
Ask HN: Keeping track of sales pipeline for sole dev/founder? - danpat
I&#x27;ve been running a small, seasonal ski-industry SaaS business for a couple of years.  It&#x27;s grown from a side project into something that&#x27;s taking up most of my time these days.<p>I&#x27;m all good on the technical side of things, and I love talking to my customers.  But I&#x27;m terrible at sales and follow ups, and I&#x27;m at the point where I need to get some revenue rolling so this beastie will really support itself.<p>For those of you out there on the small end of things, what works for you?  How do you keep all those conversations going, remember to follow up with people and don&#x27;t drop the ball getting new people signed up?  How do you balance that with getting the technical end of things done?
======
davismwfl
To a certain point it is just grinding the hours out and trying not to drop
the ball on too many people at once.

To help bring balance to the situation though I have reverted back to setting
a standard weekly schedule. Basically, set a schedule saying Tuesday and
Friday you are doing Sales, demo's and client followup. And then the rest of
the week you work on product. Or reverse it if the needs are reversed. But you
get the idea. Of course, when you do that it doesn't mean you ignore
calls/emails. Instead you immediately respond and schedule time on the next
day/time available and in that followup make sure you aren't missing an
immediate issue or hot prospect. Use your calendar of choice and just schedule
yourself in detail.

Like I said, I am doing this (again) and it is helping me refocus a lot, but
in fairness I sometimes struggle still putting off a demo until another day so
I catch myself sometimes doing a "quick" demo or talking to prospects when I
should be finishing something. Every time I do a non-critical (e.g. service is
not down) activity out of turn, I wind up kicking myself later because rarely
is the case where it has led to a sale or where it was something that could
not wait 1-2 days while I finished what I was in the middle of.

As for sales, I think if you haven't already you really need to identify how
people find you and how you get them to signup. If this process is primarily
human, that is a key if not primary place to focus a lot of your efforts.
Signup and on-boarding need to be automatic as does the ability for a person
that hits the marketing site to understand the products value proposition.
Small quick video(s) and image walk-thru's help from what I have seen. It
doesn't mean you stop being human and talking to everyone on the planet that
will listen, just that you need the research and on-boarding process as smooth
as possible so that you don't get overloaded doing work a computer should.

------
headsclouds
We have a web application out in beta (free) that integrates with Gmail,
called Funnel [http://funnelnow.com/](http://funnelnow.com/) aimed exactly at
people like yourself (and us, since we developed it for our own needs
primarily).

We've finished the integration of the complete new UI (take a look at some
screenshots on our portfolio
[http://sprawsm.com/project/funnel/](http://sprawsm.com/project/funnel/)) that
we will be releasing in a few days.

We've been using it for over two years now for our design company, worked
wonderfully.

------
JSeymourATL
How do you keep all those conversations going, remember to follow up with
people and don't drop the ball getting new people signed up?

Simple daily focus and discipline, easier said than done. As a practical
matter, write everything down on paper, schedule reminders on your calendar.
Work in power-time blocks. Suggest looking at David Allen's brilliant GTD
system>
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RVerrdJmXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RVerrdJmXw)

------
mattm
This is exactly the problem I'm solving -
[https://touchingbase.io](https://touchingbase.io)

Unfortunately, you don't have contact in your profile. Feel free to get in
touch. I'd be interested in learning more about what you need to see if we can
help.

~~~
MrDHat
Too much text on the website! I, personally, find it difficult to follow/go
through a site with more text than images/demos.

~~~
mattm
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I agree it's probably time to redo the website.

------
stewsnooze
Pipedrive helps. I sync it with calendar and contacts and integrate it with
gmail. You get a great funnel to push leads through by default. I have a few
zapper hooks set up for special things like new lead tracking direct from the
website but you don't need that

------
Terpaholic
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7805842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7805842)

Here's a small collection of resources you might find useful - I had the same
question about a year ago.

The end result one year later? Google docs + Yesware.

------
palidanx
I actually wrote some internal software to help track my sales leads for b2b
customers. If you are interested, I can show you my workflow and maybe this
might give you some ideas on tracking. Feel free to drop me a pm.

