Let’s start by saying congratulations.
Why?
Because if you’re here, you’re either just getting started with a new business venture, or your current company’s sales are ramping up so significantly that you’ve decided you better take a good hard look at your systems and processes.
You’ve realized you’re not tracking your sales deals efficiently — or even at all — and you’re crying out for help.
Don’t worry, we’re here to take you in, swaddle you, and sing you sweet lullabies all about tracking sales deals in a way that not only makes your life easier, but can improve business operations and revenue potential.
Sound like what you’re after?
We thought so.
What is sales opportunity management?
The process of tracking deals — also known as sales opportunities — is known as sales opportunity management.
It’s a key element of the sales role, as it not only provides a strategic overview of the current state of your sales leads, but also creates opportunities for leaders to analyze sales rep performance and provide coaching opportunities.
Typically, sales opportunity management takes place in a sales pipeline like this one:
Why is it important to track deals?
Tracking your sales deals offers a number of benefits.
First, using a CRM to track deals can boost conversion rates by up to 300%!
So, when you accurately track what you’re working on, you’ll close more. Simple as that.
Secondly, tracking deals in a software platform makes your sales process more efficient, as everything you need to know about your prospects is right there in one place.
Thirdly, tracking deals provides a greater opportunity for reporting and analysis.
By tracking your deals and then monitoring progress — by salesperson or compared to previous months or years — you’re able to better understand potential areas for improvement.
A good software platform for deal tracking should allow you to build your own custom dashboards, so you can review performance at a glance.
So, what do you need to track deals?
With all of this in mind, you’re probably pumped to start tracking deals but — just like anything — there are some best practices for tracking deals efficiently.
To take full advantage of current lead tracking abilities, you should invest in a Work OS that allows you to:
- Import contacts from an existing list (because you probably already have some)
- Categorize information in a way that makes sense to you and your team
- Add multiple contacts to a single company, because it’s not unusual to be dealing with two or more key decision-makers
- Create customer-facing lead forms that plumb data right into your sales pipeline board
- Automate as much manual, recurring work as possible, saving your reps time each day
- Integrate your calendar and email providers for ease of use
- Create detailed — or basic — reports, with custom dashboards to display the info you need on a daily basis
- Customize your sales pipeline boards with columns like dialable phone numbers and time zones
That last point is crucial, especially if you’re working with clients right across the country — or the globe — in which case you’ll want to pay your respects to their timezone and not call them up in the middle of the night.
A Work OS like monday.com makes this easy by providing a handy “World Clock” column type.
How should I keep track of my sales deals?
By now, it should be obvious that you should be tracking your sales deals in a pipeline, but what should this look like?
Typically, pipelines are arranged with a number of stages, representing the different activities a prospect needs to go through in order to become a customer.
Note the different stages in this sales pipeline example:
The specific stages you’ll have in your pipeline will depend on the type of industry you’re in and your company’s sales process, but a typical set of pipeline stages looks like this:
- Prospecting
- Qualification
- Demo or meeting
- Proposal
- Negotiation
- Deal won
- Post-purchase follow up
How to track sales deals efficiently using monday.com
We don’t mind blowing our own trumpet a little, and saying monday.com is the ideal Work OS for tracking deals and amping up your sales performance.
Let’s take a look at exactly how to do this in 5 simple steps.
1. Set up a system
The beauty of a Work OS like monday.com is that it allows you to custom build your own workflows, creating a board that works for your team.
That said, the easiest way to get started is with a template, which sets you up with the columns most commonly used by sales teams pre-populated so you can jump right in.
Here’s an example of what the sales CRM might look like:
As you can see, our board has two separate groups: incoming leads and active leads.
In this case, active leads are the customers who’ve already agreed to do business with us, and incoming leads are our sales opportunities in progress.
Let’s look a little deeper at this group, and the columns we’ve used to track these deals:
- People Column. The first column in this group is a People Column, used to assign each deal to a sales rep. At a glance, you can see who’s working on which deals.
- World Clock Column. In this example, we’re working leads in different time zones, so it’s helpful to have a visual representation of the timezone our prospect is in so we know when to call.
- Phone Column. In this column, we can store our customers’ contact numbers, and even click to dial if using an internet calling system.
- Numbers Column. Numbers columns can be used to respect the deal size in terms of dollars, sales commissions, or anything else you might want to see.
- Status Columns. We’ve used the Status Column for a few different things: to display how large the company is, the prospective plan we’re trying to sell, and the stage of the sales funnel they’re in.
Doing so allows us to see in one view the status of each lead in terms of progress. For a change of scene, we can also navigate over to a Kanban board view to see leads displayed in groupings based on status.
2. Import your current sales data
Now we’re cooking!
It’s time to import your current information, from wherever that may be. Maybe you’ve been working out of spreadsheets, or maybe you even had a basic internal CRM system.
Maybe, just maybe, you’ve been using the good old pen and paper method. If you have, transfer all of that information into a spreadsheet — Google Sheets is an easy, free way to do this.
Once you’ve got your data in one place, navigate to the bottom left-hand corner of your screen and hit “Import data”.
Click on Google Sheets — or any of the other integrations you see here — and monday.com will automatically map this information to the pipeline you’ve created.
Of course, you might need to tell monday.com what’s in each of your spreadsheet columns:
3. Make capturing new leads easy
So, you’ve got all of your existing opportunities ready to work, but you’re not gonna stop there, right?
Pretty soon, you’re going to be running marketing campaigns with the goal of generating some new leads.
And you’re going to want to make it easy to get their data into your pipeline without having to muck around typing it all in yourself.
You can do this by creating a simple lead capture form that integrates with your monday.com pipeline:
4. Automate
Once you’re up and running, and you’ve been working your sales leads for a few weeks, you’ll start to realize that there are certain activities you’re doing, like, all the time.
In the interest of saving yourself a bit of time — and making your sales process even more efficient — you should create some monday.com automation rules to take care of that menial grunt work.
It’s pretty simple. You start with a recipe like this:
And then fill in the blanks to turn that recipe into a nice little automated cake:
5. Reporting
Tracking your deals is about more than just having the data in a system. It’s also about reflecting on your processes, and determining what is, and isn’t, working.
The easiest way to create a catalyst for this reflection is to set up custom sales dashboards that provide both high-level and in-depth analysis of your sales performance.
Check out this example, which tracks deals closed, total annual recurring revenue, and sales commissions. It also breaks this down per rep, allowing sales managers to assess performance individually, and across the board.
It’s time to get selling
So, you’re all set up and ready to rock: it’s time to get selling!
And don’t forget that even though you’ve got a beautiful sales pipeline set up for tracking deals, there’s always room for improvement.
As your team grows, your processes develop, and your customers change — and with it, the customer journey — the way you manage your leads will as well.
To keep up, you need more than a simple deal tracking solution, you need an easy-to-use, intuitive Work OS that can flex and grow with you.
monday.com is that Work OS. Get started today with our sales pipeline template and save yourself the hard work.
