What is Sales Tracking Software?

Sales can sometimes feel like a game of trial and error, especially when you're just starting out. But you may be surprised to know that you already have the answers you need — in your sales data.

Information — data — from your sales lets you uncover trends and opportunities in your business. This can help you improve your process and increase your revenue, from pipeline to paycheck. And with the right sales tracking software, you can easily tap into the insights you need to improve sales performance across the entire funnel — and see more success.

Let's discuss why you should be using sales tracking software, its key benefits, and features to look for when choosing the best solution.

What you’ll learn:

• What is sales tracking software?
• Why is sales tracking software important?
• 6 best sales tracking and analytics software
• Key benefits of sales tracking software
• How can sales tracking software help measure performance and track KPIs?
• Features to look for in sales tracking software
• Go further, faster with sales tracking software

Sales tracking software is a tool that helps businesses capture, monitor, and analyze sales activity and performance throughout the sales process. This kind of software enables you to see your business holistically — with hard data — so you can understand where you are and develop strategies for improvement.

Using data, sales tracking software lets you see how effective your sales strategies and processes are, spot potential challenges, and make adjustments.

Sales leaders must consistently set and meet goals.

Sales tracking helps you stay on top of progress, hold your team accountable, and make refinements. Sales tracking software gives you a full picture of what's happening in real time with your business. It can also identify trends and help you improve efficiencies before you run into real problems — like failing to meet your targets.

For example, a sales manager can see that their pipeline is low. While they're on track to meet second-quarter goals, their third-quarter goals may be in jeopardy. Seeing this, they decide to provide coaching for all sales reps on prospecting techniques and put more money into the budget for prospecting. Without analytics, the manager wouldn't have known until after the quarter was over and the budget was set.

This could have ended up losing them more money in the long term.

You want your new sales representatives to be productive as quickly as possible. But it can take years to develop the right knowledge and experience that it takes to be successful in sales. And this can be disheartening for new reps experiencing setbacks. Sales tracking can help them gain more confidence, see better results, and experience higher job satisfaction.

There are countless software platforms available designed to help increase sales. Deciding which platform is best for your business depends on your teams' unique needs. Consider the size of your business, your sales process complexity, your integration capabilities, and your budget to choose the right sales software.

This list is curated with information from G2 and Capterra. These sites score sales software based on user feedback, features available, and overall satisfaction. They rate products based on a five-star system focused on usability, customer satisfaction, and market presence. Capterra incorporates user ratings across categories like ease of use, customer support, and value. Each of the tools listed here has a minimum rating of four stars, ensuring they are top contenders for streamlining your sales process, improving collaboration, and helping your team work smarter.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based, AI-powered sales management platform that offers core CRM functionality like lead tracking and contact management, as well as critical reporting tools. Other features include sales process automation, forecasting, and dashboards that help users visualize key sales metrics. Salesforce Sales Cloud helps businesses boost sales productivity, improve customer relationships, and drive revenue growth.

Reviewers say that Sales Cloud is user-friendly and integrates easily into third-party applications. They also highlight that Sales Cloud has all of its features in one place, making it easier to multitask.

How it helps sales teams:

• AI: Salesforce has long pioneered the use of AI tools in its products, and Sales Cloud is no exception. In Sales Cloud, you can build and customize autonomous AI agents to automate repetitive tasks like lead scoring, freeing up time for sales reps to develop new opportunities. These autonomous agents can also offer personalized deal insights, proactive coaching, and recommendations to help reps focus on the right leads to contact. Plus, they can nurture inbound leads, automatically scheduling meetings with reps 24/7.
• Data and analytics: Sales Cloud uses data to drive action with a suite of out-of-the-box, real-time sales analytics dashboards. With Sales Cloud, it's easy to visualize metrics, allowing reps to quickly identify the key drivers of sales performance. Connections to external data sources allow for comprehensive reporting, so reps can accurately track lead volume, activity conversion rates, and sales pipeline. And the platform offers personalized reports so that every member of the sales team has the information they need to sell faster and more efficiently.
• Deal and pipeline management: Sales Cloud helps deals to move forward faster with specific guidance for sellers throughout the sales process. The platform reveals deal-specific insights, builds account plans, and easily unifies opportunity and account data for a single customer profile. The intuitive interface allows reps to maintain and manage pipelines within a single, consolidated view, allowing them to focus on the most important deals. The platform also allows reps to track changes over time with built-in charts. And if you're on the go, Sales Cloud works on your smartphone using a dedicated mobile app.

A web-based sales CRM designed to help sales teams track pipelines, Pipedrive offers real-time insights and assistive AI features. Pipedrive automates the entire sales process with a simple, intuitive interface and customizable tools. A highly visual sales pipeline management tool, it assists reps with tracking pipelines, optimizing leads, managing deals, and automating the sales process.

Reviewers report that the platform is flexible and straightforward, and helps to make day-to-day operations more streamlined.

How it helps sales teams:

• AI: Sales reps can use natural language to search for relevant third-party tools in Pipedrive's marketplace. The CRM's AI tools include a personal assistant, an email generator, and smart integration recommendations. They also offer AI-powered features like lead scoring and automated prompts. In the platform, reps can see where deals are stuck and take action based on AI-driven recommendations for next steps.
• Data and analytics: Pipedrive gives users a centralized analytics dashboard. It also has custom reports to illustrate sales progress, and an easy-to-understand visual dashboard. Pipedrive provides reports and analytics to help sales reps track performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions using data. The platform offers forecasting, secure data management, and integration with dozens of dedicated apps.
• Deal and pipeline management: Pipedrive's advanced sales metrics tools help reps to make informed decisions based on data. It tracks communication with customers — things like emails, texts, and phone calls — providing a complete history of interactions. And with its Kanban-style dashboard, reps can visualize the sales funnel, adjusting the pipelines to their own unique sales process, moving deals along as clients progress.

HubSpot Sales Hub offers AI-powered sales engagement tools, price quoting functionality, and sales analytics. It unites sales data, tools, and teams in a single customer platform. HubSpot Sales Hub also features AI-powered deal management and advanced reporting tools.

Reviewers say that HubSpot Sales Hub is user-friendly with its visual reporting, and appreciate the platform's comprehensive core tools and functionality.

How it helps sales teams:

• AI: Its AI-powered agents can scale support, automate prospecting, and efficiently create content like emails, blogs, and social media posts. It also provides tools for automating repetitive tasks like sending email sequences. Conversational AI automatically captures voice data, providing deeper insights into conversations. Users can give HubSpot Sales Hub's AI-driven Content Generator simple prompts for content, tone, and length, and it will produce ready-to-post prose in minutes.
• Data and analytics: HubSpot Sales Hub's sales tracking software forecasts revenue, automates workflows, and identifies bottlenecks. The platform measures the performance of marketing campaigns all in one place with built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards. It also offers a comprehensive view of sales activity, allowing for real-time tracking and analysis of metrics like email engagement, deal progression, and sales performance.
• Deal and pipeline management: HubSpot Sales Hub's offers a view of the sales pipeline, allowing reps to prioritize leads. It allows users to create visual representations of the sales process, which can be customized with stages and properties to match a specific sales process.

Zoho CRM aggregates sales, marketing and customer support activities. It acts as a single repository, allowing users to streamline their sales process in one platform. Zoho CRM offers lead tracking, contact management, pipeline management, sales forecasting, onboarding, and customer support. The platform is customizable, and is designed to meet the needs of various businesses, including startups, large enterprises, and nonprofits.

Reviewers appreciate its efficient sales management, granular customer tracking, and organized lead management features.

How it helps sales teams:

• AI: Zia, an AI-powered conversational assistant, can understand commands and queries issued over voice and text. It can answer questions and provide insights in the form of reports and KPI widgets. Zoho CRM also offers other AI capabilities, like predicting outcomes, personalized recommendations, and customized workflows.
• Data and analytics: Zoho CRM's advanced analytics help users monitor every aspect of the sales cycle, including lead analytics, activity stats, and deal insights. The platform provides an automated logging process that tracks and stores information on changes made for up to six months. Zoho CRM also offers import and export features which help users maintain accurate records, migrate data, and analyze CRM data in external tools.
• Deal and pipeline management: Zoho CRM is an end-to-end sales pipeline management software platform, allowing users to customize their sales pipeline according to the needs of their business. It offers lead generation, scoring conversion, and customer insights.

An all-in-one solution for creating and automating personalized customer experiences, ActiveCampaign integrates email marketing, automation, and some CRM tools. ActiveCampaign allows users to build personalized, targeted campaigns for each customer based on segmentation data and customer insights. It offers reporting and analytic tools to track the performance of campaigns and enable users to make data-driven decisions.

Reviewers say that ActiveCampaign's email automation features are powerful, customizable, and intuitive. Reviewers also appreciate the platform's online support.

How it helps sales teams:

• AI: ActiveCampaign offers AI-powered automations that suggest, personalize, and validate marketing campaigns. Its AI-suggested segments offer detailed insights, allowing users to focus on high-value leads and optimize content for engagement. Its send-time optimization tool also uses AI to calculate the ideal time to send email campaigns for maximum impact.
• Data and analytics: ActiveCampaign helps reps see the big picture, tracking metrics with omnichannel reporting capabilities. The platform offers intuitive marketing dashboards, quickly delivering insights into campaign performance. And its reporting tools ensure data accuracy by filtering out unreliable metrics and click fraud.
• Deal and pipeline management: ActiveCampaign allows users to fine-tune their sales strategy and identify where leads are coming from and which selling strategies are most effective. The platform also allows users to create and customize sales pipelines, track deals through various stages of the sales funnel, and automate actions based on deal progression.

A cloud-based Work OS, monday.com is a work management platform that allows teams to visually collaborate on projects, tasks, and workflows in a virtual, centralized space. Within the platform, teams can also plan, organize, and track their work. The monday.com platform is customizable with a drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to structure projects and workflows. It offers several products within its platform, including an AI-powered CRM, development tools, and AI service agents.

Reviewers appreciate monday.com's organized productivity features, its visual aids like timelines and boards, and its customization flexibility.

How it helps sales teams:

• AI: monday.com offers a range of AI-powered tools. AI Blocks lets users add AI capabilities to every aspect of work, including translation, sentiment detection, and custom AI prompts. In the future, its Digital Workforce tool will also analyze projects, manage campaigns, and help with onboarding. And its Product Power-ups will take on complex business challenges like risk management and resource allocation.
• Data and analytics: Users can visualize and analyze their work progress using monday.com's data and analytic features. Dashboards, reports, and widgets allow users to track metrics, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions within the platform. Its Account Insights section allows users to monitor performance and identify areas for improvement.
• Deal and pipeline management: With the monday CRM, users can manage and streamline their sales pipeline. Users can build customizable boards that act as a directory for deals. The Deals board is equipped with a Kanban-style view, allowing users to seamlessly move deals from one stage to another. The platform also offers automations, forecasting, and dashboards to track KPIs.

By using sales tracking software, your company can see significant benefits. Common advantages include:

The success of business depends on the quality of your data. But sales reps are human — and they're very busy. Each time someone enters data incorrectly or doesn't log an interaction, your data quality goes down. Even more important, analytics may give you incorrect insights if it's only using a portion of your data. For example, if only some of your representatives always remember to log their actions, your data won't provide a full picture of the organization and won't be as useful.

Sales tracking software that's integrated with your CRM automatically logs interactions and collects data. This means that your sales analytics are more accurate and can provide the right insights. With a solid data foundation, organizations are better set up for the future. Remember, your AI is only as good as your data.

Becoming an effective closer is an important skill for sales reps to develop. But because it depends on so many things — the customer type, product, market, etc. — it's almost impossible to know the recipe for the secret sauce. However, sales tracking digs into the numbers to show you what's working best, where gaps might be, and even where opportunities are.

For example, you may see that a sales rep struggles with cold calling but leads the sales team in lead generation. Digging deeper, you see that they focus on social media prospecting and look for customers actively searching for information on solving specific business challenges. You share this with your team, and others decide to test out the same technique. Their success increases productivity and efficiency across the team.

Your sales pipeline — a visual representation of where each prospect is in the sales process — is the key to your success. Analyzing it can help you identify what steps to take with each prospect and when. It can also help you actively remove roadblocks to improve your closing rate. But sometimes you can't accurately see what's going on in your pipeline because the data isn't updating in real time or is stored in different places.

Sales forecasting is also important to your success. By knowing what is likely to happen based on your current pipeline and leads, you can make changes as needed. For example, if it's looking unlikely that you'll meet your targets based on where your current opportunities are in the pipeline, you can make changes to increase the likelihood of higher sales before it's too late.

Sales tracking software lets you see key pipeline metrics and forecast related key performance indicators (KPIs) all in one place. By analyzing these insights, sales reps and leaders can identify trends, measure current sales against KPIs, and make data-driven decisions instead of relying on intuition.

Your sales success depends on customer relationships. But just like personal relationships, they won't flourish if you don't nurture them. With sales tracking software, you can be sure that you're taking timely and meaningful steps to build strong customer relationships — such as reaching out to them at the right time using the right channels.

Sales tracking software can analyze what actions led to specific results in the past to help you choose the most effective next step for your current sales interactions. For example, if a prospect seems engaged with your nurturing efforts but is failing to take the next step and book a demo, you can look at successful past interactions and replicate what worked then.

Additionally, sales tracking tools help reps identify and engage with customers they can upsell or cross-sell. These are important opportunities to strengthen relationships and grow revenue for your company.

Sales tracking software can support busy managers by identifying reps who need extra attention — and even pinpoint specific areas of the sales process where they're struggling. This helps managers understand exactly what resources and coaching to provide — saving them time while setting their team up for success.

For example, a rep has a full pipeline and is meeting their goals for booking client meetings. However, sales tracking identifies that they get customers to the negotiation phase, but have a poor closing rate. This tells you that price negotiation may be a weakness for this rep. To help, you could provide personalized coaching on negotiation techniques or have them shadow a more experienced team member with a great closing rate to learn some tips.

Because most communication is now virtual, sales teams have a ton of data to analyze. By choosing software with AI and automation capabilities, teams can analyze data quickly on a much larger scale. For example, AI-powered analytics tools can review all your sales data (emails, call transcripts, social media interactions, etc.) and surface trends that may lead to new sales opportunities or a pivot in your go to market strategy— such as identifying when a new competitor enters the market. From there, you can adjust your sales techniques and pricing strategies as needed.

When you begin sales tracking, you must first determine which sales metrics (KPIs) you want to focus on. To make the most of your data, you should focus on what's most important — and this will depend on your overall business goals.

For example, if your organization is focused on building loyal, repeat customers, customer lifetime value (CLV) is an important data point to track. This KPI shows when reps are building strong relationships that promote customer loyalty.

Sales tracking software also makes it possible to track specific KPIs for each of your reps — including metrics based on their position. For example, a more junior representative may be monitored on all their activity metrics, while an experienced rep may be tracked on more specific metrics, such as pipeline and meetings booked. When evaluating sales managers, you can also analyze the performance of their entire team, which typically determines commissions and goals.

All sales tracking software is not created equal. By making sure that your new tool has the features your company needs, your team will see more success — and an easier transition. Features to look for include:

• Automation: Entering data manually is time-consuming and error-prone. With automation, you can automatically capture all daily sales activity data. This eliminates the issue of sales reps not logging their activities or forgetting to enter key information. By selecting a sales tracking tool with automation, you can significantly improve the quality of your data.
• Single platform: Many sales tracking tools integrate with CRMs. But, this can sometimes create multiple versions of data, loss of data, and incomplete insights due to data synchronization delays. I've found it beneficial to use a sales tracking tool that's built into your CRM. This way, all stakeholders can view, track, and analyze opportunities in the same place — using a single source of data.
• AI-based: AI-powered tools provide predictive and generative insights you can use immediately. They can help reps better manage their schedules and prioritize tasks — like focusing on prospects who are more likely to close using AI predictive scoring. Armed with these insights, sales reps can optimize their time and increase revenue.

Using sales tracking software, your sales team can gain the insights needed to improve efficiencies and increase revenue. And when you choose software that meets your needs, the process becomes more seamless and productive.

However, purchasing the software doesn't solve the challenges by itself. You must create the right workflow that uses the data to take the actions needed to level up your sales tactics. When you create the right processes around your software, your organization will quickly see benefits — from increased revenue to improved job satisfaction and stronger customer relationships.

This article is for informational purposes only. This article features products from Salesforce, which we own. We have a financial interest in their success, but all recommendations are based on our genuine belief in their value.