In an ideal world, the sales cycle would look like this:
But in the real world, this graph is far from straight. There can be tens to hundreds of touchpoints, conversations and back & forths (depending upon the nature of your business).
And at any given point, a salesman is tackling not one, but several such prospects.
You know this already, of course. But, almost always in the sales meetings, talks of targets and quota take precedence – which is understandable, but it also takes you away from the ground-reality of sales – and the pain-points, bottlenecks, effectiveness, and improvements in these processes are not discussed, because they are not being tracked end-to-end, and no one has real clarity on it.
Ponder this for a minute:
- If the targets are being met, are you quantitatively sure that this was the best that your reps could have done?
- If the targets are missed, are you aware of the reasons why, and can you provide your rep the solutions to make sure it doesn’t happen again?
That is what an automated, ubiquitous sales tracker can help you do. Every every lead source, every touchpoint and every activity of your salespeople is important, and an automated sales tracker would not just track them, but would also help you identify the sub-optimal parts of the process and improve them.
So, What is a Sales Tracker?
A sales tracker is a tool which gives you complete visibility into your sales process. It tracks all the important activities involved in closing a deal – right from the incoming inquiries, conversations that happen between your team and the prospect (calls, text messages, emails and more), to face-to-face meetings (using mobile tracking), to operational activities, like document collection etc. In the case of repeat-sales businesses, like insurance, banking, lending, travel, real estate, education, healthcare etc. the sales tracking extends beyond the first-closure to include cross-sell and upsell signals.
Many sales-led organizations still use an Excel-based sales tracker, which needs to be manually updated and is therefore highly prone to human error or more commonly to just be left unfilled by the salespeople. And when your business scales up, it is impractical to try and track everything manually.
Sales tracker is not just a monitoring tool. Collective insights from your existing opportunities can help you determine the buying trend of your customers, the drop-off points and the effectiveness of your sales team.
To sum up, sales tracking is all about:
- Tracking sales related activities (including digital and face-to-face conversations and meetings).
- Identifying the actions that generate sales (instant call to the prospect as soon as they sign up/the right follow-up frequency).
- Improving the sub-optimal parts of the processes (For instance: if you know that historically, a face-to-face meeting has proved redundant if the lead score is below 100, you can auto-schedule meetings for the opportunities when the lead score crosses that threshold.)
- Amplifying the activities that drive sales (For instance, if a face-to-face recommendation of products has proven to drive up the cross-sale ratios, you should encourage your relationship managers to make these recommendations more frequently to their customers. A good sales tracker would also be able to identify the best cross-sale product for each individual client, based on historical data.)
- Closing the deals (and all the variables involved in it – time taken to close a deal, numbers of calls/meetings required to close a deal, lead score at which a deal closes etc.)
- Identifying cross-sell opportunities (so, sales tracking doesn’t stay limited to just tracking salespeople or the prospect – it goes beyond to identify opportunities for higher Customer Lifetime Value).
Important Metrics That You Should Be Tracking
Keeping a close watch on the major sales junctures not only strengthens your sales process but also equips the sales leaders with just the information to make key decisions.
To make the most out of your sales tracking process, here are a few questions you should answer before setting up a sales tracker:
- Have I designed my sales funnel and lead stages as per my unique business process?
- Have I identified all the important deal make/break junctures?
- Does my sales team share all the important sales information?
- Am I aware of every conversation that my team has with prospects?
- Am I sure that the scheduled meetings/calls are taking place?
A sales tracking system, if set up properly can have a dramatic impact on your sales outcomes. Here’s what you can track:
Quantity Metrics
Revenue source: This is an indication of the sources generating most sales for you. This metric is shared by sales and marketing together, where the marketing focuses on the number of leads and sales team on the number of opportunities. Opportunities: This metric shows the number of opportunities generated in the given time. In a way, it tracks the effort of the sales team in pushing the warm leads to hot leads.
User performance: This metric throws light on individual sales rep performance – the number of calls they make, the number of emails they send, the distance they travel (relevant for field sales) and ultimately the revenue they generate.
Quality Metrics
Lead to opportunity conversion: This metric helps you understand the effectiveness of your team to push the sale forward. It is the number of people who show genuine interest divided by the total opportunities generated.
Opportunity to customer conversion: This indicates the number of opportunities that your sales team creates against the number that actually ends up closing. It’s a reflection of how potent your team is in delivering the final punch.
Communication tracking: Sales tracker records all the conversation happening with the prospect and the sales team which includes phone calls, email exchanges, text messages, online chat etc. This gives information about the quality of conversations and helps you make improvements or amends if needed.
Features you should seek in a Sales Tracker App
Lead/Sales Funnel
You might have a range of leads pouring in every day. Some of them go unnoticed, unfollowed, and unattended. This is called lead leakage.
Out of the ones which you follow, you might not know their source of origin and conversion. A lot of times you might even be unaware of their progress, and their status in your sales funnel.
Sales tracker helps you plug the lead leakage and provides the correct attribution to the source.
Sales performance
Sales performance includes everything – right from user performance: the total calls needed to be made to close a sale, total calls being made on an average by your team and your individual salespeople, the products being sold the most, the regions bringing in the most business, the salesperson bringing in the most business, the task completion ratio of individual reps and much more.
You also have complete real-time visibility into every salesperson’s performance at every single point – so, you’ll know the reps leading the sales-board and the ones lagging behind. Gamification in some sales trackers would also allow your reps to measure their performance against their colleagues, motivating them to do better, thereby increasing the overall sales.
Field sales tracking
Field sales tracking is the feature most important to businesses with a feet-on-street team. Your reps go to the field equipped with an advanced sales app, that not only helps them plan their meeting schedule, best routes and pitch based on prospect details, but it also tracks their movement and activities.
Sales managers can sit back and watch real-time as their reps check-in to their meeting locations, log meeting notes, and activities and everything else in between. Advanced geo-fencing feature in few sales tracking tools also checks misrepresentation of meetings, because the users can check-in only when they have reached the client’s meeting location, and not from somewhere else.
Revenue analysis 
Your sales tracker won’t just give you the number of sales, but revenue generated as well – against each product, each region, each team, and salesperson, and any other variable important to you.
Equipped with these reports, not only will you have an absolute clarity of what’s going on in your sales organization, but you’ll also be able to identify the shortfalls, and improve the sub-optimal parts of the sales-engine.
All Ready to Track Your Sales?
A lot happens in between the lead and the deal. Reports tell you the end result, sales pipeline tell you the current scenario but to retrospect and identify the loopholes in your process you need a solid sales tracking mechanism which enables you to monitor and coach your team at the same time. Get started with a free trial.
