What is Sales Tracking Software? (and Why You Need It)

What is Sales Tracking Software? (and Why You Need It)

Don't leave your sales to chance. Learn how the right software can help you see trends in your data and increase your revenue.

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Sales can sometimes feel like a game of trial and error, especially when you're just starting out. But you may be surprised to know that you already have the answers you need - in your sales data.

Data lets you uncover vital trends and opportunities that can help you improve your process and increase your revenue - from pipeline to paycheck. And with sales tracking software, you can easily tap into the insights you need to improve sales performance across the entire funnel and see more success.

Let's discuss why you should be using sales tracking software, its key benefits, and features to look for when choosing the best solution.

What you'll learn:

• What is sales tracking software?
• Why is sales tracking software important?
• Key benefits of sales tracking software
• How can sales tracking software help measure performance and track KPIs?
• Features to look for in sales tracking software
• Best sales tracking and analytics software

What is sales tracking software?

Sales tracking software is a tool that helps businesses capture, monitor, and analyze sales activity and performance throughout the sales process. This software enables you to see your business holistically - with hard data - so you can understand where you are and develop strategies for improvement.

Using data, sales tracking software lets you see how effective your sales strategies and processes are, spot potential challenges, and make adjustments.

Why is sales tracking software important?

Sales leaders must consistently set and meet goals. And everyone on your team is responsible for making this happen. Sales tracking helps you stay on top of progress, hold your team accountable, and make adjustments for better results. Sales tracking software gives you a full picture of what's happening in real time with your business. Not only does it break down individual rep performance, it can also identify trends and help you improve efficiencies before you run into real problems - like failing to meet your targets.

For example, a sales manager can see that their pipeline is low. While they're on track to meet second-quarter goals, third-quarter goals may be in jeopardy. Seeing this, they decide to provide coaching for all sales reps on prospecting techniques and put more money into the budget for prospecting. Without analytics, the manager wouldn't have known until after the quarter was over and the budget was set. This could have ended up losing them more money in the long term.

You want your new sales representatives to be productive as quickly as possible. But it can take years to develop the right knowledge and experience that it takes to be successful in sales. And this can be disheartening for new reps experiencing setbacks. With sales tracking, you can provide your team - regardless of experience level - with a road map and specific actions to take to improve. This can help them gain more confidence, see better results, and experience higher job satisfaction.

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Key benefits of sales tracking software

By using sales tracking software, your company can see significant benefits. Common advantages include:

Improved data quality

The success of business depends on the quality of your data. But sales reps are human - and they're very busy. Each time someone enters data incorrectly or doesn't log an interaction, your data quality goes down. Even more important, analytics may give you incorrect insights if it's only using a portion of your data. For example, if only some of your representatives always remember to log their actions, your data won't provide a full picture of the organization and won't be as useful.

Sales tracking software that's integrated with your CRM automatically logs interactions and collects data. This means that your sales analytics are more accurate and can provide the right insights. With a solid data foundation, organizations are better set up for the future. Remember, your AI is only as good as your data.

Increased sales productivity and efficiency

Becoming an effective closer is an important skill for sales reps to develop. But because it depends on so many things - the customer type, product, market, etc. - it's almost impossible to know the recipe for the secret sauce. However, sales tracking digs into the numbers to show you what's working best, where gaps might be, and even where opportunities are.

For example, you may see that a sales rep struggles with cold calling but leads the sales team in lead generation. Digging deeper, you see that they focus on social media prospecting and look for customers actively searching for information on solving specific business challenges. You share this with your team, and others decide to test out the same technique. Their success increases productivity and efficiency across the team.

Better sales forecasting and pipeline management

Your sales pipeline - a visual representation of where each prospect is in the sales process - is the key to your success. Analyzing it can help you identify what steps to take with each prospect and when. It can also help you actively remove roadblocks to improve your closing rate. But sometimes you can't accurately see what's going on in your pipeline because the data isn't updating in real time or is stored in different places.

Forecasting is also important to your success. By knowing what is likely to happen based on your current pipeline and leads, you can make changes as needed. For example, if it's looking unlikely that you'll meet your targets based on where your current opportunities are in the pipeline, you can make changes to increase the likelihood of higher sales before it's too late.

Sales tracking software lets you see key pipeline metrics and forecast related key performance indicators (KPIs) all in one place. By analyzing these insights, sales reps and leaders can identify trends, measure current sales against KPIs, and make data-driven decisions instead of relying on intuition.

Enhanced customer relationship management

Your sales success depends on customer relationships. But just like personal relationships, they won't flourish if you don't nurture them. With sales tracking software, you can be sure that you're taking timely and meaningful steps to build strong customer relationships - such as reaching out to them at the right time using the right channels.

Sales tracking software can analyze what actions led to specific results in the past to help you choose the most effective next step for your current sales interactions. For example, if a prospect seems engaged with your nurturing efforts but is failing to take the next step and book a demo, you can look at successful past interactions and replicate what worked then.

Additionally, sales tracking tools help reps identify and engage with customers they can up- or cross-sell. These are important opportunities to strengthen relationships and grow revenue for your company.

Opportunities for coaching and support

Sales tracking software can support busy managers by identifying reps who need extra attention - and even pinpoint specific areas of the sales process where they're struggling. This helps managers understand exactly what resources and coaching to provide - saving them time while setting their team up for success.

For example, a rep has a full pipeline and is meeting their goals for booking client meetings. However, sales tracking identifies that they get customers to the negotiation phase, but have a poor closing rate. This tells you that price negotiation may be a weakness for this rep. To help, you could provide personalized coaching on negotiation techniques or have them shadow a more experienced team member with a great closing rate to learn some tips.

Large-scale data analysis

Because most communication is now virtual, sales teams have a ton of data to analyze. By choosing software with AI and automation capabilities, teams can analyze data quickly on a much larger scale. For example, AI-powered analytics tools can review all your sales data (emails, call transcripts, social media interactions, etc.) and surface trends that may lead to new sales opportunities or a pivot in your go to market strategy- such as identifying when a new competitor enters the market. From there, you can adjust your sales techniques and pricing strategies as needed.

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How can sales tracking software help measure performance and track KPIs?

When you begin sales tracking, you must first determine which sales metrics (KPIs) you want to focus on. To make the most of your data, you should focus on what's most important - and this will depend on your overall business goals.

For example, if your organization is focused on building loyal, repeat customers, customer lifetime value (CLV) is an important data point to track. This KPI shows when reps are building strong relationships that promote customer loyalty.

Sales tracking software also makes it possible to track specific KPIs for each of your reps - including metrics based on their position. For example, a more junior representative may be monitored on all their activity metrics, while an experienced rep may be tracked on more specific metrics, such as pipeline and meetings booked. When evaluating sales managers, you can also analyze the performance of their entire team, which typically determines commissions and goals.

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Features to look for in sales tracking software

All sales tracking software is not created equal. By making sure that your new tool has the features your company needs, your team will see more success - and an easier transition. Features to look for include:

• Automation: Entering data manually is time consuming and error prone. With automation, you can automatically capture all daily sales activity data. This eliminates the issue of sales reps not logging their activities or forgetting to enter key information. By selecting a sales tracking tool with automation, you can significantly improve the quality of your data.
• Single platform: Many sales tracking tools integrate with CRMs. But, this can sometimes create multiple versions of data, loss of data, and incomplete insights due to data synchronization delays. I've found it beneficial to use a sales tracking tool that's built into your CRM. This way, all stakeholders can view, track, and analyze opportunities in the same place - using a single source of data.
• AI-based:AI-powered tools provide predictive and generative insights you can use immediately. They can help reps better manage their schedules and prioritize tasks - like focusing on prospects who are more likely to close using AI predictive scoring. Armed with these insights, sales reps can optimize their time and increase revenue.

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Best sales tracking and analytics software

With everything on one integrated platform, you'll see better forecasting and increased revenue generation. Here are three ways Sales Cloud can help your sales organization shift to data-driven selling:

1. Predict business outcomes with confidence: Build custom forecasts based on products, teams, reps, and other categories. With built-in charts, your reps can see actionable forecast views and get additional KPI insights. You can also set up forecasts that eliminate silos, such as departments and regions, and give a fuller picture of what to expect.
2. Close faster with pipeline and deal insights: Get a unified view of pipeline metrics, top opportunities, and weekly deal updates. The software also highlights change signals and AI-driven deal insights that can help identify potential pipeline risks. Reps can select which insights to display, creating a customized view most useful for their work styles and goals.
3. Find more opportunities with AI: Beyond just providing data, AI insights help you uncover trends, opportunities, and determine next steps - like when to follow up with a prospect or go after a new customer segment. Through dashboards, sales teams can track specific KPIs such as customer engagement, win rate, and average deal size, and identify areas to target for better results. And with generative AI, you can save time writing emails or proposals.

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Go further, faster with sales tracking software

Using sales tracking software, your sales team can gain the insights needed to improve efficiencies and increase revenue. And when you choose software that meets your needs, the process becomes more seamless and productive.

However, purchasing the software doesn't solve the challenges by itself. You must create the right workflow that uses the data to take the actions needed to level up your sales tactics. When you create the right processes around your software, your organization will quickly see benefits - from increased revenue to improved job satisfaction and stronger customer relationships.

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Katie is an experienced marketer with more than 14 years of B2B SaaS, sales, and customer success experience.