November 11, 2016
7 Sales Tracking Tools for Small Businesses
BY Caitlin Delohery IN Sales, Small Business One Comment
No matter your niche, sales is your lifeblood. How your team spends their time, how you communicate with your prospects, and how you spend your money all drive your sales success⭐ (or failure 👎). Here are some tools to help you make sure that blood is pumping.
Track your sales time
If sales are your lifeblood, time is the pulse it beats to. And, no matter your industry, chances are, you’re moving really quickly. That pulse is a fast one.
And when you’re moving quickly, it’s easy to come to the end of the day and have no idea exactly what you did.
These handy tools will literally help you travel back in time. By getting a picture of where exactly your time goes, you get a glimpse into what you’re really efficient at and where you’re wasting your time.
RescueTime: What’s awesome about RescueTime is that you can just install it and it will record everything you do on your computer automatically. No more keeping spreadsheets or trying to estimate how many minutes you spent emailing a particular prospect. RescueTime sits in the background with a little stopwatch, timing how long you spend reading a webpage, looking at a certain document, or crafting that perfect deal-closing message.
Harvest: Harvest is cool because it lets you track projects by individuals or teams. So you can keep data on how much time your entire company spends on different sales activities for different clients or projects. Does more time lead to more success? Harvest reaps that chronological data so you know for sure.
Track your sales communication
Communication is all the tiny blood cells rushing around to make connections. If your communication strategy is healthy, so are your sales.
One sign of good communication health is flow:
Are you talking at your contacts…
… or to them?
Here are some tools to help you keep the connections flowing, whether they’re between members of your team or with leads and customers.
Slack: Wait – you haven’t heard of Slack? For serious? Do you mean you’re still emailing with your team? Why don’t you just fax them?
(JK.)
Slack is a chat app, and it isn’t just fantastic for in-house messaging, file sharing, and meeting scheduling, tho it is phenomenal for that (can you tell we’re converts?). It’s also a sweet tool to keep in touch with your clients, too. Create information-sharing channels and invite your clients and customers to join you.
HipChat is also a pretty rad team-linking tool. It combines chat with screen sharing and video conferencing that actually works. You can create video conferencing rooms on the fly, bringing together people from all over the globe.
Track your money
It’s all about the Benjamins (or preferably the Grover Clevelands, baby).
In our sales circulatory system, money is the air you breathe. And nothing’s doing without a firm understanding of money in and money out.
You want to know what efforts drive not just engagement and interaction but revenue as well. Here are some tips to make sure you and your team are making it rain.
Quickbooks is your accounting software on steroids. It keeps track of money in and out, syncs up with your favorite vendors to get them paid, and gives you a firm idea of your overall financial health. There’s a reason it’s the gold standard of financial tools for small businesses.
Gusto replaces the need for a payroll department. It makes paying your beloved team, figuring out your taxes, and even administering benefits a piece of cake. We give it extra props because it was originally called ZenPayroll, and it definitely maintains that sense of ease.
Track your success
What makes a metric valuable? It’s not how much it impresses your customers or makes your competition shrink in fear (though that may happen, too). It’s what it tells you about the success of your efforts.
When it comes to measuring success, there’s only one tool you need in your wheelhouse. It won’t surprise you when we say what that tool is: an awesome CRM.
Here are just three of the things an awesome CRM will do for you:
- Help you schedule meetings and manage other project management functions, right from within your CRM dashboard.
- Automate email touches with prospects and leads and give you insight into how well they performed.
- Provide reports that tell meaningful data stories about all the stuff you need to know: from how your team is interacting with your clients and prospects to how your outreach efforts link to sales health.
Looking for examples of success-tracking tools in action? Check out how we do email reply tracking.
