Activity tracking is an important way to measure the performance of your sales team and the quality of your deals. However, the process of capturing all activities related to a deal is challenging and can be hindered by bad habits.
In this blog post, we will explore the challenges of activity tracking in sales, and how to overcome them using automations and a better connection between Slack and Salesforce.
What is activity tracking in sales and why is it important
Sales activity tracking is the process of monitoring and recording all activities associated with closing a deal. This includes emails, phone calls, text messages, and any other communications that happen with a prospect or lead.
Sales teams that are scaling up rely heavily on activity tracking to measure how the team executes deals and stays on top of customers. Emails and meetings between your reps and their prospects are the classic pieces of data that are captured in the CRM.
Activity tracking helps sales teams improve their performance by providing visibility into what's working and isn't, and identifying effective approaches to selling the product.
The challenges of activity tracking in sales
Now that’s all great in theory, but the reality is far different. Capturing these activities while juggling calls, meeting, emails, etc. is incredibly challenging for most sales reps.
Additionally, besides emails and meetings, tracking newer means of communication are often overlooked. More often these days, teams are relying strongly on Slack to coordinate both internally with their teams - sales engineering, developers, CSMs, finance, legal - and externally with their customer using Slack Connect. Also, texting via SMS or Whatsapp are common ways to engage with your prospect.
In order to get the entire picture of your deals for yourself and your RevOps team, you must save all communications, but manually tracking these back to Salesforce or Hubspot is labor intensive and easily missed.
How to overcome the challenges of activity tracking in sales
Enter…workflow automation!
You can do this by integrating your email and CRM, then setting up timely Slack notifications to lower the friction on reps to fill in the gaps. We like to send a message as soon as a call ends (using our integrations with Google Calendar and Gong) so pro mpt the rep to capture notes, next steps and fields immediately upon completion of the call.
This is how we handle this in Momentum. With a quick notification that also prompts action, reps can stay in flow, capture the notes and next steps in the brief time they have between calls, and stay focused on closing deals. The notes write back to Salesforce automatically and everyone is happy.
It’s also important to track internal communications to understand how your team members work together on a deal. This can be done by leveraging Deal Rooms (dedicated Slack channels for your key deals) or filing Salesforce Cases for your key internal processes (requesting a Sales Engineer, running a redline process).
Finally, don’t forget about reporting. Expand on your existing reports to track, visualize, and optimize all these new types of activity to get the full picture of how your deals are moving along the sales cycle, especially as more of these conversations happen outside of email and in Slack or text.
Want to optimize your own process for easier tracking and better reporting using Slack as an effective way to meet reps where they work all day? We can help! Sign up for a free trial or demo here.
