Selling is the fuel that keeps your business running and tracking your sales helps you understand how your business is doing, to understand what marketing strategy works best. Many businesses are using the wrong sales metrics to track sales and this results in poor sales results. Here are some tips to help you effectively track sales and increase your revenue:
Track your sales cycle: Effective sales tracking begins by measuring the amount of time it takes to close a sale. The easiest way to track your sales cycle is by engaging your prospects. If you’re operating a brick-and-mortar business, cold-calling and distribution of flyers or business cards, is a good way to engage your prospects. With running an online venture, you must be able to create content that will engage and educate your prospective customers to understand, appreciate and eventually purchase your product or service.
Track your social media leads: All business leads have a source. As a business owner, you must chase the source of your leads in order to effectively track sales. Social media is usually the best to start. As of March this year, Facebook had over 1.09 billion active users according to the latest report on the company’s newsroom. According to Twitter’s Digital Media Report, the platform has 310 million users and LinkedIn has over 433 million active users according to the company’s newsroom.With these figures, chances are that your customers are active on one or multiple social media platforms. You must figure out which of the social media platforms your leads use so you can channel them to your storefront.
Track sales by prior activity: Sales usually follow a cause-effect pattern or what marketers call ‘a prior activity.’ In other words, you have to initiate an activity (i.e. by promoting your product or service) before a customer can purchase from you. If you sell hair products for example, you can track the number of customers that order by engaging your target audience online and offline. You can compare the responses on the different marketing channels and it will help you understand what marketing strategy brings in the most sales so you double down on it.
Track new and repeat sales: In order to effectively track sales, you need to distinguish the ratio of sales coming from new customers and the ratio from repeat customers. Monitoring repeat customers will give an insight on the average customer satisfaction of your product or service. On the other hand, tracking new customers will help monitor growth. Ultimately, new and repeat customers indicate that your marketing effort is effective and you are on the right path.
Track your prospects: Create a prospect list and delegate time to follow up with them regularly. Regular follow up is essential for converting prospects into customers and increasing sales. You can follow up in person, by telephone, emails and so on.
Always remember that it takes time and effort to build a profitable business.
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