Sales Activity Tracking: Why It's Important & How to Do It

Sales activity tracking is crucial for understanding your sales pipeline, keeping deals on track, and ensuring accurate sales forecasts. Keep on reading to learn how to set up sales activity tracking in three steps.

The importance of sales activity tracking

By and large, tracking sales activity is key to a well-structured sales workflow, improved internal processes, and a high-performing sales team. Now let’s go over its benefits in detail.

Understand where sales reps spend their time

On average, sales professionals spend 64% of their time on non-selling activities.

With proper sales activity tracking in place, sales managers will be able to get a better understanding of what every sales rep does with their time. Keep in mind that it’s not about micromanaging your team but knowing which efforts pay off and result in more closed deals.

This way, you can distinguish the actions that are working and those that aren't. You can then use these insights to improve your sales strategy and provide coaching to low-performing reps.

Get a better understanding of your key sales metrics 

You’ll also get a better understanding of key metrics such as win rate, conversion rate, closed/won opportunities, total open/closed opportunities, sales reps' ramp time, etc. 

This, in turn, will help uncover areas that need your immediate attention. 

Increase win rate

With sales activity tracking, you can analyze the data and find patterns and trends to optimize your sales strategies accordingly. This will lead to improved win rates, as you’ll be focusing solely on actions that bring results. 

Improve sales forecasts

By tracking the sales process from start to finish, you know exactly what sales activities move the needle and drive prospects through the sales funnel.

Use that historical data to forecast your sales, predict future revenue, make informed decisions on where to allocate your resources, and set realistic goals for your team.

Spot deals at risk more easily

Tracking sales activity will also help you easily spot deals that are at risk of falling through. This will allow you to act proactively to ensure your pipeline stays healthy and deals continue to close.

How to get started with sales activity tracking

Sales activity tracking isn’t that complicated when you know the “why” behind it. Take the following steps to get started:

1) Determine which activities should be tracked

The first step is to determine which key sales activities should be tracked. In general, you should track any activity related to a deal or opportunity, including:

• Emails
• Calls
• Meetings
• Tasks
• Notes
• Social media messages and interactions

Ideally, you want to gather all sales data in one centralized location, and your CRM is an invaluable tool for that. It can help you keep track of all your records and ensure you don’t miss any important information or tasks.

2) Automate sales activity tracking

Tracking sales activity manually can result in a number of activities and tasks being forgotten and not added to your CRM. 

Furthermore, some sales reps use notebooks and different browser extensions to take notes while they’re on the call, so the information is scattered across different platforms.

Altogether, this can lead to inaccurate forecasts and lost deals.

Thankfully, sales tracking software can help you avoid this and allow you to automate data collection processes, combine data from multiple sources, and save hundreds of hours on repetitive tasks. If you're using Salesforce as your CRM, you can simplify sales activity tracking with Weflow. 

Weflow’s sales activity tracker feature can track all your team’s sales activities, including emails, meetings, and notes, and sync them to Salesforce in seconds.

You can log your activities in multiple ways. Emails are logged automatically, thanks to Weflow’s Chrome extension.

You can also use custom filters and create a pipeline to show the opportunities you’re currently working on. Then, you’ll need to select the type of activity to log data and sync with Salesforce.

Another way to log activities is to create notes and add the records you have. You can then select the activity type and click the Sync to Salesforce button.

3) Set activity-based goals

There are two different indicators that can help you measure sales activities: leading and lagging sales indicators.

Leading indicators are measurable variables that predict future performance and tell what your sales team is likely to achieve in the future. Examples of leading indicators include the number of created opportunities, the number of dials, etc.

On the other hand, lagging indicators show what has actually happened. They provide powerful insights into your sales team's performance. Examples include the number of closed opportunities, revenue generated from new and existing customers, and so on. 

Both leading and lagging indicators are important. In fact, you should combine them to have a holistic view of your sales performance and make sure your sales team is on the right track. 

With that in mind, your next step as a sales leader is to set and track activity-based goals to motivate sales reps and establish a clear path to attaining quotas.

For example, the high-level goal might sound like closing 50 deals per month. Activity-based objectives for this goal could be sending 500 cold emails to a target list and inviting them to a free webinar, following up with leads after the webinar, and sending out free trial offers.

Wrap up

Sales activity tracking can be a real game changer for sales teams. Are you using Salesforce as your CRM? Automate sales activity tracking and streamline the process of updating Salesforce data with Weflow. Add the Chrome extension to get started for free.