Tracking the actions of the sales team is important even if the impression is that, “We are on the right track”. Sales tracking is the system of keeping records on all parts of your sales process. When done properly, it provides insights on how to convert more prospects into customers. A customer relationship management (CRM) software system with a visual sales pipeline enhances this insight. Effective sales tracking helps businesses to manage relationships in a better fashion and gain more orders in the future by shortening the sales cycle. This can be done in 3 steps:
- Nurturing the lead:
Provide prospective customers with enough information to move through the sales cycle and nearer to the point of purchase. - Trust:
Build trust by adding value, as people buy from you when they trust you. - Perseverance:
Many sales reps are just not persistent enough to stay with the prospect throughout the sales cycle. The key is not to give up and continuously follow up on the prospect, to make sure that you’re there when they are ready to make the purchase.
Following these three steps will help you to attract new customers, but what about retaining existing customers? This is where sales tracking especially matters as it highlights the history of their needs. Information about their current environment should be maintained, to know what their next aspiration is. For example a customer might have an inventory system but not a legacy system. If that is the case, you are in a position to offer services and products to meet their needs, and even anticipate future requirements and be ready for it.
An existing customer has the element of trust in you. To capitalize on that, is to use the sales history in the CRM system. This service history in the CRM system can be mined, so that information on whether there have been gaps in servicing them can be brought forth. These issues with clients can then be resolved, thus bettering the relationship with them. Hence sales tracking is a key part of managing customer relationships.
What a Sales Tracking CRM can do for You
Well, there’s more to tracking sales performance than closing deals. An ideal CRM with sales tracking facility, should not only provide you with a system for tracking the activities of your sales team — calls made, emails sent, meetings taken — but also should enable the measurement of the impact of sales efforts. That is the measurement of the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales strategies and activities. This enables to visually represent the motion of how many potential customers are being moved through the sales funnel by your sales team. That’s sweet news for sales managers, as then now with a great CRM they can instantly track their team’s performance and determine where leads get stuck in the sales process. Tracking motion allows the sales manager to gauge the sales process over time, and map the success of sales efforts over weeks, months, quarters, and years. It also gives a greater degree of control over the sales funnel itself. When prospects are stuck at a stage in the sales funnel, sales reps and managers can put their heads together to bring forth solutions. Such jams in the sales funnel can then be anticipated in the future and not be allowed to happen at all. At this stage, even the VP-Sales can get involved with the additional information the CRM software provides, which enables the VP to make informed decisions, instead of groping in the dark.
The Key Benefits of Sales Tracking are:
- Better management of the sales pipeline.
- Clear communication between marketing and sales teams.
- Optimized demand generation efforts.
- Greater insight into your sales operations.
Features to look out for in a Good Sales Tracking CRM
The following features if existing in the Sales Tracking module of a CRM, will make for a comprehensive analysis of the sales process a company:
- Leads Not Contacted Report:
Gives you a list of leads who have not been contacted by your sales team. This can be obtained user-wise or group-wise (i.e as per team) to see which leads need to be contacted as soon as possible. It tackles a crucial gap in the sales cycle as the moment you know a lead has not yet been contacted, you can instantly reach out to him or her to ensure that you do not lose that lead. - Revenue Analytics:
Track revenue based on geography, sales user and percentage of his or her revenue contribution to the whole company. Presented in the form of pie charts. The revenue analytics can comprehensively highlight which activity is giving the most number of revenue. For example: “Are your market research leads bringing in more revenue than your field sales team?” Also, how does this compare against inbound leads. - Lead Stage Analysis:
Helps you analyze your lead database based on the stages they are in. This could be according to the change in owner, the lead stage history or simply the time a lead spends in each stage. - GPS-based Geo Location Tracking:
The sales manager can enable GPS tracking of his sales team while on the field. That means, he can know their exact location, which meeting they have completed, and the activity and notes associated with the lead. Knowing the location of the sale team on the field will also ensure that tasks can be allocated to him or her on the go. - Meeting Management Dashboard:
A unified dashboard lets you list all the possible meetings within the geography. This allows you to plan and assign the most suitable route for each particular sales agent. - Daily sales, sales progress and sales projection reports
Choosing the Right Sales Tracking CRM
Tools for sales tracking of the activities and motions pertaining to the sales funnel can be incorporated into the CRM during the CRM design and implementation phases. These tools can provide the insights needed to win deals, strengthen customer relationships, and develop powerful sales strategies for the future. These information tools help to identify, connect and sustain ongoing relationships with buyers and are more powerful than ever, helping to do things, few could have imagined even just a few years ago. Thus these powerful information tools must be used strategically, as a means of qualifying and disqualifying leads in the sales pipeline. Remember this superior technology is used to actually spend as little time as possible with leads that aren’t truly qualified. The most important factor to keep in mind while choosing the CRM with the right sales tracking tools, is synchronization. The system of keeping track of and prioritizing business opportunities must synchronize precisely with the sales process of the sales team and support it at every stage. Also, any contact management system that doesn’t synchronize with the sales process and not automatically pop up with the tools and resources needed to interact effectively with a customer at any given stage, needs to be reconfigured or even replaced.
Sales Metrics after Sales Tracking
Sales tracking puts one in an analysis mode. The question is what is the inference from what is measured? Such reasoning helps a company to remain competitive in the industry. Possible sales metrics that can be used on the data collected are:
- What activity and/or lead source most predictably leads to business discussions with a targeted decision-maker… and how often does it do that?
- What is the ideal next step following an initial positive discussion with a decision maker… and how often is that next step being requested?
- What percentage of prospective buyers typically move forward from any given stage of the sales process to the next?
- How do the graduation numbers in each stage of a company in a vertical compare with the numbers of other companies in the same vertical?
- How many discussions with a decision maker does it typically take to generate a “Yes, we want to do business with you” response?
- How long does an ideal prospect spend in each stage of the sales process? This is a vitally important number. Once we know the answer, we can get a clearer sense of when someone is exceeding the ideal amount of time in any stage… and we can make better decisions about who is, and is not, qualified to buy from us. Someone who dramatically exceeds the optimum time in any given step of the sales process is not a qualified buyer.
The Vymo Advantage
In today’s era a salesperson’s world is populated with information and data, needing technology to organize his or her daily schedule around this data crunching. Vymo has two tech solutions for salespersons designed keeping the sales manager’s needs in mind.
- The Vymo Enterprise Assistant is a mobile-first, AI-enhanced, intelligent, self-learning, pro-active and predictive Personal Sales Assistant. It schedules, communicates, and plans work life; captures data, creates work streams, and helps organizations to achieve goals; and detects and auto updates, the sales representative’s activities. Other pluses are it being user friendly, battery conscious and driven by real time updates.
- Vymo for Salesforce helps Salesforce CRM users understand their sales engagement in detail and improve net business outcomes through prescriptive interventions. Its key features are Automated call logging, Contextual recommendations, Geo detection and intelligence, Seamless integration & setup, and Product distribution strategy. The Sales Force Automation software deployed by Vymo automates the business tasks of sales, including order processing, contact management, information sharing, inventory monitoring and control, order tracking, customer management, sales forecast analysis and employee performance evaluation. Gartner had earlier identified algorithmic sales automation with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence as the third wave of Sales Automation. Vymo was reviewed by Gartner in 2018 under the Mobile Sales Productivity space factoring ‘Sales Enablement’.
Vymo’s sales solutions are used by over 75,000 sales representatives across 50+ global institutions which include AXA, Allianz, Generali, Citibank, HDFC, Yes Bank, FE Credit, and Abu Dhabi Finance.
