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Ask HN: How do you manage the sales "funnel"?

12 points by cshipley ↗ HN
I am a freelance mobile developer, and business is picking up to the point where managing potential clients through gmail labels will not suffice.

How do you manage contacts, track where they are in the sales cycle, and gather statistics for later feedback and analysis?

Is there a particular methodology or software that is used?

Thanks, Curtis

6 comments

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jseeba
Might be a bit overkill to start, but we started early on with salesforce.com, which provided a good framework that we've grown into. Other CRM solutions like sugarcrm would work too.
allwein
It may be cliche around here, but I'm a big fan of 37 Signal's Highrise.
cshipley
I've been looking at FreeCRM, and for the price, well, it looks pretty good.
avalore
Fat Free CRM (http://www.fatfreecrm.com/) is a pretty nice self-hosted, RoR, option. There's an iOS app for it called Senbei, off the top of my head, although it is a little limited.
rpwilcox
For the first two I use Kanban: I have one bin for "On Radar" (people I need to send proposals to, etc), and "Followup". The card for each person has their email address and when I should follow up with them