It’s very hard to keep track of the success of your sales strategy without the use of data and analytics.

Sure, you can look at the sales numbers as they come in from finance. If you’re lucky, at your company they filter through to you within a few days. However, this is not normally the case.

The problem with looking at the numbers after that fact is they are trailing indicators. You find out at the end of the week, month, quarter, and year when you are behind target and need to catch up.

Realtime data

Using a CRM with a reporting capability to report sales data on the fly is the key here.

We use HubSpot CRM, but the same thing can be done with Salesforce CRM and a number of other good CRM’s.

Below is a screenshot of one of our pipelines, this data is presented realtime and we can tell at any stage whether we out in front or behind on our sales target.

Talking about leading indicators, one of the most important factors is sales activity.

Sales activities are meetings, deal, contacts created, emails sent, etc. With sales, high levels or activity leads to revenue numbers on the board.

Below we can see how many emails our sales team sent out over the month. We can also see how many tasks they set for themselves and which ones are completed. It looks like it was a good month of activity.

If we look below, CONTACTS CREATED, it shows us that the sales team and marketing teams are reaching out to lots of new contacts every month. CONTRACTS WORKED shows us how many contacts have been nurtured during the month.

Once a sales strategy has been set, it is critical to track how the sales and marketing teams are tracking to the activity goals they have been set. This is how we track progress on the action plan we set out in section 4 above.

Using a range of dashboards and data analytics that talk to the sales strategy, we can give sales managers and anyone responsible for the numbers in business a real time snapshot of the sales strategy.