Entrepreneurs handle their sales operations very delicately. This spurns everything from getting the right salespeople, training them, and investing heavily in sales and marketing. However, do you know how effective any of these actions are?
Sales tracking is exceedingly essential whether you are a small local outfit or a national business.
A sales tracker helps you monitor and analyze all the different sales process components. This gives you better visibility of what you are inputting into your sales systems.
Why You Need A Sales Tracker
Creating a sales tracker might seem tedious. Unnecessary even.
However, the different metrics you collect offer insights that allow you to make decisions and adjustments to streamline processes, optimize operations, and increase your bottom line.
Here is a closer look at how your business can benefit from a sales tracker.
It Helps You Align To Your Objectives
Your sales objectives might get clouded or buried under an impossible to-do list with multiple competing roles.
A sales tracker in all scenarios helps refocus your sales activities on what is truly important. The data you gather shows you:
- The stage a sale is in
- Its priority
- Deal value
- Probability of a conversion
- Contact information
This information helps shape consequent actions on your part.
Supports Accurate Sales Projections
Keeping all your information current through a sales tracker is central to making accurate sales forecasts.
Every business needs this to make decisions related to budgeting, planning, scaling, and risk management.
Accurate sales forecasting helps businesses allocate resources efficiently for future growth and even manage their cash flows better.
Improved Collaboration
Effective sales tracking software contributes significantly to improving internal communication and collaboration. This is one of the key benefits of using a cloud-based sales tracker.
Your employees can access the same information from anywhere. Whether employee-to-employee or client-employee, each interaction can be tracked and accessed later. This can be especially useful for your sales, procurement, and marketing teams.
Highlight Challenges
Sales trackers can help highlight pain points earlier rather than later. This makes sense because you want to identify and resolve problems without wasting too much money on actions that do not deliver results.
For example, you might notice that one of your top reps currently brings in fewer leads than they have in previous months. Looking into their process, you discover they have been so bogged down by making in-person visits that follow-ups have fallen through the cracks. Or maybe they changed their email template, and the new one isn’t converting.
Either way, a sales tracker will flag these issues and allow you to right the ship early on.
Key Features Of A Sales Tracker
You want a tracker that will offer the most value. Must-have features of a tracker include:
- Accessibility: sales reps should access information from anywhere
- Integration: a sales tracker or any other software is unlikely to be used in isolation. As such, get one that can be integrated into other software and platforms your sales force uses
- Automation and data visualization options
With these as a foundation, you can lump any additional features that could help support your sales function.
