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.

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.

Prospects don’t usually enter and exit your sales funnel as customers in one step. Most sales cycles involve multiple and incremental steps that occur over a period of time. Some sales cycles are extremely long especially when the sales involves high ticket decisions. The sales cycle itself poses 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.

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.

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.