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Guest post by: Cheryl A. Clausen Become an Author

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How you track your sales funnel and sales cycle can significantly impact your sales success. All too often the way you track 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.

Selling 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. 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.

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 small business owners and 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 expert. 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.

How often do you find 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.

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. Consequently, your sales funnel always has the right number of people entering and leaving to achieve consistent sales success.

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