Sales has been called the world’s oldest profession. And for good reason. Before anyone can purchase or use any service or product, they must be sold. But in today’s social media world, how we sell – or more importantly, how we sell effectively – is harder to track than ever. To make you’re your sales force is working effectively and efficiently, it’s important to monitor and manage sales and leads. But how?
Today’s companies need a sales tracking tool to track their successes, failures and interactions with their customers. Creating a process with a sales tracking tool will increase your success, and improve the efficiency of your sales force.
Components of a sales tracking system
From the business owner’s or sales manager’s point of view, critical sales tracking indicators include:
- Sales increases
- Number of customers and/or leads
- Sales efficiency
- Sales per customer (or better yet, profit per customer)
Sales management wants metrics to measure the efficiency of their sales force – number of leads, calls per day, close ratio, new calls, etc. Your customer only has so much money to spend, and you want as large a share of his or her wallet as possible. Systems should be put into place to track these vital indicators, plus others that you deem important.
Increased efficiencies for sales people usually mean more sales per day or week. The more that you can automate the tasks of the sales force, the more time they can spend pleasing the customer, and more time in front of them. All sales tools must be easy to update from any wireless devices. Sales people want efficiency in their lives and will spend as little time as possible entering data.
Tracking Customer Lead Information
Part of the sales tracking process is capturing information about both leads and existing customers. This information includes:
- Customer dynamics
- Demographics
- History of interactions between companies
- Customer needs
- Buying habits and how often the customer is touched
Touching a customer or lead includes face-to-face discussions, phone calls, emails, ordinary mail, your website, blog postings, tweets, and other information your customer can find out about you. Do you know what your customer is posting on their blogs, websites or in tweets?
Automated Sales Tracking Tools
Today’s automated sales tracking tools can assist in expanding upon your success and improving the efficiency of your sales process. Tools for small one-person companies can be drastically different from those used by 100+ person sales forces. Before you implement any sales tracking and customer information systems, you need to understand what we have just covered.
For a one or two person company, the simpler the tool the better. It can start with Outlook and the business contact information. As your sales force grows, you could then add a free online CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. This allowes multiple people to track customer information, as well as track input from a hired telemarketing team. The larger your sales force, the more sophisticated the tools must become to increase the efficiency of your sales efforts.
Automated tools are wonderful to track the success of marketing and/or sales campaigns. Maybe you start with an electronic newsletter (using tools such as Constant Contact and SwiftPage). This is followed up with a special offer on your blog. Then you send out an updated offer announced on Twitter. Tracking the success of this campaign can be tied to your automated sales tool and help you retool the program to better focus and achieve grander results.
CRM Tools
To start using a CRM tool, start with the simplest and easiest tools first. Then, find out what you like and do not like. As you review your own sales process, decide what your minimum requirements are, and eliminate tools that are too simplistic for your needs. Have every department and/or person who touches your customer provide input, as they will be using these tool. Use a small segment of your sales force, if you can segment them, to test one solution for a short period. Then you can add a couple other departments to the testing phase. Eventually, you can find a sales tracking tool everyone can use and accept. The usefulness of the tools will only be as good as the information kept, and everyone has to participate.
With the proper sales tracking tools, you can listen very carefully to what your leads want and what your customer says, and touch them when needed. You can provide them with the appropriate information when they want it, and create a desire for your product. Automated sales tracking tools can facilitate the sales follow up and keep your company name at the top of the customers’ mind. The result is more sales, and a more efficient sales effort.
Lead management
One important feature of any lead management system is its ability to give crucial business information on leads, deals, and the sales force in real time. This is why there is a rise in web-based lead management software. The real time sales tracking gives an instant snapshot of the strength of current leads.
By tracking sales within the software you have an instant snapshot of the progress of each deal through the pipe line. By inputting leads in to a web based system it is possible for multiple members to see the size of deals in the works at any given time. Sales managers can find out when a deal is closed or rejected, the size of the deal (opportunity), and review notes during the process.
This real time information helps track the Return on each lead by:
Creating Reports: Managers can run a variety of reports based on the capability of the software. At any time a report can identify the percentage of overall deals closing, the price points of deals that are closing, or the close rate on individual products.
Identifying Deals (Opportunities): Building on the last point, are there particular products that are bringing the leads in? At what point in the lead’s life cycle is the deal won or lost? Are there identifiable trends developing? Lead management systems allow you to look across a range of criteria to determine which opportunities are producing the highest close rate so that you can change your marketing strategy to maximize your sales.
Tracking Employee Progress: One key component of these lead management systems is watching trends and sales figures of individual employees to identify areas of strength and areas that may require additional training. With these systems it isn’t necessary to wait until a project is won or lost to assess an employee’s progress moving the lead through the funnel. Systems that offer real time tracking and notification in a change within the status of a lead means that at a manager can watch trends of individual salespeople, or the trend of an entire department or company.
Determining Best Lead Source: For companies that rely on lists or lead generation from outside, being able to determine the quality of the list will help you make wiser decisions about the usefulness of certain lead list vendors. For those who work more through networking or word of mouth business development, being able to track leads and get reports on the number of leads that close, are declined, or remain pending helps you spend your time more wisely when determining the networking groups, referral networks, or even associates who get the bulk of your time.
These are not your father’s sales tracking tools.
Companies are sometimes reluctant to employ a sales tracking system because it seems like such a daunting task. Sales management may remember the headaches of instituting new systems in the past. Many of them are afraid of the costs of initial investment. Many of them really have no idea where or how to begin collecting the data, and once they have it, they are not quite sure what to do with it. These are typically fears associated with prior experiences, but nowadays there are so many simple yet effective solutions available, and these solutions will not even be considered a cost in the end because the result is increased revenues. We compare it to putting gas in your car. Sure, it costs something to drive a car, but what good is your car if you can’t drive it and it is unable to deliver you from point A to point B? It costs something to run your business, but why run it when you have no idea where you are coming from or where you are heading? Besides, unlike gas, a system will pay you back plentifold.
Using a sales tracking system may change the entire direction of your business or grow you more profitably from where you stand right now.
Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Understanding your customer
Knowing your customer’s buying cycle is paramount for success and you need to map this cycle to your unique customer. Some significant points to know about your ideal customers are:
- Geographic coverage
- Size (revenue & employees)
- Company history
- Lifestyle
- Psychographic (Values)
- How they buy
- What problems do you solve for them
- Who are their ideal customers
- What are their key products
- Who else sells to them
- Why would they buy you over your competitor
The more you know about your customers, the more you can please them during the buying cycle and after they have purchased your product. Knowing the correct information, you can follow up with them with the right information at the right time. Your touches to your customers will determine the relationship with them.
As you touch your customers, you need to understand who else touches them (departments and other employees in your company). In addition, it is important to know how and where the touches take place, and how these touches correspond to the buying cycle (need, information gathering and desire). Tracking this process is helpful for success, and today’s automated tools can do just that.
You know your customer, you know their buying cycle, and you know what your company strategy is. The interaction between you and your customers is a series of touching and listening. Listening to your customers and prospects is getting more complex every day, as you must track what they are saying verbally as well as electronically (websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Do you have a process in place to listen to your customers? The more listening you do, the better you can touch the prospect and provide what they need and want. The goal is to create a great flow of the appropriate information to capture a larger share of your customers’ wallets.
The Customer Buying Cycle
Your customer leads go through a buying cycle. This buying process may vary, but the primary steps are need, information gathering, and desire. Throughout the entire buying decision process, emotions are influencing and directing the customer. People buy with their heart and then justify the decision using the gray matter between their ears. Therefore, all information that flows to your prospects and customers must guide their emotions at that particular point in time. Follow up is critical at each step.
As you provide information to potential buyers, you must focus on their requirements and wants. As Winston Churchill said: “If you want to profit, you must first learn to please.” The sales cycle focuses on your customer and their buying cycle. You must identify their process, and find the steps your customer goes through. Then get the right information and right people involved to please your customer.
Most of us provide more than one product to a customer, as we can usually sell ancillary products and on-going services. Every customer should be looked upon as a future referral. The result is that we must focus on all customers for the long haul.
The focus of your selling cycle is to match the buying cycle of your customer. The first step the customer goes through is identifying that they have a need to solve a problem. Your sales force must identify the customer’s problems before they can effectively sell to them. Listening is an important attribute at this stage. By listening to what the customer says, types in an email, posts on a blog or a tweet, or places in printed material, you can learn plenty about your customers.
Once the customer has found that they have a problem, they gather information. During this stage of the buying cycle, specific information must be fed to the prospect. Too much irrelevant information forces the prospect to look elsewhere for a solution. The whole company can be involved in providing the right information such as product benefits and features, demonstrations, trials, customer support, referrals, etc. During this gathering stage, the desire for a solution builds within your prospects, as they want a solution. Experienced sales people will build upon that desire and direct it towards their solutions. Tracking the interaction with an automated tool will increase the efficiency of your sales process.
Whether your tracking your web site’s online sales or needing to manage the sales of an entire sales force, Superior Web can help define and place the right system for your business needs. Give us a call to speak to one of our sales tracking specialists.
Superior Web Solutions
518-925-1142