You're 3 weeks deep into the month and you're still unsure how your team is progressing towards the target. You don't know where your reps are at, and you're pretty sure there are unrecognized sales opportunities among your existing clients. Now is the time to learn how sales tracking can be used to up your sales performance!

Although, without an understanding of the specific areas to focus on, it can be difficult to know how to use sales tracking to paint a clearer picture of rep performance.

In this article, we'll take a look at the most important areas to focus on in sales tracking to give you the best chance of improving sales and rep performance over time.

How is your sales team tracking? Let's investigate

Let's start broad: Team-wide objectives

A new quarter has begun, targets have been assigned, and your team is overwhelmed, unmotivated, and already lagging behind. How can you drive your team towards the quarterly target, and preempt a drop in performance?

Sales tracking is a critical tool which, when updated regularly, can help a team visualize their progress towards the overall target, and act as an early warning system for a drop in pace. Tracking team progress can help a team understand how their individual efforts are helping move the team towards the target, boosting motivation and focus.

If visualizing the goal in a clear way isn't enough, you can additionally use sales tracking to build forecasts- which are great for tracking the team's pace and identifying when to intervene to prevent poor sales results. If you use a sales tracking app, this is where you'd be keeping an eye on your team-wide pace using real-time updating forecasting / progress tracking.

How are the individual sales reps tracking?

Without having current data on rep activity, it's hard to tell what your team is really up to; are they following up on their leads, or following up on their Instagram? If you had the right information, you may have been able to pinpoint the moment when one rep began lagging behind, and gaps started growing between your top performers.

Tracking individual reps can help you identify rep level sales gaps and quickly identify which reps you should follow up on. Rep tracking data can additionally be used to drive healthy competition with leaderboards, and create better work habits using sales KPIs.

You could even tie a KPI to a sales activity, for example, number of face to face meetings, and track instances of reps meeting this KPI on a team leaderboard; increasing rep engagement and giving you an even clearer picture of rep performance.

Spotted a rep who's behind pace? Start with their customers

March's revenue for your top buyer SensationBathrooms Ltd have suddenly dropped by 60% compared to last year. Without customer level tracking, this drop came out of nowhere, and now your rep is falling behind their target. Imagine if your rep had the customer data on hand to spot this earlier!

Keeping record of customer purchases, tracking their progress towards a target, and giving reps speedy access to that data can help reps identify sales opportunities and recognize which customers are behind and need attention most. However, if you still aren't getting a clear picture of why a customer is falling behind, you may need to drill down deeper to the product line / SKU level.

If you've got a smart sales tracker: drill down to the product / SKU level

While investigating SensationBathrooms Ltd's purchase record, your rep has noticed that gold shower heads, the customer's most purchased product, is earning far less profit than last year. After checking gross profit for other shower heads, the rep realizes that performance can be improved by persuading the customer to buy the more profitable stainless shower heads at the same price.

Without that information, your rep would have missed the opportunity to the right sales...those which make the most money for the company! Through access to purchase tracking at the product / SKU level, reps are able to understand why a customer is lagging, and what they should do to get a better sales result.

Whether you're tracking team-wide targets, individual reps, customers, or specific SKUs, it's important to use a tool which updates information regularly and gives reps the right data when they need it. However, sales tracking isn't solely influenced by the tracking tools you use; external factors like supply, season, or global heath crises can also impact sales performance.

Understanding team performance is one thing, but it's another to understand where you sit at the macro level. If you'd like inside knowledge on how you and your reps sit in comparison to other sales teams across a range of industries and countries, watch this space for a cross-industry, cross-country benchmark of sales performance.

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