Tracking your business sales will show you exactly how successful or unsuccessful your sales processes are and how much profit is made up of the sales. The last thing you would want is to spend money on something that is not effective and the only way to do this is to track your sales and marketing efforts. Sales tracking allows you to have a better understanding of how potential customers can talk to you, and inform you of certain issues that may exist in your sales process. It also helps you understand the effects & outcomes of your sales channels.
5 steps on how you can set up your sales tracking process:
Identify your audience
A standard sales and marketing process is important to identify your target audience and understand who your customers are. This step helps you plan the rest of the process more clearly and also helps you identify the influential people, decision-makers and buyers.
Point out the sources
Understand the online and offline platforms your audience is more likely to see your sales on. You can look into most common social media platforms, in-app adverts, keywords & frequently visited websites.
Identify what stage each lead will fall into
The next step would be to define potential steps that the audience could take – this could be cold leads, hot leads or customers. These stages can differ by company and industry.
State how potential customers can interact with you.
You can start by listing all the communications points between you and your audience. This could be through social media chat, emails, web forms, and phone calls.
Set metrics that require constant measurement
Now that you have built a system, you can see what you need to measure your sales tracking system. Do you have traffic from your website? or several people from other sources.
10 reasons why you should track your sales:
Stronger sales analysis
You will have a stronger overview of your sales activities from start to finish. You will have much more data to analyse your business transactions and daily activities, helping you make informed business decisions.
Better understand on products and services
With more understanding of your products and services, you can focus more on improving your value offering instead of wondering why people aren’t interested in your service or product.
Finding the gaps in your pipeline
With sales tracking, you will be able to identify what the catcher of your product is. You will be able to see how people are deciding on buying your product. By going through this information you can find the major gaps in your sales process and be in the position to rectify them.
Higher customer satisfaction
Any small business that wants to survive longer than 5 months should be built around customer satisfaction. Having a good sales tracking record can help you identify what customers appreciate most about your product, helping you improve on it.
Helps you know what you can afford
Knowing your sales statistics and profits per sales will help you make better decisions on marketing. You will need to know your sales rates to know what a sales lead is worth to you.
Shows you where you get the best leads from
Your tracking should show you where you get most of your leads and sales from. So, if you run an advert in a newspaper you know should ultimately know how many sales that ad is bringing in. This allows you to calculate your total profits as well as your cost per lead.
Helps you see what marketing strategy is not working for you
By tracking your sales, you will be able to see what marketing strategy you could be paying for that is not bringing you any sales leads at all. You could also have a further look into it to see why it is not working which could save you a lot of money.
Increase activities that drive sales
If face-to-face recommendations have been proven to bring up sales, you should encourage your sales reps to do this more frequently with the customers. The best sales tracker would be able to identify the best cross-sale product for each individual client.
Maximum operational efficiency
How much of your time do you spend on routine administrative tasks? What if you could reduce the time spent by 50%? What would you do in your spare time? In short, tracking your sales and what works best for your company gives you more time to focus on what matters most.
Greater insight on more informed decision making
Effective Sales rely greatly on maintaining a clear and accurate view of the progress your sales are making. With better insights, you will be able to identify the bottlenecks that are slowing your sales down. Tracking your sales helps you save a lot of time and provides you with more information to make more informed decisions.
In conclusion, the benefits of tracking sales are extensive. The best question to ask would be “What is best for me?”. When choosing a sales tracking system, it is very important to evaluate your needs and select a system that is powerful enough to bring you more sales leads and fewer expenses.
