Just like how we make calendars, planners, and to-do lists to stay on top of our daily activities, a sales tracking spreadsheet helps businesses identify trends in their sales and make informed decisions about their future strategies. The tool also enables businesses to track their sales performance over time and monitor their progress in achieving their goals, apart from identifying areas for improvement to increase sales.
“A sales activity tracker is a tool that helps salespeople manage things like contacts, deals, and quotas more effectively. It supports sales teams in monitoring and analysing all the moving parts of their sales process and, in turn, helps them to make better decisions. Using a tracking tool, spreadsheet, or template makes it easy to have all the information you need to review in one place. Plus, these resources can be used to quickly identify trends and any corrections that need to be made in one-on-ones and team meetings to review performance,” HubSpot said.
Sales activity trackers play a crucial role in decoding invaluable insights into customer behaviour, market dynamics, and revenue streams, thereby empowering businesses to optimise their sales processes and maximise profitability.
Need for sales tracking spreadsheets
Harvard Business School defines ‘Data-Driven Decision-Making’ (also abbreviated as DDDM) as the process of using data to inform a business’ decision-making process and validate a course of action before committing to it.
When it comes to adopting DDDM method, businesses don’t need to follow a hard and fast rule. They can either collect survey responses to identify products, services, and features their customers would like or conduct user testing to observe how customers are inclined to use their product or services, while identifying potential issues that should be resolved before the product’s release.
Also, you have methods like launching a new product/service in a test market in order to test the waters, along with analysing shifts in demographic data to determine business opportunities/threats.
“The collection and analysis of data have long played an important role in enterprise-level corporations and organisations. But as humanity generates more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, it’s never been easier for businesses of all sizes to collect, analyse, and interpret data into real, actionable insights. Though data-driven decision-making has existed in business in one form or another for centuries, it’s a truly modern phenomenon,” Harvard Business School noted.
We already have successful examples of DDDM. One such example was Google’s “People Analytics,” where the tech giant implemented ‘Project Oxygen’, under which it mined data from over 10,000 performance reviews and compared the data with employee retention rates. Google used the information to identify common behaviours of high-performing managers and created training programmes to develop these competencies.
Another one is ‘Real Estate Decisions’ by Starbucks, an approach which the legendary American chain of coffeehouses took after hundreds of its branches closed during the 2008-09 “Great Recession”. Following this, the then-CEO Howard Schultz went for a more analytical approach to identify future store locations. Now, the venture partners with a location analytics company to pinpoint ideal store locations using data like demographics and traffic patterns.
As stated already, DDDM can either be heavily tech-driven or simple tools like surveys. Sales tracking spreadsheets too can be viable options for enterprises. The goal at the end of the day is simple and crisp, to make confident business decisions, be more proactive and realise cost savings to become operationally lean and increase the success ratio.
Utility of sales tracking spreadsheets
The mantra of remaining competitive in the 21st century economic landscape is something called “Informed Decision Making”. A business leader needs to harness the capability of mining a lot of market data to understand the customers’ buying behaviour, and his/her product preferences. This activity also needs to be completed quickly, before chalking out the tailored products, as time is the crucial element here, to get the edge over the rivals.
Through the implementation of sales tracking spreadsheets, businesses can address the above-mentioned challenge of harnessing the power of “Data-Driven Decision Making”. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies prioritising data-driven decision-making end up being 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their industry competitors.
Leveraging real-time sales data captured in spreadsheets, businesses can adapt quickly to market fluctuations, apart from capitalising on emerging opportunities and mitigating risks effectively.
We are talking about software offering real-time data analysis, tracking sales metrics, forecasting trends, and providing actionable insights to drive strategic decision-making. Sales tracking spreadsheets can seamlessly be integrated with the overall enterprise software for the holistic view of a business leader eyeing to remain competitive and growth-oriented, while having first-hand access to crucial insights about customer behaviour, product performance, and overall business trends.
Tasks like tracking and analysing sales data, and identifying market trends and sales patterns, without the technology’s helping hand, can become a time-consuming and tiresome affair for the human staffers. Sales trackers expedite the whole process by leaps and bounds, thereby enabling the ventures to make proactive and informed decision making, followed by the quick course correction of their sales processes, which helps them to gain a crucial market advantage over the rivals.
Sales trackers go after sales data, customer behaviour patterns, product performance, overall business trends, key performance indicators (KPIs) like revenue, profit margins, and customer acquisition costs, basically information which needs to be used to make strategic calls on marketing, sales, and product development.
Pros of the tool
First of all, sales tracking spreadsheets streamline sales operations by centralising key metrics and performance indicators in one accessible platform. This process not only enhances efficiency by eliminating manual data entry and disparate systems but also fosters accountability among the sales teams.
With clear visibility into individual and team performance metrics through sales tracking spreadsheets, sales professionals get motivated to meet and exceed targets, driving overall business growth.
Automated reporting features usually get integrated into sales tracking spreadsheets, thereby streamlining the process of generating insights. By automating data aggregation and visualisation, businesses can eliminate manual reporting tasks, saving valuable time and resources in the process.
“With scheduled reports and customisable dashboards, key stakeholders gain access to real-time sales performance metrics, enabling proactive decision-making and rapid response to market changes,” Global Banking and Finance Review stated.
“Sales tracking spreadsheets provide a scalable solution for managing growing sales operations. As businesses expand their customer base and product offerings, the need for efficient sales processes becomes increasingly critical. By standardising workflows and centralising sales data in a spreadsheet format, organisations can maintain consistency and visibility across sales channels, facilitating seamless scalability without sacrificing performance or quality,” it added further.
Sales tracking spreadsheets also come with in-built collaboration features, which foster alignment and cohesion across the departments. By granting multiple users access to the same dataset, sales teams can collaborate in real-time, share insights, and coordinate deal-making efforts more effectively.
“This collaborative environment promotes cross-functional alignment, ensuring that sales, marketing, and operations teams are working towards common goals and objectives, ultimately driving greater synergy and results. Navigating the vast sea of sales metrics can be daunting, but focusing on key indicators is essential for measuring success. Sales tracking spreadsheets help businesses identify key metrics, such as conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and sales velocity. By monitoring these indicators over time, organisations can gauge the effectiveness of their sales efforts and make data-driven adjustments to optimise performance,” Global Banking and Finance Review commented further.
Also, the sales tracking spreadsheets turn data into actionable insights, by leveraging which, businesses gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Whether it’s identifying untapped market segments, refining sales strategies, or improving customer engagement, sales tracking spreadsheets are there to mine the market data and generate sales intelligence inputs, which ultimately empowers businesses to make smarter decisions and drive sustainable growth.
How to implement sales tracking spreadsheets?
First, identify the specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that suit your business objectives and expansion agendas. Then, determine which data needs to be collected and recorded. After that, design a spreadsheet that meets your business needs and collects the data you require.
After going through the aforementioned three stages, the business leader needs to define the reports he/she needs to access the data and use it to make informed business decisions. This process will be followed by a selection of spreadsheet software that will align with the business’ operational requirements and offer robust features for data visualisation and analysis. The business leader should make sure that the sales tracking software they choose is user-friendly and compatible with the company’s computer operating system. Additionally, it’s important to ensure that the software is regularly updated to ensure optimal performance.
The sales tracking spreadsheets also need to be customised to include fields for tracking sales activities, pipeline progress, revenue forecasts, and other pertinent information. The business also needs to ensure that the spreadsheet gets integrated with CRM systems, marketing platforms, and other data sources to capture comprehensive sales data automatically.
The venture needs to provide comprehensive training and ongoing support among its staffers to ensure that the sales professionals understand how to use the tool effectively. Also, the spreadsheet needs to be reviewed and updated periodically to ensure that the tool is operating as per the business’ evolving operational needs and the existing market conditions.
Finding perfect examples
United States-based “Podium,” a private technology company which develops cloud-based software related to messaging, customer feedback, online reviews, selling products, and requesting payments, has carried out detailed research in the domain of “Sales Tracking Spreadsheets,” before shortlisting such utility tools.
One of them is HubSpot’s “Sales Hacker Pipeline Template,” which despite resembling a basic tracker spreadsheet, helps its users to generate their quarterly sales forecasts, apart from “adjusting the weighting by the probability of each stage in the sales funnel.” The tool, if used correctly, can predict expected revenue over a given period of time, thereby helping sales teams to accurately estimate how much product/service they will be selling throughout the financial quarters, thereby ensuring that the sales representatives, managers, business leaders and other stakeholders remain on the same page, in terms of chalking out the strategies.
Another such tool (again from HubSpot) is the “Sales Performance Dashboard Template,” which is interactive and helps its users track sales pipelines with unique metrics to provide the best possible data for forecasting the success of the businesses. This template can even offer detailed reporting at each stage of a business deal and monitor how the client venture’s sales prospects move through the pipeline.
Then we have Smartsheet.com’s “Lead Tracking Spreadsheet Template,” which keeps track of the sales leads, thereby helping its client businesses to function more efficiently. Business leaders who use this tool don’t face situations like chasing down leads they have already followed up on or losing track of hot leads.
“This Excel template has columns so you can easily input and organise details about each sales lead, such as dates, which sales reps they worked with, and contact information. With this template, it will be easier to monitor your efforts in marketing and identify where you need to refine them. Click the link above to download the template and get a closer look at your lead quality,” commented Podium, while describing the tool.
HubSpot’s “Sales Activity Log Template,” another sales tracking spreadsheet-kind of tool, has been designed to help its users track customer interactions and to find out who is buying what kind of services or products.
“You have enough space to put meeting notes, titles, and names, as well as proposed solutions you want to mention at the next interaction. This template also clearly displays sales pipelines and helps with managing relationships. It helps your sales team to keep prospects tracked and ranks them based on priority. This is one of the sales tracker templates that is easy to use with real-time integrations,” Podium stated further.
Another useful tool is Podium’s in-built “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Template,” which provides seamless integrations with the client businesses’ enterprise software.
“From what they have spent on your products and services to their contact information, having a template to keep customer details organised is one of the first pieces of the small business puzzle of success. Like having a CRM built for small businesses, getting all your details gathered, sorted, and stored in the same spot enables your agents to provide excellent customer service and build an excellent brand,” Podium described its product.