Great Ways To Manually Track Sales Leads
Why You Should Track Sales Leads
Generating sales leads is important to the success of any small business. However, if you don’t keep track of your leads, how will you know what’s working? You will be flying by the seat of your pants when it comes to advertising. You need ways to manually track sales leads so you can determine where your sales are actually coming from and make the necessary adjustments to increase your sales.
Use The Computer
Your computer can be a valuable tool when it comes to tracking your leads. You can use a free sales lead tracker to keep up with your prospects. If that is too fancy for you, use the notepad tool to make notes of when you talked to a prospect and what the results were. Just make sure you back up the information on a flash drive so in case something does happen with your computer, you will still have your sales information handy.
Also, don’t rely on automated methods to stay in touch with your prospects. Actually take the time to send your prospects individual e-mail messages from time to time. You don’t have send a sales message every time you contact a prospect, either. Just drop them a line to see how they are doing.
Use Online Tools To Keep Track Of Sales Leads
Many people use Microsoft Word or Excel to keep track of sales leads. That’s great, but you should also use an online method to keep up with your spreadsheets and documents. It’s always a good idea to have your data in more than one place. One online tool you can use is Google Docs-you can even use Google Docs offline. Basically Google Docs is a free online word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet creator, and drawing tool. All you have to do is sign up by visiting their website and sign up for a Google account (if you don’t have one) and begin using this software to track your sales leads. You can download the free sales lead tracker that was mentioned above and then upload it to Google Docs. Once you do that, you are ready to start tracking your leads.
Often Manual Is Better
While computers are nice tools to use to track sales leads, you should look at ways to manually track your prospects. What if your Internet service goes down? What if your computer crashes? If you don’t use some manual means of tracking your sales, all of your data could be lost in the blink of an eye. Let’s look at some ways to track your sales leads manually.
Capture Sales Leads Using Forms
Even if you have an excellent memory, dedicated sales lead forms can keep track of the information sales leads provide. You can create a form using MS Word or OpenOffice and then print it out. Once you have your form printed, you can write certain information down to help you keep up with where your prospect is in the sales process. Write down whether they are interested in purchasing your product or if you need to do more to entice them. Write down the timeframe they expect to buy the product and when you plan to contact them again. When you put things on paper, you are less likely to forget to follow up on sales leads.
Conclusion
While it’s true that automated systems save time, it should never replace human interaction with your prospects. People don’t expect to talk to an actual human being these days. So, if you take time to connect with your prospects, even if it’s just you sending e-mails outside of those auto-responder messages, you will stand out in your potential customer’s minds. Be sure to use the ways to manually track your sales leads mentioned here so you can have backups in place in case something happens to your computer.
References
Google Docs - https://docs.google.com/?pli=1#home
OpenOffice - https://www.openoffice.org/
