Why tracking your
progress is important to your success
Certainly, if
you're consistently exceeding your sales goals, you might not need
to set up sales pipeline tracking. (Or maybe it's time to raise the
bar?)
On the other hand, if you feel that you have room to grow, then setting up tracking for your activities is really useful. With proper tracking in place, you can identify what is not working, where you have hidden potential and deal with any issues early on.
What should you track?
Remember the four
levers we discussed? The number of deals in your pipeline, size of
the deals, your success rate and the speed at which deals are
closed are the four best things to track.
That said, if you track too many things at once, you're less likely to get the most from that information, so it's a good idea to focus. Try deciding on 1-3 things to track at any given time.
Start tracking the kinds of things that you've seen having the biggest impact on your sales results, a bottleneck if you will. If, for example, not enough deals are being added into the pipeline, tracking number of deals added per day or week is a good place to begin.
In many cases, number of meetings/demos and number of deals added are important to track at companies that are growing aggressively. For other types of businesses, tracking repeat sales or the amount of up-selling being done can be crucial.
How to track accurately
When tracking your
pipeline, it's important to be specific. You may want to not only
track the number of new deals that are being added every day or
every week, but the number and value of deals in key stages of your
pipeline as well.
You'll get more out of your tracking efforts if you begin with clear definitions. For example: