By: Cheryl A. Clausen
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.
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.
Have you taken the time to actually identify all the required steps for acquiring a sale? Have you identified all the possible steps for advancing the sale when the prospect isn't following the standard cycle? As a sales professional it's your responsibility to develop next step options for your prospect. You can't expect the prospect to come up with options for you. When you don't have clearly defined advancement options you don't have a sales funnel you have a leaky bucket. You're losing potentially valuable prospects because you aren't taking control of the sales process.
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.
Do you know exactly how many people you need in your sales funnel to get the sales results you want? Your sales tracking system helps you to increase your sales because as soon as you close one prospect you immediately know you have to get a new prospect to replace your new customer. Your sales tracking system will help you to better understand your capabilities and limits. You'll develop an understanding for the number of new leads you can handle at one time. This will help you to develop lead generation systems that produce the number of leads you need to keep right number of people entering and leaving your sales funnel so you can produce consistent sales results.
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About the author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get unstuck. Use top Sales Techniques get her free ecourse. Use top Sales Coaching look here.
Sales Coaching: Increase Your Sales through Better Tracking
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