Complete sales tracking guide with 5 steps and 6 app templates

When a company wants to boost sales, its people can feel like they’re trying to hit a tiny target while wearing a blindfold. Since they don’t know where to aim, they attempt to cast a wide net and hope something sticks. If you’ve tried to get a sales program off the ground, you can probably sympathize. This struggle doesn’t come from a lack of ability — it comes from a lack of data, which can be a big hurdle for new businesses.

Until new businesses collect enough data to understand their customers, making sales is difficult. But there is a bright side. As your team closes deals, they’ll collect data that can help them visualize their target and fine-tune their efforts. The key is to establish a system for capturing sales data.

Data is essential to efficient sales tracking

Imagine you’re a salesperson working in e-commerce. Unfortunately, you can’t meet prospects in person and get to know what makes them tick. Without data, you only have your intuition, which can be unreliable. If you had data, you’d understand what your audience is interested in and the steps you can take to convert prospects into customers.

This article will help you understand which sales metrics are most important and how you can track them consistently and efficiently. We want you to understand the fundamentals of sales tracking so you can define your ideal customers and target them with consistency. One section that will be especially helpful is “Five steps for tracking sales like a pro.” There, we’ll consider the following topics:

• Deciding which metrics to track
• Getting feedback from your team
• Defining the customer journey
• Creating a data repository for all your sources
• Analyzing data to form actionable insights

Feel free to jump ahead. But before diving into these topics, it’s best to start with something more fundamental.

What is sales tracking?

Sales tracking is the recording and monitoring of all aspects of your sales process. However, it is more than simple data collection. For your data to deliver value, you must also analyze it and use the insights learned to improve your sales activity. These insights can help you refine buyer personas, adjust marketing messaging, personalize offers to your users, and much more. 

Companies typically use customer relationship management (CRM) software to collect and share data with their team. Jotform has an app for that. Once your business has a single repository for all of its data, you can organize it so that your team can identify customer patterns and trends. Those patterns help your team find opportunities for improvement and new offerings for customers. Sales tracking is a huge undertaking, especially if you work with a large sales team. But the effort is well worth it.

Sales tracking gives you more control over performance

Without sales data, you could be trying to hit a target you can’t see and don’t fully understand. Sales tracking provides insights based on actual data and helps you sharpen your vision. It prevents teams from making assumption-driven decisions with a low probability of success. Do you want to improve your sales performance? Here are a few of the things you can accomplish with sales tracking: 

• Make data-driven decisions. Decisions based on data are much more likely to be correct than those inspired by intuition. They also increase the accuracy of your decision making and help turn it into a repeatable process that your team can emulate. 
• Identify symptoms of bigger issues. Unfortunately, many problems don’t become apparent until they impact financials or operations. Sales tracking can help you identify where processes are falling short and correct these issues before they impact your bottom line. 
• Test new ideas. Every business tracks metrics, whether it’s overall financial records or micrometrics, such as sales calls per landing page. When you have visibility into sales metrics, you can test new ideas promptly. You’ll quickly learn what activities impact leads, conversions, and open and churn rates long before they turn into sales. 
• Visualize sales rep performance. Without data, you can’t effectively manage your team. Data helps you visualize rep performance across all sales activities. This visibility enables you to provide personalized training to those who need it and helps you learn from your all-stars. 
• Personalize your sales. Companies that use personalization increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. But you can’t personalize offers without data. Imagine trying to guess what your customers might like without considering their past purchases or interests. It’s almost impossible.
• Automate your processes. Sales tracking helps you understand the different steps a customer takes during their journey. With enough data, it’s possible to set up reactions that trigger responses based on common customer actions and automate your processes. Automation can reduce data entry, improve personalization, and shorten follow-up times. 

Trying to manage sales without adequate data is like trying to plan a city from a street-level view. You only see what’s in front of you and have to make decisions based on instinct. On the other hand, companies that use data get a bird’s-eye view, allowing them to see issues, trends, and opportunities in advance. Before you get started, however, you should consider the different metrics you could potentially track.

Breaking down sales tracking metrics

If we compare your goals to points on a map, sales metrics would be the points that identify cities, landmarks, and other map symbols that help you navigate to your destination. Without sales metrics, it’s impossible to know if you’re reaching your sales goals or if you’re getting an accurate picture of your company’s performance. Track at least some of the following metrics for a comprehensive view: 

• Sales activity metrics include any activity where a team member interacts with a customer or prospect. These metrics help you determine sales performance and understand how engaged prospects and customers are. Sales activity can include emails, calls, meetings, product demos, and other customer interactions. 
• Sales lead metrics help you understand your system’s status and volume of leads. They also show you if leads are being generated and nurtured and are moving through the sales funnel in a timely manner. Common metrics include contact date, next action, lead action, lead status, lead response time, percentage of leads dropped, and average new leads.
• Sales pipeline metrics help you measure the health of your overall sales process. This metric is a good starting point to identify which areas are languishing, so you can fix them before they become a problem. Metrics include sales cycle length, win rate, open and closed opportunities, and conversion rate by sales funnel stage. Our guide to creating a sales pipeline covers lots of useful information for getting started with pipeline metrics and best practices. 
• Sales goal metrics help your team visualize the progress you’ve made toward your goals. Goal metrics can be a motivational tool as they reveal the adjustments needed to stay on track. Metrics include total revenue goals, new customer goals, and sales goals for the week, month, and quarter.
• Sales funnel metrics are essential to understanding if your sales and marketing efforts are working in harmony. When these departments are in sync, it can lead to a 32 percent increase in annual revenue growth in addition to higher customer retention and sales win rates. Typical metrics include inbound leads, outbound leads, qualified leads, conversion rates, and acquisition costs.

Understanding the different types of sales metrics will help you pick the ones that best represent progress toward your goals. In the next section, we’ll talk about taking the first steps in tracking sales.

Five steps for tracking sales like a pro

Sales tracking doesn’t have to be a burden. In fact, a lot of exciting results can come from a sales tracking program that’s well  executed. And implementation is crucial. Figuring out what’s essential and what’s not is key to a program that rocks. Let’s look at five steps that will help you succeed: 

1. Decide on what metrics your company should track. List all the metrics you could potentially track and compare them with your current process and evaluate areas for opportunity. Pare it down to the most important metrics. The key will be using enough metrics to get a clear picture of sales performance but not so many that tracking becomes clunky and hard to manage — especially when you’re getting started. 

2. Get feedback. Feedback is essential to every business process because it helps you attack the problem from different viewpoints. While your final decision may not change, getting input from your team will give you a more well-rounded view of the sales process — even if it only confirms your original assumptions. 

3. Define the stages of the customer journey. One of the goals of sales tracking is to uncover why customers do or don’t buy from you. It’s necessary to outline your customer’s journey from not knowing about your business to becoming a customer. Don’t worry about being 100 percent accurate; this will be refined as you collect more data. Start by connecting the metrics you’ve chosen to their corresponding stage in the customer journey. When you make these connections, you’ll be able to identify the actions that propel prospects through the customer journey and where you’re falling short. 

4. Choose where you’ll track your data. Your goal should be to choose a place that is centralized, consistent, and easy to automate. Employees are more likely to enter data when they can easily access the software they need. It’s even better if you can automate some or most of the data entry process. Additionally, you want a centralized repository for all your data so that employees can pick up where they left off or fill in for other team members. Unifying your data will prevent repeat work, which can be frustrating and time-consuming. 

5. Use your data to take action. The point of collecting and analyzing sales tracking data is to make incremental improvements — and sometimes not-so-incremental — that increase sales and profits. Sales tracking can help you improve your processes continuously by allowing you to test marketing ideas, fix broken processes, and engage customers using the right communication platforms.

These five steps represent the fundamentals of getting started with sales tracking. Refinement will come, so don’t let the process intimidate you. If you get started today, you’ll be that much closer to improving your sales process. With that in mind, let’s consider some software solutions that can help you track like a pro.

A closer look at popular sales tracking software

Sales tracking software makes data management easier. It helps facilitate data entry, keeps data organized and readily available, and presents metrics in a visual format that simplifies extracting insights. But before jumping in, you must analyze your company’s unique needs and compare the options. 

One of the most well-known software options for sales tracking is Salesforce. However, many companies seek out alternatives for various reasons, including their budget, use case, and the product’s complexity. Below is a list of popular sales tracking software to help you compare the options: 

• Salesforce. If you’ve been a part of a conversation about sales software, you’ve likely heard of Salesforce. Its products cover a range of sales and business needs, including customer relationship management, marketing, and analytics. 
• Pipedrive. Pipedrive is an all-in-one sales platform that includes solutions for your CRM, pipeline management, and team collaboration. 
• Bitrix24. Bitrix24 is another all-in-one sales solution that prioritizes collaboration. It has many tools for each category, which can be a positive feature for teams who need to fill different gaps, but it can be confusing for those getting started with sales tracking.
• Insightly. Insightly is a CRM-focused sales tool with an emphasis on building workflow automation. They offer a free plan with limited features for teams of two or less. 
• Zoho. Zoho isn’t purely a sales-focused software solution. Instead, it’s a suite of cloud tools geared toward different aspects of the business. The Zoho suite includes tools for powering your CRM, marketing automation, and social media. 
• Close. Close is a CRM solution specializing in communication with prospects and time management optimization. It contains built-in VoIP and SMS tools to help reps communicate right from the app. 
• Engagebay. Engagebay is an all-in-one sales platform that helps teams manage marketing, sales, and customer support. One differentiator is that the software is free for up to 15 users, lowering the barrier to entry for small teams. 
• Freshworks. Freshworks is another cloud suite of solutions covering a gamut of business needs including customer service, IT service management, and sales and marketing automation. 

Your software should help you track data by conforming to your company’s workflow, not the other way around. If you’re looking for something flexible, scalable, and always at your fingertips, Jotform is the tool for you.

Start using Jotform for your sales tracking needs

What happens when your sales process changes and you need to collect new data? Or when there’s a compliance demand that requires customers to sign a different form? Will your sales platform conform to your needs? Jotform can.

With Jotform, you can create custom forms that allow you to do everything from collecting customer information to helping customers finalize orders. Forms can be created from templates or built from scratch based on your needs.

Your sales team can take even more control with Jotform Apps. These apps are flexible and can be used on any device, giving everyone involved the access and visibility they need to do their job. What can Jotform Apps help you do?

Sales tracking app. A major hurdle to accurately tracking sales is getting employees to enter information in a timely manner. While you may have a CRM solution to help with data organization and analysis, a software needs to simplify your data entry process to be effective. Jotform’s sales tracking app comes preloaded with forms to help team members quickly enter lead information. You can easily customize the app without writing any code, and forms can be added or removed to fit your sales process.

• Easily share the app with your sales team
• Integrate forms directly into your CRM
• Create a seamless workflow for generating leads and logging sales activity

Call tracking app. Important details can get missed when salespeople rely on their memory and don’t share call data with their team. Jotform’s call tracking app provides a simple way to log general call information before it’s forgotten. Data entered in the app is compiled in a secure database and is easily accessible.

• Access data on a globally accessible and easy-to-understand spreadsheet
• Filter and sort data by any metric you consider important
• Make your call tracking app as simple or as complex as you need it to be

Lead tracking app. Nurturing leads during their journey from prospect to customer is a complex process that requires the input and collaboration of your team. A lead tracking system that helps you keep data organized will ensure that leads move through the sales journey and eventually become customers. Our lead tracking app provides tools to track your leads and sales pipeline. Additionally, it includes a CRM system, lead-gen forms, and expense reimbursement tracking for a well-rounded view of the leads in your system. Customize it to your unique lead capturing process.

• Use forms to add lead data directly to your CRM
• Quickly view your sales pipeline
• Keep expenses organized and linked to the right leads

Client management app. CRM software can be expensive and often has more features than you need. Jotform’s client management app helps you track your company’s relationships and client interactions at your speed. Register new clients, access your CRM database, generate reports, and collect feedback in one dashboard. The best part is that you can customize your app to be as simple or as complex as you need.

• Track client and business relationships from a single dashboard
• Customize your CRM database to fit your company workflow
• Add, edit, and remove data with ease

Meeting tracker app. There’s nothing worse than pointless meetings. Use Jotform’s meeting tracker app to ensure everyone gets the most out of every meeting. Our app allows teams to track attendance status, submit meeting reports, and provide feedback from any device. Your whole team can review meeting information at their convenience so nothing gets missed.

• Log meeting information with ease
• Collect and analyze meeting feedback from your team
• Submit and share meeting reports with everyone

Customer tracking app. Customer management doesn’t end with the sale. It’s important to keep customers happy and look for ways to increase their value. Jotform’s customer tracking app helps you onboard new customers, resolve issues, and keep track of customer-specific data, allowing you to respond to customer needs quickly.

• Use smart forms to collect and track customer information
• Give customers access to the app for easy form filling
• Ensure data is securely stored and accessible

One of the challenges of using all-in-one solutions is the complexity of getting started. Jotform Apps allows you to work on one step of the sales tracking process at a time, then connect the steps to create a robust sales tracking solution.

Jotform provides unlimited flexibility

Businesses that respond to the needs of their customers quickly are more likely to succeed. To be agile and boost sales, business leaders must keep a pulse on customer sentiment and maintain data-capturing systems that conform to what’s most important to their audience. Jotform gives businesses unlimited flexibility with its app ecosystem.

You can customize all of Jotform’s apps to the needs of your business. Simply drag and drop the elements you need and remove those you don’t. And our apps don’t stop with sales tracking. As you learn the Jotform Apps ecosystem, you can use it to manage other parts of your business, like scheduling, inventory management, and human resources. Try it free today.

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