Employing age-old practices to track your sales force is one of the biggest deterrents in the entire sales process. Unfortunately, many companies are still using their pocket notebooks to keep a record of the sales activities going on in the team. Figuring out the loopholes and properly using training and assistance is next to impossible in such a setting.
For this reason, many firms are resorting to the use of sales force tracker which makes tracking sales activities a piece of cake. It is not surprising to know that over 95% of the Fortune 100 companies use Salesforce tracking to do away with the old and tedious procedures of managing sales activities.
What Makes Sales Tracking Special?
At present, there is a plethora of CRM software that you can use to track sales activities, but what makes Salesforce stand out of the crowd is the amazing set of features that the program comes with. These features allow for an easier tracking procedure. The sales force tracking app will enable one to access features such as:
- Task management
- Contact management
- Opportunity tracking
- Workflow creation
These features are directed towards making sales force tracking a better experience. Salesforce offers you several elite services that enhance customer experience and facilitate ease of use.
The coveted sales force monitoring app is also infamous for creating reports about previously held sales activities, allowing a sales manager to be ready with all the necessary information before a meeting. These reasons are why tracking sales activities via sales force management software such as Salesforce is highly beneficial for your team. Let us now throw some light on why it is important to track Salesforce activities.
What Makes Sales Tracking Important?
1. Makes coaching easier
The end goal of any sales force tracking activity is to help a person attain a better viewpoint of the ongoing operations in a company and understand how they engage with potential clients. All of this enables you to assist the performance of your sales team, thereby making coaching much easier. Being a good coach to your sales team will directly translate into your company’s growth.
2. Prioritizing Tasks
One of the biggest reasons behind tracking Salesforce is that the activity allows you to prioritize the overwhelming tasks of your salespeople. Today’s competitive market requires salespersons to accomplish a huge number of tasks every single day.
From contacting new leads to following up on the previous ones, having them purchase your products, to genuinely following the steps until the completion of the transaction, a salesperson’s work gets tedious. A good sales tracking app can relieve your personnel of the confusion when deciding which task to work upon first by prioritizing the tasks.
3. Work While You Travel
Business owners often have to leave their companies’ premises either for personal or business purposes. In the absence of a leader, many sales activities start getting out of hand. A good sales team tracking app allows a manager to keep an eye on the activities going on within the team and supervise despite staying physically absent.
This is a huge benefit of Salesforce tracking since such type of tracking requires only a sales employee tracking app and a mobile phone or a laptop, and a stable internet connection.
Tracking sales activities during your physical absence isn’t just confined to the managers. Instead, the feature plays a defining role when a sales rep goes out in the field and wants to communicate with his or her team leader. These figures and stats are distributed easily, and the entire work gets done quicker.
4. Keeps The Staff Motivated
As per a survey conducted by LinkedIn, 94% of the company’s staff would stick to the company they are working at if it took a greater interest in their career. Instilling healthy competition among the staff is a vital part of Salesforce tracking, but this process isn’t direct.
A decent sales force tracking management application will enable a leader to record the sales reps’ activities and accurately track their performance over time. The app allows a leader to figure out the strengths and loopholes within the staff and award incentives accordingly. This, in turn, ignites a spark within the other sales reps who get motivated to perform better.
In addition, every group must hold regular meetings. This is another method that will assist your team in determining which aspects of their sales activity need to be improved. The software aids in the collection of data on all sales activity, which can be shared with the team to provide a complete picture. Instead of giving them blind feedback, data-driven feedback would push them to work harder toward their goals.
5. Provides Concrete Data
Regular data collection through reliable sales force tracking software allows your sales team to have an appropriate image of their growth. The collected data is the most appropriate yardstick to measure your team’s performance. It also gives an idea of what needs to be done to improve.
The loopholes are made public, and the team members can actually get to know the areas they need to improve upon. This is what makes Salesforce tracking a crucial task. When you have numbers right before you, it becomes relatively easy to draw conclusions and design an action plan.
Five points that IT Managers, Sales heads should look at while finalizing on the mobile Sales Force Automation software.
1. Does the mobile sales force automation software need your present and future requirements?
Many times companies are not able to visualize the need beyond a certain point. So, you can say that you need location tracking or order management only. But do you think you will need other advanced features like Expense Management (TA/DA), deviations etc in the near future? If the solution has newer advanced features built-in, you may not buy them right away, but when you need them you can simply ask for an upgrade.
2. How does the mobile sales force automation provider support remote field users?
For a customer with a pan India workforce, it will be difficult for a solution provider to support users from different places. Does the provider have a mechanism or technology to resolve and fix issues of field workers remotely? Initially, the salespeople show resistance to any mobile SFA. Can the solution provider show you (with proof) that it’s a problem with the salesperson itself rather than the solution?
3. Is the solution provider ready to customize the mobile SFA software?
Say, you are a growing company and adding salespeople every few months. Or you are targeting different markets or channels. After some time, you may need that your mobile SFA software either integrated with your ERP or there might be some changes that you want to get fully assimilated into your company/channel. The solution provider should be willing to customize it for you. Of course, they will charge you for it.
If it’s a SaaS (cloud-based) provider, check if they have an on-premise model as well. Because any on-premise software can be customized to your exact needs.
4. Is the technology robust?
Field salespeople need to be spending time on sales and not worrying about the device’s battery being drained out.
A good Mobile SFA should work on a 2G network. It should not consume battery even if the location tracking is on.
It’s advisable to get 15 – 30 minutes of location updates rather than every second. This makes sure that the battery runs for the whole day and you always know where the person is.
The solution should be able to download large data even on 2G networks. Some companies have 50k different products or variants. Some want to show detailed order history. All this requires a huge amount of data to be downloaded over the phone. 3G networks are not available across the country. So, the mobile SFA solution should work in a 2G and offline environment.
5. Is the technology secure?
Mobile can be lost or stolen. Salespeople will have the app always logged in. Can the mobile SFA solution log out a salesman remotely? Is the data on the mobile device secure? Does the solution support limit access to a particular SIM or device?
Ideally, the data on the mobile device should be encrypted by the mobile SFA. So, even if the device falls into wrong hands, your data will be secure from prying eyes. Any sales coordinator or authorized person should be able to log out and deny access to any salesperson remotely.
Final Word
As is evident from above, Salesforce tracking is one of the most important aspects of a sales activity. In the absence of a proper sales tracking application, you and your team may end up in a lot of confusion. An incredibly common sales monitoring app in the U.S., it has been estimated that mid-sized organizations which employ sales force tracking via Salesforce earn annual revenue between $1 and $50 million. The staggering growth of these companies that engage in Salesforce tracking speaks volumes of the application and how its proper tracking can benefit you.