If you’re involved at all in the world of sales, you’ve probably heard of sales trackers. It’s not exactly a revolutionary concept. For as long as human civilization has had commerce, we’ve been keeping an eye on who we sell to, how much we sell them, and how we might be able to sell more. It’s every bit as fundamental as developing relationships and knowing your product inside and out.
But despite their long-standing existence and utility, there’s a lot of confusion surrounding what sales trackers actually are and how best to employ them in order to increase productivity and drive bottom-line revenue growth.
In today’s article, we’re going to be going through sales trackers with a fine-toothed comb, analyzing how best to deploy these invaluable tools to streamline activities and enhance outcomes.
Understanding Sales Trackers
The simplest way to think of a sales tracker is as a tool or system you can use to monitor and record various aspects of the sales process. Given that selling is a multifaceted discipline by definition, the way you track the process can vary hugely. As a consequence, sales trackers are designed to be versatile frameworks that can be adapted or tweaked to fit just about any purpose.
Ranging from simple, spread-sheet-based systems to more sophisticated software solutions, there are several different approaches to tracking your sales efforts, each with their upsides and downsides. But they all share a few key features.
The most important aspect of a sales tracker is keeping key information recorded, organized, and ready for further analysis whenever that may be required. Data points like contact details, interaction history, deal status, and performance metrics are all crucial elements that need to be accounted for.
Without a thorough understanding of those data points, any sales planning, strategy formulation, and decision-making efforts are going to be significantly hampered.
The Value-Add of Sales Trackers
Sales tracking spreadsheets are so much more than a way to keep an eye on how many deals a sales team has closed and how near it is to meeting its quota for that quarter. There are a range of different areas in which a sales goals tracker adds value to a modern sales team; here are a few of the most compelling.
Data-Driven Insights
One of the most compelling ways sales tracking spreadsheets add value to your team’s efforts is by providing data-driven insights into your processes. If you’re keeping close tabs on sales performance, customer behavior, and market trends, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions and strategize more effectively.
Put simply, it takes the guesswork out of your top-level planning. You don’t need to guess how you’re doing because you’ve got all the data you need to know for sure.
Efficiency and Productivity
Automating data collection and analysis reduces time spent on manual admin and busywork. As a result, your sales teams will have more time and energy to focus on selling, which in turn leads to a significant increase in efficiency and productivity across the board.
After all, more time spent on the right deals means more of those deals get across the line. Any steps you can take to maximize the energy the sales team puts into its work are worth taking.
Improved Customer Relationships
Relationships are everything in the world of sales. By maintaining detailed records of customer interactions, preferences, and feedback, you’ll be able to build better, more lasting relationships with your customers.
Sales tracking spreadsheets make it easy to keep track of every single thing that happens with each customer, giving you the detailed history you need to close more deals and make sure everybody you’re selling to feels heard and valued.
How to Get Going with Sales Trackers
Getting started with sales tracking spreadsheets can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. Breaking the process down into its core components is the best way to get started on the road towards improving your processes and enhancing your team’s performance.
Assess Your Needs
Here’s a thought that sounds simple, but is overlooked surprisingly often, even by experienced sales professionals: if you don’t know what you need, you have no way of knowing how to get it.
The first step towards figuring out how to set up your sales tracker is determining what exactly you need to, well, track. Some products and services will have different KPIs and goals to others, and there’s no point in having a beautiful, custom tracker set up for the wrong process altogether.
Choose the Right Tool
The sales tracker tool you end up selecting will depend heavily on what your specific business needs are. Again, it can feel like there’s an overwhelming amount of choice out there, but by focusing on a few key elements, you should be able to narrow the field considerably without too much effort.
Focusing on things like ease of use, integrations, and scalability will give you the best chance of picking a sales tracker that can slot right into your existing workflow, rather than shoe-horning in a tool that doesn’t fit.
Implement and Train
Once you’ve figured out what you need to track and which tool you’re going to track it all with, it’s time to dive into the deep end and get started. But before you implement the sales tracker into your process, it’s always a good idea to provide thorough training to your team.
Ensuring everybody understands how to use the tool effectively will cut down on unforced errors and keep morale as high as possible while you all become familiar with the new workflow. Don’t be afraid to spend as much time as you need to on this part of the process. Time and effort invested at this stage will pay dividends further down the line.
Regularly Review and Update
It would be a mistake to assume that just because you’ve implemented a sales goals tracker and it’s working well, there’s no room for improvement. The world of sales is constantly in flux; what looks great today might well be out of date by tomorrow.
In order to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your sales tracker, it’s vital that you regularly review your processes and make any necessary updates to stay aligned with your targets.
Integrate with Other Business Tools
A sales tracking spreadsheet is only as powerful as the information it has to work with. To get the most bang for your proverbial buck, integrate your tracker with as many of your other business tools as you can, like your calendar or CRM.
(And by the way, if you’re looking for a lightweight, user-friendly CRM your whole team will love using, learn more about noCRM here.)
This won’t just streamline your data collection and smooth out the process for your whole team. It’ll keep you on track to achieve your goals and prevent any deals from unnecessarily slipping through the cracks.
Best Practices for Using Sales Trackers
Make the Most of the Analytics Features
Use the analytical capabilities of sales trackers to get deeper insights into the trends and patterns of your sales process. You’re going to end up with a goldmine of information: make the most of it by diving deep into your data whenever you can.
It’s a cheat code for forecasting your performance and being able to make micro-adjustments on the fly as your team continues to refine its sales process.
Update Information Regularly
Ensure that all team members regularly update the sales tracking spreadsheet with the latest information. In addition to being a good habit, this will also keep your data as accurate and relevant as possible. It can often be a good idea to implement a weekly check-in or update session.
That way, everybody knows what’s expected of them and has another goal to work towards each week, while still keeping the information in the tracker as tidy as possible.
Get Personal with Your Tracker
Why be general when you could be specific instead? Don’t be afraid to customize your sales goals tracker to be specific to your business needs.
As well as reducing operational friction and other minor admin headaches, you’ll find that even tweaking minor aspects can greatly increase efficiency across the entire sales team.
Encourage As Much Use As Possible
Any sales tracking spreadsheet is at its most effective when your entire team is using it regularly as a seamless part of their day-to-day operations as sales professionals. In order to get the maximum benefits out of the tracker, encourage the whole team to use it as much as they can. No change or update is too minor or insignificant to be considered.
By staying flexible and adapting your process as you go, you’ll be that much more prepared to face the inevitable curveballs that the world of sales will throw at you.
Conclusion
Sales trackers go way beyond simply monitoring sales and deal closes. By functioning as integral components of a broader strategic sales approach, they can monitor, record, analyze, and motivate a sales team to achieve their quotes and accomplish their goals. Effectively implementing and utilizing sales trackers, while seemingly difficult at first glance, will soon become second nature.
Your sales process will thank you for taking the time to get familiar with trackers, and the bottom-line results will speak for themselves.
