When you prospect for sites it is very important you keep records of everything you do. Securing locations is an ongoing job and the better your records and the more you refer to them the better you will do. Here's the bare minimum you should record about every location:

Customer Records
Name of location
Name of manager or owner
Phone number
Email address
Their response to your proposal
Follow up required

As you collect business cards, and write notes transfer them to your computer. In this day and age a diary scribbled with notes is not adequate. Here's some ideas of how you can record site information:

Recording Site Information
Excel spreadsheet
Word Document
Outlook address book
Access Database
Google Docs
Advanced CRM program

Locating machines is an ongoing commitment you make when you buy this franchise. As you go round visiting potential locations, you can easily end up with a collection of business cards, scraps of paper, and notes scrawled in diaries. It becomes really inefficient after a while to be looking back through diaries and notes to get numbers and try to remember what you said or did. What you need to do is maintain one ongoing database where you can transfer these names, numbers, and details. Then you can throw all your business cards and scraps of paper away.

When our team is setting up new locations, they use an online Google Doc—it's just a spreadsheet really—and down the left-hand side, they list all the potential locations and the locations they have called on. Along the top, they include the address, phone number, email address, relevant names, reaction to the proposal, follow-up needed, and any general comments. This allows everyone involved in the project to access the data. If you keep a record like this, each week before you go out, you can print out your data sheet and check back on where you got to with each location.

Every location will have a reaction column with a comment about what the person said. Next to that, there will be a next action column for you to put notes on what you should do next. It could look something like this:

REACTION: Owner wasn’t there NEXT ACTION: Call back on Mondays and Wednesdays

REACTION: Owner said yes NEXT ACTION: Deliver a machine next week

REACTION: Manager interested but has to ask partner NEXT ACTION: Call back next week

REACTION: Manager (Steve Smith) said not their scene. NEXT ACTION: Wait for change in managers - try again in 6 months

REACTION: Owner interested but wants to think about it NEXT ACTION: Call back next time passing

REACTION: Manager said definite no NEXT ACTION: Don’t go back until that manager leaves - check if he is still there every 6 months with a phone call