick voice note, and get the summary and the next step written for you, ready to copy into the log.

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Call log questions