When you struggle to track where prospects are in your sales funnel and how likely they are to do business with you it's easy to drop the ball and miss prime opportunities. Many tracking systems are complicated and unwieldy. You need a simple tracking system. You need to know at a glance exactly who your prospects and leads are, how likely they are to do business with you, their contact information, the commitments agreed upon during your last contact, and the next action you must take to close the business.



You need all that key information in one place. Sales is a crazy fast paced business. At any given moment you have to know exactly who your prospects are and you need to be able to access that information quickly and easily no matter where you are. When you try to track all your prospects in your appointment book, on a call sheet, or many software packages you can't access everything you want and need to know quickly and easily no matter where you are.

Using a single sheet to record all the required information in your sales funnel can make this whole tracking process much easier for you. Plus it provides everything you need in one location.

Unless the buying decision involves a low cost investment your prospects don't usually enter and exit your sales funnel as customers in one step. Some sales cycles are very protracted multi-step processes. Defining the sales process cycle for your business is a stumbling block for many sales professionals.

Define the required steps for advancing the sale in your sales process. Based on your sales experience what sales techniques do you have to advancing a prospect that doesn't fall within your standard sales process? You're sales success depends on your ability to move people through the buying selling process. If you don't have a next step option for your prospect you can't expect them to come up with one for you. Plan clearly defined advancement options that both you and the prospect can agree to. If you don't have advancement options you have to have far more leads in your sales funnel that someone who does. You're letting valuable prospects slip through your fingers because you don't have a plan for keeping prospects on track and on board with your solution.

How often do you find that months have passed without you taking the appropriate next action for individuals in your sales funnel? Probably more often than you'd like to admit. When you allow these time lags to occur you almost have to start over from ground zero because the tenuous relationship you once had has almost vanished making it even harder to move the sale to closure. When you track where everyone is in your sales cycle including your next actions you have this happen far less often. Because you're on top of the whole sales process and your sales funnel you increase your sales success.

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.