February 16, 2024
Sales is a bit like fishing. There’s nothing stopping you from going out and casting your line into the open water. If you’re lucky, you might even catch a couple. But after enough time chasing nibbles and pulling up a few boots, you’ll come to realize this approach isn’t so effective because you can't see what's under the surface.
Sales is a lot more hands-on. Between finding leads, nurturing them, pitching, and following up, there are a lot of points of interaction between the initial bite and onboarding.
With each of those interactions comes a data point. These data points range from details like where the lead came from to what stage of the sales cycle they’re in, revealing insights about your sales process.
This information can help you determine when to set up meetings with leads, which sales enablement materials (like sell sheets) to send them, what questions to ask, and more. But in order to harness that data, you need a way to track your sales activities.
What you need is sales tracking software.
What Is Sales Tracking?
Sales tracking is the process of measuring and monitoring each aspect of your sales process. From the moment a lead enters your radar to the handoff to customer success, it provides a deeper look into what’s going on behind the scenes at each moment in time.
On a micro level, it gives you more information about your leads, like who they are, how they got into your system, and where they stand in your sales funnel. But on a macro level, sales activity tracking can also reveal insights about your sales organization as a whole, like how reps are performing or whether goals are being met.
What Is Sales Tracking Software?
Sales tracking software is an application or tool that helps you measure and analyze your sales process. It collects all sorts of data about your customers, deals, reps, and sales ops, organizes it, and, powered by entity resolution, turns it into actionable information that helps drive decisions.
What To Look for in Sales Tracking Software
The right software will help you track leads from the top of the funnel, through the proposal process, to the sale and beyond. Here's a handful of features to look for.
Conversion Rate
The number of leads that convert into sales is the most important metric for knowing whether your sales pipeline is working. By determining your conversion rate, you can identify areas that are working.
More importantly, you'll be able to see which areas need improvement. This will allow you to make process changes that will hopefully bring your conversion rate up.
Revenue Per Sale
Your team is, of course, tracking overall sales and revenue. But imagine if you and your team could gather data on the source of revenue for every sale you make.
This can open a host of new sales opportunities by allowing you to focus on popular products and services. At the same time, you can see what offerings need to be adjusted, or even possibly phased out.
Total Addressable Market
Once you know how much revenue each product or service generates, you can estimate how much revenue your team may be able to generate from each one.
Tracking your total addressable market (also known as TAM) can also help you measure market penetration, and determine how many resources to dedicate to new opportunities in specific areas.
Funnel Reports
You likely spent a lot of time building your B2B sales funnel. All that work will be wasted if you don't track what's going on at each stage.
Any problems in the funnel could keep potential customers from moving from one stage to the next. Identifying those issues as soon as they arise will let you fix them and keep those prospects moving through the funnel.
Activity Reports
You know your team is in contact with multiple leads at any given time. But do you know how much time they're spending on each lead? This is crucial information because you don't want your team wasting time on leads that aren't panning out as quickly as they should.
With activity reports, your team can track every interaction they have with every lead, and by what method. This will enable them to spend their time where it will yield the most and best results. You can also guide them in changing tactics, if necessary.
Sales by Lead Source
Do you know where most of your sales come from? You should. If you don't, you could be wasting time and money on sources that produce weak leads, or none at all.
For example, if you find most of your sales are coming directly from your proposals, you need to find ways to get more proposals into more prospects' hands, and then use sales tracking software to monitor the success rate.
Sales Forecasting
All of this data gives you more control over the day-to-day sales activities. But you also need to know where all those activities are going to take the company. That's where sales forecasting comes in.
Any sales tracking software will collect a lot of data. The best ones will aggregate that data for you, and put it into more manageable forms. With this condensed data, you and your team can help your company see what lies ahead and prepare accordingly.
Top Software for Sales Tracking
Now that you know what to look for, let's review some of the best sales tracking software options available.
Salesforce
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that gives you a holistic view of your customers, everywhere they interact with your brand.
It logs all of their data, allowing you to develop a clearer understanding of their profile and needs so you can tailor your approach and provide a better customer experience.
Salesforce also has a marketplace that contains compatible sales tracking apps built to integrate with Salesforce.
Gong
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that provides much more than just revenue analytics and forecasting. Gong for teams is a rep tracking tool that helps leaders help their reps win more deals.
By harnessing and highlighting data on rep behavior and performance, it helps leaders understand what sets top performers apart from the rest. Then, it provides actionable insights that allow sales leaders to ramp up new hires faster, replicate winning rep behavior, and drive better alignment across teams.
Using Gong, sales leaders can provide personalized coaching based on data, not opinions.
Outreach
Outreach is a sales engagement and intelligence platform that aims to maximize sales effectiveness. Pulling data from Salesforce, it takes a deep dive into your customer interactions and pipeline activity to provide conversation intelligence and buyer sentiment analysis.
With real-time AI assistance, reps can receive real-time support that helps them crush every customer interaction -- before, during, and after. Armed with these insights, you can “Accelerate deals with actions that matter,” as outreach puts it.
Clari
Clari is a revenue operations platform that makes both revenue forecasting and intelligence far more accurate. It provides total visibility across your business, empowering each team member and leader with the data they need to make informed decisions. It reveals the complete history of your revenue data, helping each team understand where they're at, how much they need, and how to get there.
Plus, it offers automated reporting and workflows that help ops leaders streamline, scale, and standardize forecasting and revenue cadences.
Proposify
We’d be remiss to leave out our own tool, wouldn’t we! As you already know, visibility is crucial if you want control over your sales process. While the other sales tracking software solutions in this list are amazing for sales lead tracking through the funnel, none of them tell you what’s going on after you send a proposal.
But Proposify does.
Beyond making it way easier and faster to send winning proposals to your prospects, Proposify helps you track those proposals once they leave your hands.
With the activity feed, you can see exactly what your prospect is doing with your proposal—when they’ve opened it, how long they’ve spent on it, which pages they’ve visited most, and so on. It can even send you reminders to reach out and follow up with your prospect.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is software for sales tracking that gives users access to lead management, communications tracking, pipeline automation, and detailed reporting. In their words, it's "designed to keep you selling."
It helps reps manage new and existing opportunities, and like Proposify, can even send notifications telling reps when to step in.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is another widely used CRM software best known for its vast array of features. It comes with a suite of sales tracking tools like customizable dashboards, sales forecasting, detailed analytics, and automated workflows.
While its interface isn't as intuitive as some of the other options, it's a powerful solution that helps reps and leaders gain a better understanding of their sales process.
Plus, it allows you to leverage gamification to turn the chore of capturing leads, measuring goals, and accomplishing tasks into a competition, making it easier for reps to stay productive.
Build a Custom Sales Tracking Solution
Sales tracking software is one of the best ways to measure and optimize your sales process. It provides insight into your operation so you can see what’s going on below the surface, allowing you to make better informed decisions. With so many clear benefits, the question isn’t whether you should use it, it’s which one(s) you should use?
Regardless of your choice, Proposify can seamlessly integrate into your sales funnel, helping you build a complete sales tracking system. Learn more about how adding Proposify to your sales arsenal will maximize visibility into the entire process, from proposal to closing.
