Getting Out From Under the Sticky-Note Pipeline
A sales associate working three active projects across Chennai and Vellore is managing somewhere between 40 and 80 live prospects at any given time. Some of those prospects came from direct walk-ins at the site office. Others came from associate referrals. A few came from a digital campaign two months ago that is now over. The site visit for one of them was postponed twice. Another said "call me next month" six weeks ago.
Without a structured record per customer, the followup logic lives entirely in the salesperson's working memory and a tangle of calendar reminders. The ones who get called are the ones the ME happened to think of that morning. The ones who get dropped are the ones who said they were still deciding — the exact segment where the most conversions actually happen.
This is not a closing technique problem. It is a data structure problem.
The Fields That Carry the Actual Pipeline Intelligence
The Current Status field has three stages: Waiting for Presentation, Waiting for Site Visit, Waiting for Cheque. These are the three real gates in a land sale cycle. A customer who has attended a presentation and seen the site but has not handed over a cheque is at a fundamentally different temperature from a customer who has never been to the site. Collapsing all three into "in progress" destroys the filtering logic that tells you where to spend tomorrow's calling time.
The Next Follow Up Date field is the operational core of the record. It converts a passive prospect into a scheduled action. Every customer without a next follow-up date is a lead in slow decay. After a site visit, you set it to three days out. After a "call me next month," you set it to 28 days. After a "we are discussing internally," you set it to seven days — because the internal discussion will not resolve itself, and if you are not in the room when it does, a competitor will be. The Last Contact Date field pairs with this: the gap between them tells you the actual cadence, not the intended one.
Feedback is free-text for a reason. A customer at a site visit in Vellore who says "the road approach still feels too raw for my wife" has given you actionable intelligence that no dropdown will capture. You log it verbatim. When you call back 10 days later and lead with "we have completed the metalling on the main access road from the highway junction" — citing exactly what she said — the close rate on that call is materially higher than a generic followup. The feedback field is where you store that specific objection, not a paraphrase of it.
When the Database Has 300 Records and Three Associates Working It
The Project Location field — Chennai, Vellore, Bangalore, Coimbatore — allows you to partition the pipeline by geography when you are managing multiple concurrent launches. A new project landing in Coimbatore means you pull every Coimbatore-tagged lead and run a fresh re-contact campaign before the public launch date. Without the location field, you are manually scanning names and trying to remember which city each prospect mentioned.
Lead From captures channel attribution. When your manager asks which source is producing the highest site-visit-to-booking conversion ratio, you filter by Lead From. Three months of data will tell you that associate referrals convert at 28% and the digital campaign converts at 11%, or the reverse. That number changes your commission structure for the next launch.
The Associate Name field is the broker accountability field. When a deal closes, who gets credit is never ambiguous. When a deal falls through and the customer calls to complain about a followup that never happened, the associate name is on the record.
Customer Decision: Booked or Not Interested. Those are the only two terminal states. Everything else is still in motion, and still your responsibility to move.