5 Powerful Tips for Deal Tracking

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There are lots of moving parts in the sales process: prospecting, qualifying, making that first pitch, following up on concerns and reservations, closing the sale. And let us not forget that sales is all about people, and people are complicated and sometimes contradictory. A lot goes on inside the typical sales operation.

Without solid deal tracking, this complicated process can get out of hand and agents easily can miss opportunities. Sales managers also can lose touch with what’s going on inside the team.

Deal tracking addresses these issues and brings discipline and order to the sales process. That’s why it is important that every business has a good deal tracking system in place–and why deal tracking best practices are important.

With that in mind, here are five of the most important components for effectively tracking the sales process.

1) Automate the Process

Manual processes invite sloppiness. Automate whenever possible with deal tracking as long as complexity can be kept to a minimum.

Look for automatic follow-up reminders, real-time deal metrics that are automatically updated by your CRM or sales system, data entry automation and workflows that move deals along in response to agent or prospect activity.

2) Track the Source of Your Deal

On an eventful day, you might be showered with lot of customer opportunities. Don’t just leave it to pure luck; understand what’s driving new leads. If you are tracking the source, you can better tailor your sales efforts to focus on your most promising lead generation areas.

Once you define the target audience for your product and spread the message on all the social channels, make sure you track every detail and have a system in place to capture how people are finding your brand. These can include where the lead came from, the duration of the sales cycle, where the high-ticket deals lying, etc. This helps you revise your plan and invest more on the sources that fetch you high quality deals.

3) Break the Deal Cycle into Smaller Parts

At times, tracking a long deal cycle can be tedious. A better way to do this is to break it into small cycles. By breaking the cycle into smaller pieces, you can map the deal flow during every stage of the sales cycle without it getting overwhelming. This process also helps you to track the success ratio of your campaigns as you get deeper insights.

If you are losing more deals at a point in time, for instance, you can then more easily revamp the nurture cycle with a different pitch and subject line to increase the open rate & click rate of your emails.

4) Follow-Up Actions

Ensure that your sales and marketing team is on the same page. This will fetch you greater results, and also the teams will stay aligned and focused in their activities with less data leaks.

Effective deal tracking is all about drawing the contours of your deals and allocating them into buckets from which they can be transferred to a nurture cycle. The team may have different perceptions about the process, so ensure that they are trained and aligned to the objectives of the company.

The best way to define follow-up is to determine the path flow of hot, cold and warm leads.

5) Distribute Your Deals

Everyone loves quick, personal responses. A customer will more likely feel positive toward a company that quickly replies to questions and generally is responsive.

For the sales reps, distribution of deals adds up to better streamlining of the sales process. The experienced personnel can take the deals that need more calls and effort and the easy cracks can be passed on to relatively new sales reps. This helps the company utilize the entire bandwidth of the team, assign the tasks accordingly and boost the efficiency of the sales staff.

Final Word

Now that you are clear in terms of deals, their importance, what qualifies them and the best ways to track deals, you are slowly inching towards the growth trajectory of closing more sales. You can couple it with pathbreaking initiatives in sales and marketing process and stay ahead of the competition. On top of it, effective ways of tracking and nurturing deals help you make more sales. All in all, giving due importance to the process, creating a homogenous system, working in close corners with your sales staff, and following the tips mentioned above lead to the best possible outcome.