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.

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.

A single sheet to record all the required information in your sales funnel can make this whole tracking process easier for you. Plus when you need information you have 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 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.

Do you find that months pass and you forget to take the appropriate next action for your prospects? Do you realize that you're letting your prospects down when that happens? When you allow these time lags to occur you almost have to start completely over with that prospect because you've undermined your relationship. Tracking everyone in your sales cycle and the next actions you've committed to keeps you on task. You're on top of the whole sales process and you increase your sales success ratio.

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.