The Expert's Guide to Sales Tracking in 2021

Sales tracking is precisely how it sounds. It involves tracking sales and all the processes that are involved in your sales process.

There is more to it than that, however.

A lot more.

By tracking every aspect of your sales process, you can gain valuable insights into exactly how effective and efficient your sales processes are - or are not - operating.

This puts you in a position to streamline workflows, improve your sales rep’s productivity, identify bottlenecks, and identify a whole host of other things that are potentially harming your sales numbers.

Sales tracking plays a vital role in helping organizations of all sizes improve their sales numbers and increase their revenue.

If you’re not currently using sales tracking software, the hard reality is that you really don’t have a clear picture of how efficient your sales processes are.

Ready to improve your sales processes and improve your bottom line?

Here’s an expert’s guide to sales tracking covering everything you need about how and why you should be using sales tracking software:

What Is Sales Tracking?

To explain sales tracking in a sentence;

Sales tracking is the process of tracking, monitoring, and recording every aspect of your sales process. It’s beyond what a CRM can do today.

Sales tracking means every customer interaction, like phone calls, messages, and emails is all tracked. Moreover, it can track prospecting and outreach statistics, sales rep performance, time spent on maintaining customer records - literally every action that goes into your sales process.

The more data points you’re able to collect, the better accuracy and visibility you get into those data points. With this data, the better placed you will be to improve your sales process.

This is what makes SetSail the most effective sales tracking software on the market. Not only does SetSail track more data points than other sales tracking software, but it also uses a combination of AI and behavioral science to turn that data into actionable insights.

Why Sales Tracking Is So Important

I think we can all agree that sales today is different than what it was 10 years ago..

According to Gartner, when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers. .

Therefore, how effective your sales processes are within that 17% will play a crucial role in how profitable and sustainable your business is.

It’s this simple; the more you track and hone your sales process to better connect with the customer, the more effective and productive your teams will be.

To break this down a step further and show you how sales tracking can help, here are some of the core benefits of using sales tracking software:

Monitoring Sales Rep Performance

Sales reps are on the front line as customer-facing teams. Having productive and efficient sales reps has a direct correlation with the number of successful sales.

Sales tracking software gives you insights into how your sales reps are performing. Moreover, it enables you to go much deeper than just looking at the number of sales they’re making.

You can see how they’re interacting with customers, the types of communication they’re using, how long it’s taking to convert customers into sales, where they’re spending their time, and much more.

SetSail enables you to use these insights to highlight strengths and weaknesses with each rep. This helps you identify training needs so you can coach each rep to perform their best.

You can also see each of your team members’ performance in a leaderboard, set monetary rewards, and promote a more productive selling environment.

Improve Processes and Increase Win Rates

The ultimate goal behind tracking sales data is to use that data to identify weaknesses or areas in a sales process that you can improve.

Automating high-impact tasks that improve win rates is a huge part of improving efficiency. The biggest complaint most sales reps have is that they don’t spend enough time doing the right activities to close a sale.

This is because data entry, maintaining records, paperwork, and various other administrative tasks get in the way. Old habits get in the way, too.

Sales tracking software enables you to identify precisely what tasks improve win rates - and ways to surface a lot of these insights to drive impact.

Using SetSail, you can set up rules to track the most important behaviors and lift your team’s performance across every leading indicator of success.

This is a huge shift in thinking about sales tracking. Most businesses that adopt this approach see a return on their investment instantly just from the number of leading indicators of success that sales reps improve on..

Better Understand Customer Behaviors

How well you understand your customers will determine how effectively you can serve them.

Unfortunately, sales has up to now been centered around understanding and rewarding the rep’s activity.

The problem with that is that no matter how much your sales reps repeat tasks or how hard they work, if the customer doesn’t respond, all of that is in vain.

90% of what SetSail rewards the reps on is based on the customer’s response. Did they accept the meeting? Did they respond with a positive language to a pricing-related email? Were enough of the new contacts involved in the process?

That’s what makes SetSail’s sales tracking so unique and impactful - that it’s primarily based on customer’s buying signals.

Sales Tracking Metrics That Make a Difference

The idea of tracking vast amounts of data can feel overwhelming. No two businesses are the same, and some metrics will be more critical to some businesses than others.

With SetSail, you can set custom leading indicators of success and select signals that are important to your business objectives. For e.g. if your goal is to ramp new Enterprise Reps who are selling a complex product to a new market, the signals you track will be around early pipeline activity that leads to growth.

To give you a better idea, here are some of the most important sales metrics businesses use SetSail’s sales tracking software to improve:

Unlike traditional metrics of pipeline and revenue, these are the ‘small wins’ metrics that are not backwards looking. Rather, they are predictive signals that if followed, there will be more pipeline and more revenue.

Machine Learning, correlation, and natural language processing algorithms do their magic behind the scenes, but fundamentally, there are 4 basic types of these signals.

They are like the ‘primary colors’ of your unique sales tracking palette. The ones you can use to paint your masterpiece of doing right by your customers and your business.

The Basic Metrics

As already touched on, leading indicators, not lagging ones are important to look at in this new digital age of sales. But some of these are very basic, intuitive behaviors that every rep should follow. However, for some reason, doing them consistently is the hardest part. so. Some of the examples of key metrics that fall into this basic category that tracking software can help improve include:

Meetings completed - You can look at the number of meetings scheduled. But what matters is if they have been completed. And even more important is how many - has the threshold been met for the right number?

Meetings completed with the right buyer - At the end of the day, most reps are evaluated on the quality of their engagement, which is always an important metric. Did they spend time meeting with just anyone or the right buyer personas?

Contacts engaged - Contact conversion rate is often a “hidden” metric. Yet, it gives an insight into how effective a salesperson is at driving business, regardless of their total sales.

Contacts newly engaged - Finding new prospects is the lifeblood of a sales department. Identifying if reps are consistently engaging  the new leads is equally as crucial as those closing the most.

Time-based Metrics

Speed is the currency of business. In today’s noisy, distracted world just how quickly you are able to respond and engage your customer - the speed and the velocity of it is everything. That’s why time-based sales metrics that a tracking software can capture are so important. Some of the key time-based metrics SetSail’s sales tracking tool help you in accelerating deals include:

Same-day follow up - Keeping prospects engaged is essential.. Tracking the time it took a rep to respond and finding ways to improve this metric can increase win rate by more than 10%

Number of contacts engaged in a quarter - Every added contact  in an in-progress deal throughout a quarter is a sales opportunity getting closer to a successful finish line. Keeping a closer eye on this metric helps identify where to focus effort and if too much time goes by without the right engagements. .

Pricing inquiry within 7 days - Hearing a question about pricing within 7 days increases your likelihood to win by 42%. Tracking this metric transparently will ensure reps do everything in their power to have a great initial meeting to be asked that. Pricing inquiry within 7 days from a VP - Now imagine the persona asking the pricing question is a VP with a full buying power. Knowing that they need to focus on that metric is a powerful motivator for great initial VP engagements.

Milestone Metrics

SetSail’s sales tracking software collects many data points around the milestones that indicate a key event happened during a sales cycle, or more importantly, that it hasn’t happened yet. Knowing that will help in rep coaching; rewarding those milestones will help in rep success. .

Here are some of the milestone metrics that will help you get an insight into how you can improve your sales process:

1st active Director+ contact - There are only so many hours in the day to hold pipeline reviews that are based on opinions. This one metric can tell you all there is to know if a deal is still worth discussing. .

NDA signed - There is no better indication if a customer is committed than her signing a legal document to keep speaking with you. Another pipeline review slam dunk to know how to guide and motivate reps towards the right steps.

Multi-threading milestones - Whether it’s the 5th contact or the 3rd, depending on the complexity of deals you work, multi-threading is key. According to Gartner, on average 7+ decision makers are involved in a typical deal. So if a rep is speaking with one buyer, tracking and motivating him to involve more is key.  

Coverage Metrics

Lastly, a sales tracking software needs to provide not only insights around individual events, but also, overall standing of the business. That’s why coverage metrics like below are so important:

Meet with at least 50% of books in a quarter - If your business is highly dependent on expansion, you must track and motivate sales to meet with more of their customers in their territory. Because those relationship metrics can be a make or break of your business in that quarter.

Receive emails from 30% of the target account list - Coverage metrics can also be key in building pipeline. Your BDRs, Inside Sales, and new logo AEs might have propensity to buy lists that they need to go through. But how do you know how much through the list they are?

Coverage metrics like ‘receive emails from 30% of your target account list’ can be a good stretch metric to track to ensure overall business success.

How SetSail Provides a Complete End-to-End Sales Tracking  Solution

You can’t perform sales tracking with the right software. SetSail is the first sales tracking Signal-Based Selling software to use data science in combination with AI to provide a proper end-to-end solution.

Using SetSail, you can gain deep data-driven insights into every aspect of your sales process. From managing sales teams to bridging the gap between insights and action - SetSail collects, cleans, and compares hundreds of data points.

The software can be broken down into three main stages:

Automate Sales Data

The first stage is collecting data. SetSail Collect picks up every interaction between your reps and customers. Every point of data is captured, cleansed, enriched, and passed into your CRM.

SetSail recognizes that every business has different needs. You can set rules to tailor what data is collected and how you want it placed into your CRM.

You can also access the SetSail Collect API if you want to create custom rules and control how the data is collected and processed.

Harvest Small Wins

As data is collected, SetSail Discover leverages machine learning to analyze customer interactions and piece together the customer behaviors that drive your sales process.

By comparing data to hundreds of built-in data signals, SetSail Discover helps you better understand how leads are moving through your pipeline.

You can also see how your reps perform and analyze what your best performing reps are doing right, enabling you to replicate your top reps’ success and identify training needs for the lowest-performing.

Drive Rep Action

SetSail Accelerate is the final stage. This element provides you with custom-tailored incentives to help motivate and reward your reps that follow the best practices discovered in the last stage.

The software captures and records all of your rep’s performances, presenting the data in a leaderboard. You’ll see their strengths and weaknesses, and SetSail highlights areas that need attention.

You can then set monetary or other rewards for your top-performing reps to work towards. Ultimately, creating a culture of healthy competition and continual development, resulting in bringing out the very best in every rep.

Conclusion

Sales tracking plays an incredibly important - and often essential - role in improving sales processes and maximizing your sales revenue.

There are two main parts to sales tracking; collecting data and turning it into data-driven insights to improve your sales cycle.

SetSail provides a complete end-to-end sales tracking solution. There is no other software platform that collects and compares as many data points, then turns that data into custom solutions.

To find out how SetSail can boost your sales reps’ productivity and improve your conversion rates across the board, get in touch and book a demo today.

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