Keeping Track of Your Prospective Customers

Quite simply... how do you do it?
It is a topic near and dear to my heart - one of the biggest reasons people lose sales is that they lose track of where they are in the sales process - they forget about what the issues really were - they lose interest, or the prospective customer loses track of how you were going to help them.

Notice my focus is on tracking opportunities, or deals -- not tracking prospects - because you could have multiple opportunities with one single prospective customer.

An opportunity has a start and end. A prospect doesn't. This is why it is so powerful to track a potential deal. It can end, one way or the other, and you've captured prospect or client info for the next time around - but it is always evolving this way - always moving forward. If you have not tried this, think about that for September or through the end of the year.

I'll be attending the Salesforce conference in San Francisco next week. They make the most widely used web-based CRM (customer relationship management) program available. It is a tool to track sales opportunities. I will follow up with you on tools and process - and your questions on these topics will be appreciated.
For now-
How do you track your sales opportunities?
Does anything ever slip throgh the cracks?
If so, what happens?
If it is not working well, how do you plan to change your process?