By now, you understand the fundamentals of sales tracking and what it entails.
In fact, we’ve previously covered the general introduction to sales tracking and laid down the framework of its importance to the sales funnel, decision-making processes, and the success of businesses in general.
Now that we know the theoretical background, it’s time to move to practical tips and see the opportunities and improvement spaces for your business! Let’s get to the bottom of the sales funnel.
9 sales tracking tips
- Gather statistics into one place
- Technology is secondary; business use case is more important
- Make sure you only collect data that matters
- You can form decisions only from a reasonable amount of data
- The purchase process is always more complex than your data shows
- Data is a good servant but a bad master
- You cannot automate everything, nor should you want to
- Focus on a maximum of two data sources as your primary interest to track
- Read reviews carefully before choosing your preferred stack
1. Gather statistics into one place
Having one central hub for all of your data, statistics, and information about your business and customers is crucial in order to provide transparency and simplicity in your internal IT systems. An example of your potential data warehouse is the Grafana tool, an open platform for analytics and monitoring.
It has a powerful visualization tool, gives you the ability to set custom alerts and reminders, and also select metrics your decision makers care the most about. Since it is an open platform, the integration with your other internal tools is easy and convenient. Its power to unify all of your data acts as a must have for proper sales tracking.
Source: Grafana
2. Technology is secondary; business use case is more important
The technological advancements of humankind in the past few centuries played an essential role in the development of society, increased life expectancy, or in the effort to eradicate some of the worldwide spread diseases. Besides these positive effects, technology also made our life much easier; transportation and logistics are faster, communication between people in countries around the world is quicker, and the ability to stay in touch with customers is more convenient.
However, when it comes to the sales department of the businesses, technology should not be the main pillar of success. Yes, it helps to automate some of the tasks, gather and filter data or provide insights on how the customers behave.
Good, deeply crafted and detailed business use cases are essential for companies in order to be successful as it describes the situations and processes of a business and its interaction with several stakeholders, such as customers or other companies and entities. Its purpose is to primarily characterize how the products and services of the specific business are used by its customers.
Knowing how they behave, what they expect from the company and what are the desires can help you to identify potential future sales as well as improve the customer support. None of the companies can exist on the market without the customers nor this data.
Credit: SparxSystems
3. Make sure you only collect data that matters
Why collecting data and keeping them in a single, centralized hub is beneficial for most of the companies was covered in the first point of our article. Our current focus is why you should do the analysis of which data you are willing to collect. Not every single piece of data is deadly-important for your business.
Overwhelming and overcomplicating won’t bring more sales, better conversion rates, or happier customers. Collecting non-necessary data will only reflect in the loss of financial resources and time. Which both could be invested into more important fields of business, such as customer care or support.
4. You can form decisions only from a reasonable amount of data
Never ever should decision makers in any company form the decisions based on minimal amounts of data. That is exactly where statistics from proper tracking software come in handy and can have significant impact on the direction of the business. And no, we don’t mean the college course you did not like that much next to the math. Collecting and analyzing a broader amount of data from a larger scoop provides management better starting point and certainty.
The most important aspects of statistics that you should follow are:
Focusing on the bigger picture |
Proof and evidence that serve as the bulletproof confirmation for making the specific decision |
Sustaining the quality of the outcome (products or services) |
Financial plans for the present and future |
Shaping strategy for the upcoming long-term direction of the companies |
Allocating enough resources to specific departments |
5. The purchase process is always more complex than your data shows
Many of your customers can act outside of your regular customers habits. Even if it is important to have several marketing personas and try to fit the majority of them into common types, we recommend to also think outside of the box. The process of selecting your product or service for your customers is an important journey for them.
Complications can arise even in the beginning phase of consideration phase, since people will inevitably have questions. They will look for answers even on your support portal or get in touch with you via several available channels, let it be traditional mail, social networks, or calls.
TIP: The great news is that you can always rely on multichannel help desk software solutions to make the journey as smooth as possible. |
Once the customers put the checkmark to all of their questions and made the decision to purchase your products or services, the real fun begins. Implementation, testing, proper set up or even consultations arise, all of which make the process only more complex.
Credit: Business2Community
6. Data is a good servant but a bad master
Data can be a foundational piece of success for every business, since they provide bulletproof facts. They can and are a good servant as they help to make purposeful decisions that impact the business, its market share, and its profits or losses.
Wrongly interpreted data can result in a situation when companies go bankrupt. However, data is not always the only aspect that should be blamed. An extremely important factor of decision making is that humans are the ones who shape the business, create the vision and mission, come up with the best-in-class optimization or make the cognitive decisions based on the previous experiences and customer behavior patterns.
For instance, Tesco heavily relied on the data in the past. This dependence on the data-driven behaviour resulted in the moment, when the company lost almost half of its market value.
Even Warren Buffett reflected that Tesco was not a good choice: “I made a mistake on Tesco. That was a huge mistake by me,” as his losses reached the level of more than 700 million dollars.
It is important to value the skills of the people and their contribution to the success of the company on all of the levels. It is humans who combine business model, previous experiences, emotions, and analytical models together.
7. You cannot automate everything, nor you should want to
Automation can save time and effort for most businesses. Deploying successful workflow and fine-tuning every single aspect of it can bring thousands in savings and help increase company productivity.
The ability to have talk to virtual assistants saves time and effort from looking for information online. The only requirements to have conversation with AI-powered voice assistants is the connection to the internet as well as owning a smartphone.
Related: Learn all of the latest voice search statistics to see how AI-powered voice assistants are changing the way we search for things online today! |
According to research, the Google Assistant scored a perfect 100% on the ability to understand the customer queries and 92.9% on the ability to answer these queries, the highest from all the available assistants.
The opportunities for automation are almost endless and the implementation of them can bring fruitful results, but there are still some fields of businesses, that should not be fully “touched” by it, here is just a small portion of the ever-growing list: customer support, review management, and decision-making,
Customer support
Customers are the most important asset of every business. Integrating chatbot into website can be helpful to quickly filter the requests or sort them to specific department of your business. At the end of the day, current bots are no yet smart enough to solve all the issues – they could have problem with the understanding of the more complicating requests, they lack of empathy or the ability to naturally follow the flow of the conversation. That doesn’t mean that providing customer support has to be pain.
Relying on multichannel help desk solutions quickly brings many rewarding benefits, such as 20% increase in conversion rates, improved customer loyalty, or shorter resolve times.
Review management
Collecting enough reviews on several review platforms brings many positive effects for most of the online-based companies that sell either some services or products. The importance of the reviews for the customers is significant, as more than 70% of them read reviews before they make that purchase decision.
Collecting reviews is only one part of the successful listing. The second half of review management comes after the review has been posted. Responding to them in personal way with empathy or even emoticons can improve your local SEO, according to Google.
Decision-making
The final decision can be preceded by automated data collection or filtered by artificial intelligence based on several conditions and rules. The last choice is still always made by the leaders, managers or directors as so far only they can take into consideration not only data but also the personal approach towards the company.
An example on how the humans are still needed when determining the win-win situation can be seen at Google’s AI technology, Duplex. In fact, 25% of calls made via Duplex are finished by humans. Humankind is not at the point where everything can be achieved using AI. Yet.
Related: Maybe everything can’t be automated with AI yet, but it’s interesting to see which industries are using AI today. Download our free statistics roundup to see how important AI technologies are and why you might want to use them! |
8. Focus on a maximum of two data sources as your primary interest to track
Less is more, especially when it comes to the beginning phases of your business and tracking your prospects and orders. Overcomplicating the already difficult situation only means, that as the time will go, you will get lost in the amount of data and different sources. More data means more tools to handle and filter them and this means higher costs.
Your business should not have more than two primary data sources. Once you have established your tracking and fine crafted it with the help of guides or external partners, you can move on to the next step and add more sources to better profile your stakeholders. We recommend Google Analytics as your first choice partner for website tracking and visualising the data.
Source: Google Analytics
Your sales tracking can be often over complicated when trying to focus on too many KPIs and different metrics, therefore “Sic Parvis Magna” – “Greatness from small beginnings”.
9. Read reviews carefully before choosing your preferred stack
We will go back to the reviews and give them a little bit of extra attention, this time from the different perspective. It is equally important to collect them for your business, rock that high score of the satisfaction and the amount of contributed testimonials as well as to read them before you make your own purchase decision.
Remember the last time you were planning your vacation abroad, what were the steps you had to go through? Besides selecting your dream destination, you also had to select your hotel, popular destinations to visit as well as interesting places to eat or enjoy a great drink. Interesting fact is, that outside of the recommendations of our friends, family members or acquaintances, we also rely on the opinions of total strangers.
We read them carefully and put (usually) a lot of trust into them, especially once we see they are on a high authority site, such as G2. This same situation is applicable also to your business as it can benefit from posted opinions and feedback. Discover. Consider. Decide!
Source: G2 Learn Hub
Conclusion
Sales tracking, or tracking in general is an extremely important pillar of business. Even more important is to properly set it up, analyze and interpret the data in order to make the most rational decisions, that bring the best impact.
To keep your customer top-of-mind, make sure to see our customer service software statistics to learn which other software you should be implementing at your company today.