Can you answer these revenue questions? 📊

February 17th, 2026

If I asked you right now what your close rate is, could you answer with a number – or would you be estimating?

What about your Q2 revenue projection – do you know if you’re on track to hit your goals?

A connection reached out recently with a challenge he knew had been quietly working against him – and one he knew he’d need to solve if he was going to hit his ambitious revenue goals this year.

He’d lost track of someone he’d already had a conversation with. Months later, she reached out – and he was glad she did, because he had completely forgotten about her!

He knew he had important details somewhere – her email address, her role, notes from their last exchange – but couldn’t remember if it was in his inbox, his LinkedIn messages, or a note he’d jotted down somewhere and promptly forgot.

“If I had a place to put them all,” he told me, “I could reach out with intention instead of wasting time trying to remember who to reconnect with.”

He knew what he wanted: to look at a contact and immediately know how warm the relationship is, where he is in the process, and what that person actually cares about – without relying on memory.

We decided to work together on a custom engagement to build exactly that – more on that later in this blog.

Do his issues with tracking leads sound familiar?

This is one of the most common challenges I hear from coaches and consultants at every stage of business. Not a lack of leads. Not a lack of conversations. A lack of visibility into what’s actually happening with them.

Before you can measure results, you need to be tracking the right things in the first place.

From Goals to Data: What We Had to Fix First

Last week, I wrote about a client whose goal was to send three proposals per week – and how we couldn’t measure whether she was hitting it until we fixed how she was tracking leads in the first place. (If you missed that one, catch up here.)

Here’s what that process actually looked like.

Her existing tracker showed WHERE leads were (at which stage of her pipeline), but nothing else. No dates, no deal values, no record of when things moved. That meant we couldn’t calculate conversion rates, forecast revenue, or identify where deals were stalling.

To get the data the metrics dashboard needed, we had to restructure the pipeline tracker first.

The “before”: A simple list of names organized by stage.

The “after”: A structured sheet with five key columns added:

Stage Entry Date: when the lead moved into their current stage. This is how you calculate how long deals are sitting, and where they’re getting stuck.
Proposal Sent Date: the moment that triggers the most important metric for that particular client: proposals sent per week.
Deal Value: the dollar amount of each proposal. Without this, you can’t calculate pipeline revenue.
Close Date: when the project was confirmed. This is what tells you your actual conversion rate over time.
Notes: one line on where things stand and any relevant context.

None of these columns are complicated. But without them, you’re flying blind.

Exercise: Let’s Make This Concrete

If you’re tracking leads in a spreadsheet right now, here’s a five-minute exercise worth doing.

Open your tracker and add these columns if you don’t already have them:

Lead Name
Organization
Current Stage
Stage Entry Date
Proposal Sent Date
Deal Value
Close Date
Notes

Now add your top 3–5 active leads and populate what you know.

Don’t worry about backfilling historical data perfectly – just start from today. A month from now, you’ll have enough to start seeing patterns.

Thinking About Moving to a CRM?

If you did that exercise and thought this is already a lot to maintain in a spreadsheet, that might be your signal.

Not sure whether you need a spreadsheet or a dedicated CRM tool? I wrote about exactly that here: How a CRM saved me from spreadsheet overload

If you’ve read it and decided a CRM is the right next step, I’d point you toward Copper (affiliate link). It has an intuitive interface and is easy to customize, making it my #1 choice for people who don’t want to become a software expert just to manage their leads. Try Copper with no obligation here.

The Done-For-You Version

The client I mentioned at the top? He’d tried to set up his own lead tracking system more than once. He knew he needed it. He just didn’t want to become a technical expert to make it happen – and every time he sat down to do it, the overwhelm kicked in, and it went back on the “someday” list.

Here’s what I built for him:

Full Copper CRM setup and configuration, including custom fields and tagging framework
Chrome extension implementation for one-click contact adding directly from LinkedIn
Email tracking in Gmail so he can see when contacts open his messages
Import of 100+ contacts, cleaned and categorized
Calendly integration for two booking types (so every contact who books a call automatically gets added into the CRM with the right tags)
Task automations for follow-up reminders so no lead goes cold
Complete documentation: written guides, video walkthroughs, and a VA-ready reference so he can eventually hand this off
Three training sessions plus two follow-up check-ins

He walked away with a system he can actually run – and the confidence that it won’t fall apart the moment he stops paying attention to it.

If this is a project you’ve been putting off, I have capacity for one more CRM implementation this quarter. Reply and tell me where you’re at, or book a complimentary consultation here.

Talk soon,
Moriah

P.S. Not quite ready for a consultation? If we haven’t met yet, let’s start there – book a complimentary intro call, and we can get to know each other first 👋