Sales tracking is essential for a business to survive. If you sell a physical product, this has to be coupled with a good inventory tracking system. This gives you real-time data about your merchandise. You will know which products you have in stock, what products have been ordered, when your products will arrive, and what you’ve sold. Systems like this allow you to intelligently plan out your business and make fast acting decisions to provide a better service for your customers.
Some businesses decide to create their own sales tracking and inventory tracking systems, others decide to use one that’s already on the market. Today, businesses use a wide variety of software tools to track sales. Here are 6 of the most popular methods:
1. Customer Relationship Management Software
A CRM or customer relationship management tool allows you to intelligently track communications with prospects. Also called revenue management software, it can be incredibly powerful to sales teams and businesses that provide a service and rely on leads. CRMs are valuable assets. Using a CRM, you can keep track of communications in real time and follow up with leads more effectively. CRM’s provide a system that allows you to categorize leads based on where they’re at in the sales pipeline. For instance, many CRM’s provided opportunities page where you can label your communications as a contacted lead, qualified lead, proposals sent, a won contract, or a lost contract. This helps you organize and track the sales process effectively.
2. Accounting Software To Track Business Income
Manually recording business income can be extremely tedious. Rather than monitoring your bank account yourself, you can use software to do this for you. Accounting software are tools that take the hassle out of managing your business and tracking your sales. If you’ve had a hard time monitoring income in the past, these are tools that can make it really easy to track expenses, send invoices, get paid, and balance your books. It’s financial software that takes all aspects of accounting and tracking your sales to a new level.
3. Using Good Ecommerce Software
Tracking your sales, however, goes well beyond a CRM and accounting software. Another tool that you can utilize is using good e-commerce system to run your website. If you process sales online for products or services, you should be using an e-commerce tool to manage those payments and subscriptions. This will make it much easier to get paid, it takes the hassle out of having to invoice and charge your clients. It’s also a great way to stay organized.
4. Analytics Software to Understand Your Customer Demographics
Understanding the demographic profile of your customers allows you to target them more efficiently in the future. It also opens up the door for optimizations to your website. When you better understand the customers you’re targeting, you can optimize your copywriting and strive for a better conversion rate. Google Analytics is the most popular software for monitoring website traffic and getting insightful data that represents them. Combined with other Google resources like Webmaster Tools, you can gather very powerful data on your customers. Here are 11 Webmaster Tools that can help you better understand your sales and customer acquisition sources. This will help you keep track of sales and makes sense of the sales you’re getting.
5. A Clear Sales Pipeline
It’s equally important that your website has a clear sales pipeline. What this means is, you might be directing visitors to subscribe to your email list, which you then used to distribute more content to them, hopefully encouraging them to buy your products or services. This is a strong example of a clear sales pipeline. However, if you dictate from this and you sometimes direct your audience off-site or to internal pages of your website, this detracts from the efficiency of the pipeline and it blurs the boundaries. This will make it really difficult to track and optimize your sales.
6. Monitor Important Metric
Traffic analytics like Google Analytics don’t always provide important sales tracking metrics. You need to be monitoring things like your cost per acquisition, total sales and given time periods, sale per demography, sales per salesperson, the average time to close a sale, new versus recurring customer sales, your overall churn rate, average revenue per customer, and more. These are sales metrics that can tell you a lot about your customers and your ability to close sales and turn a profit.
There are a lot of tools in even more data that goes into the sales tracking process. These are six of the most popular ways businesses keep track of sales. What methods and tools does your business use for sales tracking? We’d love to hear your ideas!
