Tracking Sales Activity - A CRM Must Have

"What activity do you have on your calendar next week?"

I remember asking this as a sales leader. All I wanted to know was what meetings my sales people had on their calendar in the next week. What I found disheartened me.

Nothing.

They had zero sales activities coming up. What they did have was excuses or rationalizations.

If you have not sales activity you have no sales.

Your CRM should be able to show what sales activity has happened or is going to happen.

Your CRM needs to have sales activity tracking

The CRM should allow for easy entry and tracking of activity for establishing ratio data and improving effectiveness.

Most salespeople are not particularly good at tracking activity and some are not interested in tracking activity at all (see above). But it is essential information for determining consistency and effectiveness of the approach for trying to engage prospects.

For example how much activity did it take me to get an appointment and what were those things? There are only so many key activities you can do to engage a prospect: call, email, walk in, reach out on LinkedIn, or other social media channels, etc.

Here are some questions to ask when reviewing a CRM to ensure it is to designed to support Activity Tracking:

Can you easily track prospecting activity by approach?

Even if you use marketing automation, that CTA, which may have generated a request for contact, still needs a sales rep to engage. A good CRM will show you which approach is being used and leading to results. Is it sending email, prospecting phone calls, following up on website leads, or some other marketing campaign? Which sales rep is active in these activities?

How can the CRM be configured to easily track sales activity?

There are only about five or six ways you can engage a lead. Can you configure your CRM to have a drop down that shows you called, emailed, walked in, sent a social media message on LinkedIn, etc.?

Is the CRM easy and quick to update with sales activity?

Can you open the CRM as you’re reaching out to a prospect, identify the action taken, make a quick note, close it, and move on. This is different from automated tracking, which clogs up CRM with too much data.

How can the sales activity in the CRM be analyzed?

Does the Activity you are tracking correlate to helping you drive engagement with a possible customer? Can it tell you what activity is driving that engagement?

Does the CRM have a sales activity summary pre configured?

Is there an activity summary so you can see prospecting action taken by a rep or a team? Being able to summarize the and see this data will help your team find strengths and weaknesses in your activity.

Only gather the important sales activity data.

Keep it simple!

Learning how you can become more effective at prospecting, not transcribing conversations, is what should be tracked. Many reps log finite details of all actions and correspondence, which really doesn’t matter. Keep it simple and focused and as a result, your sales reps are more likely to engage in tracking.

There are two parts to becoming a high-performing sales person.

1. Activity - How much are you doing and is it enough to hit the revenue objectives.
2. Effectivness - How effective are you at each stage of that pipeline.

Each stage of a sales pipeline requires is a very different set of competencies. It's important to be able to track that activity, and learn from it.

I train sales teams to define a prospecting process. This process includes how often and what way are you going to try and reach prospects in an attempt to get in touch with them?

This is opening a potential sale. That's a process.

Sales reps tend to take a shotgun approach. This does not work. Not only is it impossible to improve on an ad hoc process, but you inadvertently send that prospect a message that you are not particularly interested in engaging with them.

I Often ask sales reps, “Would You Respond To You?” Usually the answer is a resounding “No”.

Then why would you take that approach?

Be cautious of things such as automated email or phone integration that can just clutter up a CRM with information that seems like a good idea, but is seldom actionable or even looked at. Most sales reps are not working that many leads. Tracking truly needed information is seldom problematic and “takes away from selling”, as I so often hear.

Again, I'm interested in “Are we doing enough” given our estimated ratios to achieve our revenue objective? Keep it concise and simple.