How you track your sales funnel and sales cycle can significantly impact your career sales success. All too often the way you track now is complicated and cumbersome when a simple system would be more efficient and effective. You need to know at a glance exactly who is in your sales funnel, where they are in your sales cycle, their contact information, the result of your last contact, and the next action on your part.

And you need all that information in one place. Sales is a hectic fast paced business. You need to know exactly who your prospects are at any given moment. When you try to track all your prospects in your day planner, a call sheet, or many CRM's you really can't access everything you want and need to know quickly and easily and everywhere you are.

You can use a single sheet to record all the information you need to track your sales funnel. This will make the whole tracking process easier for you. Plus it helps you to have everything you need in one location when you need it.

It would be great if your prospects entered and exited your sales funnel as customers in one step. But that's rarely the case. Most sales cycles are multi-step processes that occur over a period of time, sometimes a very long period of time. Here's where there's a big glitch for many sales professionals.

You haven't taken the time to actually identify all the required steps for advancing the sale, and all the possible steps for advancing the sale. You're the professional. If you don't have a feasible next step option for your prospect you can't expect them to come up with one for you. Without clearly defined advancement options you don't have a sales funnel you have a sales sieve. You're unnecessarily losing potentially valuable prospects because you aren't proactively controlling the sales process.

Do you find that months pass and you forget to take the appropriate next action for your prospects? Do you realize that you're letting your prospects down when that happens? When you allow these time lags to occur you almost have to start completely over with that prospect because you've undermined your relationship. Tracking everyone in your sales cycle and the next actions you've committed to keeps you on task. You're on top of the whole sales process and you increase your sales success ratio.

If you want consistent and predictable result you have to know exactly how many people you need in your sales funnel at all times. As soon as you close a prospect you know you immediately need to replace that prospect in your sales funnel. Through experience you'll discover both your capabilities and limitations. You'll discover how many leads you need to consistently generate to produce prospects for your sales funnel. Eventually you want to develop lead generation systems that produce the right number of new prospects entering and leaving your sales funnel as customers so you obtain the sales objectives that fit your needs.