Let’s be honest: A sales activity tracker sounds like micromanagement.
Used a certain way, it can be. Tracking sales activities for the sake of monitoring every rep every moment of every day is definitely micromanagement.
But sales activity management gives a new meaning to sales activity tracking. Instead of using it to control sales behaviors, sales activity management uses tracking to guide selling and coaching.
The new sales activity tracker – often referred to as a sales scorecard – helps motivate selling activities that lead to closing business.
Which sales activities are worth tracking?
With activity-based selling, you can identify the key sales activities you should be tracking.
Let’s say you run a field sales team, and you’ve defined the key steps of your sales process as new opportunities, face-to-face meetings, VP-level conversations and wins. These are your activity metrics. Use conversion rates between each step of the process to calculate how much of each activity you need to achieve quota. Then take it a step further to divide the total number of activities among your sales team, and assign individual metric goals.
Now you’ve got strong goals in place. Time to start tracking.
Activity goals for the entire quarter or year can be intimidating. But a sales activity tracker breaks down that data by week or month, making them much more achievable. In a sales activity management system, the tracker automatically logs activities so reps stay up-to-date on progress to goals.
Modern sales leaders are embracing this type of sales activity tracker. Here are six compelling reasons why.
6 reasons to embrace a sales activity tracker
1. A sales activity tracker creates transparency around key sales metrics.
From top to bottom and across all teams, alignment is critical. When sales leaders report on close ratio or MRR, but the executive team focuses on total contract value, the entire company suffers from misalignment. How can anyone understand how the company performs if no one speaks the same language?
A sales activity tracker keeps individual and team goals at the forefront. This keeps everyone aligned around the most important initiatives and helps demonstrate how daily activities roll up to large company goals.
2. A sales activity tracker helps onboard new hires faster.
Even the most talented sales reps need time to understand your company’s specific sales process. According to CSO Insights, more than 40 percent of sales teams report a ramp-up time of more than 10 months. That’s almost a year before sales reps become fully productive.
When equipped with a sales activity tracker, new reps understand exactly what activities they need to do now to hit their quota in three months. They aren’t left to find a path to success through trial-and-error. The sales activity tracker guides them to the next appropriate selling steps, decreasing their overall ramp time. Paycor cut their sales onboarding time down from six months to three using the LevelEleven sales activity management system.
3. A sales activity tracker cuts through day-to-day noise with visibility into what matters.
Salespeople are busy. They get lost in the day-to-day noise of responding to emails, crafting perfect pitches and handling support requests. Reps want to close deals just as much as you do, but sometimes they experience difficulty prioritizing tasks. That’s why sales leadership must create focus for reps around the activities that lead to closing business.
With a sales activity tracker, the most important day-to-day tasks for each sales role stay top of mind. They understand that those 3-4 activities almost always take precedence above other tasks. This enables reps to efficiently prioritize their time.
4. A sales activity tracker improves decision-making for each salesperson on where they spend time.
Many salespeople get laser-focused on activities at the bottom of the funnel. It makes sense. They want to close deals and bring in revenue for the company. But that often leads to little time for top-of-the-funnel activities like prospecting and qualifying leads.
In addition to driving focus around the right selling activities, the sales activity tracker informs reps exactly how much of each activity they need throughout the funnel. It alerts reps when they fall behind pace to goal and tells them what to do to get back on track.
5. A sales activity tracker enables real-time course correction.
Reports and dashboards tell you what has already happened after the month, quarter or year is over. Sure, you might be able to use that information to guide future actions. But wouldn’t it be nice to have this data before it was too late to do anything about it?
A real-time sales activity tracker does just that. The system tracks and reports data in real time, so your sales leaders know exactly when performance falls out of line and what they need to do about it. If the entire team falls behind on a metric, rally them around it with a quick contest or spiff. When an individual sales rep doesn’t hit their activity goals, dig into the data to see where they struggle and might need coaching.
6. A sales activity tracker brings in more revenue.
When you know what activities lead to closing more business, you simply need them to happen more often. That’s exactly what a sales activity tracker will do for you. Focusing rep efforts on those key activities makes them happen more often, which results in more revenue.
With a sales activity management system, Jackson SVP of national sales development Doug Mantelli saw more year-over-year activity with less salespeople. He explained to a panel at Dreamforce, sharing how sales activity levels for the entire organization increased 30 percent.
Want to learn how you could benefit from a sales activity tracker? Use our sales activity management calculator to find out!
