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.



Stop using and relying on pieces and parts of multiple systems to get what you need. You need all that information in one place so you can handle your fast paced work environment. You need to know exactly who your prospects and where they are in your sales funnel. When you try to track all your prospects in your calendar, a contact sheet, or many software tracking systems you can't access everything you want and need to know 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.

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.

All too often sales professionals drop the ball and allow months to pass without taking the appropriate next action. This probably happens more often than you'd like to admit or than you even realize. These time gaps hurt your relationship to the point where you almost have to start over with the prospect. You've lost your connection and now they don't trust you because you've demonstrated that they can't count on you. That kind of relational damage is hard to repair. Effectively tracking all your leads and prospects and the next actions you've committed to reducing the likelihood of dropping the ball. It's much easier for you to monitor your entire sales process and everyone in your sales funnel, and you close more business.

You need to know exactly how many people you need in your sales funnel at all times to get the sales results you want. A sales tracking system helps you to improve your results because as soon as you close one prospect they drop off your sales funnel and you know you have to enter a new prospect into your funnel. You also learn your capabilities and limits. You begin to develop a feel for the flow of lead generation you can handle and that you need to create, so your sales funnel always has the right number of people entering and leaving to achieve consistent sales success.