You will be able to keep a simple weekly log that shows where your sales process leaks.
Ask a new seller how their week went and they usually describe a mood: "busy", "slow", or "lots of meetings but nothing closing". They may well be right about the mood. What a mood cannot do is explain why the week went that way or what to try differently on Monday, so when a whole month goes badly the only explanation left is that sales is hard.
Numbers give you a better answer. Not a complex dashboard, just a few counts written down once a week. This lesson shows you what to count, how to read the counts, and how to keep the habit going long enough for it to be useful.
Your selling week has three layers, and each one feeds the next.
The first is activity, meaning the things you do to start conversations: calls made, messages sent, introductions asked for, posts that invite a reply and events attended. You decide every one of those numbers yourself.
The second is conversations: the times a buyer actually engaged with you. A first meeting held, a call where the buyer talked about their situation, a WhatsApp exchange that went beyond a polite reply. You influence these but do not control them.
The third is outcomes, which is whatever came out of those conversations: next steps agreed (in the sense lesson 5.3, Ask for a next step every time, gave the term), proposals sent and sales made. Of the three layers, this is the one where the buyer has the most say.
Most people only track the third layer, if they track anything. That is like checking your bank balance without looking at what you spent. You can see that something is wrong, but you cannot see where.
Once you have all three layers, look at how each one turns into the next. Those ratios tell you where your process leaks.
Here is an example with made-up figures. Over four weeks, Zhi Wei, a freelance web designer in Singapore, sent 80 messages to potential clients, had 20 conversations, agreed 4 next steps and won 1 project. Her activity is steady, and a quarter of her messages turned into conversations. But only 4 of her 20 conversations ended with a next step. That is where she is losing most of her buyers, and it points straight at the end of her meetings. No amount of extra messaging fixes that. Practising the close of the meeting from lesson 5.3 does.
A different seller might show the opposite pattern: 80 messages, 3 conversations, 2 next steps, 1 sale. Their meetings go well, but too few people agree to meet. Their problem sits in the first layer: who they are messaging, or what the messages say. Lesson 2.2, First impressions in person, on the phone and on WhatsApp, is the place to start.
Do not compare your ratios with anyone else's averages. They depend on your product, your price and your market. Compare them with your own previous weeks, and look for the layer where the drop is steepest.
You do not need software to begin. A simple spreadsheet with one row per week and a column for each count does the job: messages, calls, conversations, next steps, proposals, sales. Add a notes column for anything unusual, like a public holiday or a week off sick.
Keep it to a sheet until it starts getting in the way. A sensible point to move to a CRM, a customer relationship management tool that keeps a record for each buyer and their stage, is when you have more than a few dozen open buyers and you start losing track of who needs what. Plenty of tools exist at different prices. Choose one when you need it, not before, because a CRM you do not update is worse than a spreadsheet you do.
Numbers only help if you look at them. Pick a fixed time each week, Friday afternoon or Monday morning, and put it in your calendar as a fifteen-minute meeting with yourself.
In that review, fill in the week's counts, work out the ratios between the layers, and compare them with the last few weeks. Then choose one thing to change for next week. Only one. If you change your opening message, your meeting structure and your follow-up all at once and the numbers improve, you will not know which change worked.
Zhi Wei's one change might be: "In every meeting this week, propose a dated next step with two options before I leave." The following Friday she checks the next-steps column and sees whether it moved.
The first week of tracking is the hardest, because you have to reconstruct numbers from memory, your calendar and your message history. Open your calendar and your chats for last week before you start the activity below, and count as honestly as you can.
Set up the weekly tracking sheet from the course downloads and fill in last week's numbers from your calendar and messages.
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