My job at Branch is to identify people who aren't (but should be) using Branch, get in touch with them, pitch them, make sure they have a good onboarding experience, and then solicit feedback.

It's essentially a sales funnel, even though I don't like to call it that.

One of the steepest learning curves I've run into so far is how to effectively track and communicate this to the team. So far, I've been using a combination of spreadsheets and "weekly roundup" emails to keep folks appraised of where we are with whom and share some insights — but with dozens of individuals, rather than a few deals, that's getting to be pretty sloppy.

Do you all have any pro tips? I'm interested in both tools and strategies for how I can do this better.

More sophisticated sales tracking software like salesforce is probably too much for what you're doing. That stuff is really for managers to measure because it provides robust reporting. So I think a spreadsheet should be fine so long as you adhere to it diligently.

A few thoughts:

People new to sales sometimes feel like they're doing wrong if they're spending all day looking at a spreadsheet. ITS OK. If you live and die by your pipeline, you should be spending all day in it.

One way to declutter your spreadsheet is to seperate it into where they are in the funnel:

Users
Warm Leads
Prospects

Instead of a weekly roundup email (what we do at SP) just get a big whiteboard or something and chalk names up so people can see.

I agree with Scott on much of what he said. At Gumroad, we tested out a bunch of CRM services and found that a Google doc served us best. It was critical to maintain it diligently, though. For example:

-A tab for each kind of contact (author, artist, photog, label, agency, etc.)
-Primary contact w/ all info
-Date we last contacted them & next date to contact (mtg, call, email, follow-up)
-Status & % of "closing," which we got better at estimating as we progressed

We made this open to Sahil, so he could go in and check at his leisure.

Every Monday, during a team brunch, we ran through the past week's highest priorities and the priorities for the next week (for all team members) and sent a bi-weekly email with most pertinent BD efforts.

Plain ol' Google Docs! Who knew?

One of you guys who blogs a lot should make a macro and put it up there for download. No doubt it'd be popular.

I gotta say, after swimming deep in Google spreadsheets (and using SalesForce in the past), I agree about the plain oul' whiteboard. It keeps everything present and and concrete. The challenge is reporting that back to other people. Maybe there's some way to convert the whiteboard progress into something indexable and shareable...