Effective managers know the importance of tracking sales activities. They make sure that their sales reps are doing their part to make a successful sales team. They also know the strengths and weaknesses of their sales process.
The more information that you gather can help you make improvements to your overall sales process. You can use the information gleaned from sales activity reports to reverse engineer your sales process. From there, you can set realistic sales goals and get a great idea of how to accomplish them.
However, staying on top of the day-to-day tracking can quickly become overwhelming with every other aspect of sales team management. This is where sales activity templates come to the rescue.
Sales activity tracking spreadsheets is an organized space to get all the information you need to make informed decisions, plan to crush upper management sales goals, and get an in-depth understanding of the sales process.
Sales activity reporting seeks to get an overall understanding of sales activities as a whole group. It aims to measure each separate component of the sales process. By tracking each part, you can know how each activity is impacting the big picture.
We’ve found some great resources to help you put together a sales activity tracking spreadsheet that will help you succeed. Read on to find out what you need to know about sales activity trackers and where to get one yourself.
What Is a Sales Activity Tracker?
A sales activity tracker measures the individual components that lead to a sale. These components could be the number of phone calls made, demos presented, or contracts written.
Sales tracking is usually performed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, depending on who needs to review the trackers and what is being monitored. For example, a sales rep may want to see how many phone calls they make daily, so a daily tracker would be appropriate. Managers who have more responsibilities overseeing larger teams, though, may only want to track on a weekly or monthly basis so that they are not wasting time analyzing numbers every day.
Why You Should Track Activity
In the case of sales, knowledge is power. It is impossible to understand too much about your sales process. The more you can know about each activity, the more you can improve the process and start creating your ideal sales team.
Most sales leaders understand how micromanaging can be detrimental to the sales process and overall morale of the sales team. However, blindly allowing sales reps to work without any oversight is equally as harmful to your organization. Activity tracking strikes a delicate compromise: it will enable the sales team to run mostly unencumbered with micromanaging while allowing leadership to get critical insights into the team performance.
Here are some reasons that activity trackers are critical to your sales team:
Identify Weaknesses
You know that your sales process, but where exactly do changes need to be made? Where are sales bottlenecking? At what point in the sales process does your sales team struggle?
Activity trackers will help leadership answer these important questions. You can identify the areas your team needs to improve and get a critical snapshot of each part of the process.
It’s impossible to know what sales issues need your attention if you don’t understand clearly what the problems are. You could be wasting valuable time and energy on the wrong part of the process without the insights a tracker can provide.
Improve Efficiency
With these insights into your team’s weaknesses, you can then start to make real changes that will affect your sales team’s efficiency. You can make sure that your team makes better efforts in crucial parts of the sales process.
Inefficiency could be costing your company significantly. Most sales reps miss out on sales because of poor time management. In fact, lost sales productivity, along with wasted marketing budgets, end up wasting organizations at least $1 trillion a year!
With an activity tracker, leadership can make sure that sales reps are spending their time wisely. One study found that salespeople spend only one-third of their time actually selling. An activity tracker can help keep reps on track with selling and minimizing the parts of their job spent on less important activities, such as driving long and complicated routes or administration tasks.
Better Support Sales Team
If leadership knows exactly where customers seem to be bottlenecking or falling out of the pipeline, they can take concrete steps to fix it. In most cases, this means better supporting their sales team to run as effectively and efficiently as possible.
You may find that demos are not leading to as many closed deals as you expected, for example. You can provide better education and practice for your sales team to make sure they land the perfect pitch. When you know exactly where the problem is, you can start to make constructive changes to support your sales staff.
Meet Sales Goals
When you receive sales goals from leadership, do you put your head down, work hard, and hope for the best? Unfortunately, many sales teams do, which is at least part of the reason only 54% of them hit their sales quotas.
Meeting sales goals doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark. Activity trackers give critical insights into how teams can meet their sales goals. Management can simply look at the numbers in their activity trackers to see how many opportunities they will need to meet these sales goals. They can then make a practical plan to meet those numbers.
Highlight Key Sales Reps
While leadership always hopes that each sales rep is pulling in their fair share of revenue, it is rarely ever the case. They’re often unaware of who is bringing in the leads that are helping the team reach their overall sales goals.
By tracking performance, management can know who the top-performing reps are. Just as importantly, they can also identify the weaker sales reps who may need more accountability or support. It both encourages sales reps to stretch themselves to sell a bit more and give you the chance to reward the reps that are working hard to bring in the most revenue.
What to Consider for Your Sales Activity Tracker
Before you hit the ground running with a new sales activity tracker template, it’s essential to know exactly what you need for your business. Map out the entire sales journey so that you can identify each step of the process. From there, you can pinpoint critical steps that need tracking.
Once you understand the various steps that need to get measured, you can figure out what type of data you want. Data is usually classified into one of two categories:
Quantitative information is concerned with the raw numbers. It breaks down how productive your sales team is in numerical form. Examples of quantitative data include:
- Number of phone calls made
- Emails sent
- Demos presented
- Closed deals
- Average length of sales cycles
- Time spent on the phone
- Lead sources
Qualitative data, on the other hand, gives meaning to quantitative data. It seeks to answer the “why” behind the quantitative information. It’s not as easy to pull information from, say, a CRM. However, it can be drawn from the quantitative data that you collect. Examples of qualitative details include:
- What clients object to after demo
- Why clients want to buy your product
- Productivity tracking
When you pull together both quantitative and qualitative sales activity, it can give you a more in-depth insight into your sales team and clients. You can use this better understanding to make more informed decisions about the direction of your sales.
Next, also consider how often you would like to track sales activity. Sales tracker templates offer yearly, monthly, weekly, and even daily tracking. Decide how often you need to review the data and go over the results with your team.
It might be tempting to start tracking each aspect of the sales process daily and depending on your company’s needs, it might be necessary. If it is not, though, make sure to start with a reasonable amount in the beginning. Many leaders can find themselves overwhelmed with tracking all of their sales activities daily and end up quitting altogether.
Lastly, consider where you would like to track all of your sales activity. Depending on your business’s size, you may need to input all of your sales activity manually. However, if you have a CRM, you can often track your information from there or use helpful software. Read on to find out the best places to find both written templates and software to fit your needs.
Free Sales Activity Tracking Spreadsheets to Try Out
If you have a new business or small sales team, you may need to start with a written sales tracker. Or you may also want to start with a written tracker before investing money into the software. Whatever the reason, there are great templates to get you started and get your sales team in order.
If you need physical printouts, here are some great places to find the right sales tracker for you and your team. We have separated them daily, weekly, and monthly to see which one works best for you!
Tracking Spreadsheets to Use Daily
What your sales reps accomplish daily is what will determine the success of your company. These templates will provide your sales team with the clarity and accountability they need to show up with their best performance every day.
Although it is a subscription-based site, Template does offer free sales activity trackers. One of them includes this daily tracker that can cover the basics for each sales rep:
This template offers two purposes: it allows you to track where your reps time is spent and allows for useful insights. It also enables your reps to plan and organize their day to be more productive. With better organization and goal-setting, your sales reps can start getting more done each day.
Daily Sales Tracking Excel Format
Transitioning to a new system can result in resistance from sales reps, especially if they’re not exactly sure how activity tracking will help them at first. This template is ideal because it uses technology that almost everyone is familiar with: Excel.
It is easy to navigate and input so that your sales team will be spending less time putting in information and more time selling.
Tracking Spreadsheets to Use Weekly
Successful sales teams take stock of where they are each week to ensure they are on track to hit their monthly goals. If your sales team is constantly scrambling at the end of the month or quarter, a weekly sales tracker can help keep their efforts consistent.
As the leader of office technology, Microsoft does offer free manual templates that fit easily into Excel. Their weekly tracker makes it easy for sales reps to fill out and send to their manager at the end of the week:
Microsoft offers simple, clean, and straightforward templates for sales teams that want minimal fuss.
Marketing and Sales Lead Goal Calculator
Marketing and sales work best when they both understand the company’s goals and what it takes to get there. To make sure that they are in alignment, use this lead goal calculator:
It makes calculating your SLA simple and effective so that your sales team can make the revenue that your company needs.
Tracking Spreadsheets to Use Monthly
Most leaders do not have the time to daily look at what their sales reps accomplish. Most sales reps will have a slow or busy day, so getting the average over the month can provide more valuable insights. Also, overviews can help make a sales forecast and get a critical look at the sales pipeline.
Although this template has reps input their data by the week, it is simple enough that leadership can look it over monthly for the information they need.
Smartsheet says that it is dedicated to bringing the best sales templates. They offer a wide variety of templates for whatever you need, such as sales funnels and follow-ups. They also provide a general in-depth tracker for each sales rep to see sales activity on an individual basis:
Smartsheet does require a subscription to use most of its activity templates. However, they also offer a free trial so that you can make sure that their templates are right for you and your team. They also have some free templates (like the one above) to help get you started.
Information is only as useful if you can get insights from it. The problem many leaders find with sales activity tracking is that it is a lot of data that they aren’t sure what it means or how to use it. Data visualization is critical for insights and finding patterns. This sales tracker is perfect for that:
The sales tracker takes the data and turns into helpful graphs so that management and leadership can better understand where their revenue is coming from and keep track of the items that are sold.
Why You Need Sales Software Tracking
Let’s face it, we’re almost to 2021. Companies that want to keep up with competition need to harness technology for better efficiency. While manually tracking sales activity might work for a small start-up, it’s not the best way to grow a business.
Manual sales trackers present a lot of problems. It’s harder to spot the trends in information and gain an overall picture with a stack of papers or a series of Excel spreadsheets. Leadership will need to spend too much time sorting through the data when their time could be used more efficiently. Manual sheets are also difficult to share with the whole team and giving your team helpful overall views of their progress can take a significant amount of time.
In addition, sales reps may struggle to record each phone call, visit, and email with the meticulous detail you need to get helpful information. As a result, you’ll lack the most accurate records. A manual file is time-consuming, so your reps waste valuable selling time with a task that could be streamlined with the proper software.
A manual template can help get you started and to find out what works for you and your team initially. However, growing and successful sales teams need to invest in quality software.
Top Sales Tracking Software for Your Business
When it comes to improving sales, the right software can make all the difference. While some CRMs are equipped to handle some sales tracking, they lack the in-depth insights that most businesses need.
Here are some of the top software to track your sales!
Repsly
Repsly is tracking software specific for retail sales. They give the real-time organization of data to get the information exactly when you need it. The real-time feature also helps to provide accountability so that leaders know exactly what is going on without constant back-and-forth phone calls. Sales reps can concentrate on their work and don’t need to continually check in to prove that they are doing their job.
SalesLoft
Information without insight is useless. Leadership can waste valuable time trying to sort through data and still not understand how to use it practically in guiding their sales team. SalesLoft can help. It not only makes tracking important sales activity easy, but it helps leadership interpret the information for more significant insights. They help management create helpful customer personas and optimizes sales activity for a productive team.
Accent
Accent is a sales enablement technology that can integrate with your CRM to pull out valuable insights. It helps create data visualizations so that leadership can quickly grasp all the information in their sales tracker. It can also capture and collect sales email and calendar activity so that sales reps do not have to log each email and meeting manually. Accent both saves your sales team time and make your reporting more accurate than manually entering it.
Map My Customers
Map My Customers can take your sales team to a whole new level. Our technology is built to do more and can be used as a stand-alone CRM or easily be integrated into the top CRMs on the market. Among its numerous benefits, Map My Customers can track your team’s sales activities so that their visits, calls, and follow-ups can automatically be reported. No more manually entering each visit into a sales log: simply walking into a client’s building will check your sales rep in for you. Leadership can rest assured that they have the most accurate information possible.
The better sales managers and leaders can understand the information, the more accurately it can be used. Map My Customers provides map visualization so that you can see how your data affects each territory for better management. You can feel more confident in your decisions and forward direction with our software’s insights.
The Map My Customers Weekly Scorecard feature updates leaders on their team’s sales performance in their inbox. Every Monday, leaders receive a weekly email with their teams’ key sales stats. The Scorecard can be customized to see activities completed, companies added, pipeline created, and more. The Team Leaderboard shows who is the MVP and who needs more coaching.
Sales Activity Trackers to Grow Your Company
Understanding sales activities is a crucial part of running a sales team. Sales activity tracker templates can be easy to find online and implemented quickly with your sales team. Once you decide exactly what sales activities you need to track, you can find spreadsheets and Excel templates to match your business.
However, if you want to grow your business and use your time most effectively, sales tracking software is critical. You and your sales team can save valuable time, you can get the most accurate information, and it can be visualized quickly for better insights.
