Sales tracking: 7 best practices for small businesses

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Let’s be honest: high sales are the lifeblood of every small business owner. From the number of cold emails you send in a week to the number of deals you close in a month, it’s all a numbers game.
This is where sales tracking comes into play. Sales tracking refers to the collection, analysis, and reporting of sales data to understand how well a business is achieving its short- and long-term sales goals. Sales tracking is an important metric for small businesses. It not only indicates how many sales your company has made through strategic efforts, but it also highlights aspects of the sales process, customer experience, and sales strategy, helping you make informed decisions going forward.

While most large companies use a combination of sales strategies and customer relationship management tools to track sales, small businesses can struggle to define and measure key performance metrics, which can lead to missed sales opportunities and a lack of a solid long-term customer base. If you’re a small business struggling to optimize your sales tracking processes, here are 7 best practices that can help.

7 Best Practices for Sales Tracking in Small Businesses
1. Set Clear Sales Goals
Sales tracking isn’t just about hitting some random Sweden telegram data numbers at the end of the week; it involves creating a sales cycle based on thorough market research and knowledge of successful businesses. If you want to achieve certain sales goals or improve your performance, you need to set measurable goals for everyone involved in the sales process.

What is the ultimate goal you want to achieve with your sales coaching? Are you planning to increase your business revenue and reach a larger number of target customers, or are you trying to streamline the process of creating more effective sales proposals?

By setting short- and long-term goals, assigning appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to your sales team, and actively tracking progress toward those goals, you can help your small business stay focused and agile. You can also use sales tracking software, both paid and free, to monitor your teams’ performance against their goals in real time.

For example, if you are a wedding venue management company in California and you want to increase your sales of loft-style wedding venues , instead of saying "we need to increase our revenue," set your goal like this: "We need to increase our sales of loft-style wedding venues by 20% by the end of this quarter."

Key Takeaway: Setting clear, measurable goals provides direction and establishes success benchmarks for small businesses.

2. Use a Centralized Sales Tracking System


A centralized sales tracking system that aims to improve sales pipeline management is better than storing the same information across multiple platforms. A centralized CRM system can help small businesses streamline their customer data, retention strategies, and automate tedious tasks using artificial intelligence, as well as streamline collaboration across teams.

Compared to traditional tracking methods, such as using Google Workspace or Microsoft Office for manual data entry, centralized systems provide a real-time view of sales data for easier pipeline reporting, can help with sales forecasting, reduce churn, and improve team collaboration.

There are several work management tools and software solutions available for small businesses that integrate sales tracking, client management, and project reporting into a single system for a holistic view of the entire process.

For example, Flowlu uses its online CRM capabilities to streamline sales tracking processes in organizations, in addition to offering project management, collaboration, task and financial tools, essential for small businesses to execute and manage their end-to-end sales tracking.