by Cheryl A. Clausen

The way you track your sales funnel and sales cycle can significantly impact your insurance sales success. Is the way you track now complicated and cumbersome? Could a simple system be more efficient and effective? Yes. You need to know at a glance exactly who is in your sales funnel, where they are in your sales process, their preferred contact information, the outcome and commitment from your last contact, and the next action you need to take to keep your prospect on track for closing.

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.

Unless the buying decision involves a low cost investment your prospects don't usually enter and exit your sales funnel as customers in one step. Some sales cycles are very protracted multi-step processes. Defining the sales process cycle for your business is a stumbling block for many 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 professional. 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.

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.

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.

About the Author:

About the author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get unstuck. For Sales Techniques get her free ecourse. For Sales Coaching look here. You can get a unique content version of this article. Download ebooks.