Best practices: How to track sales in Scoro?

As the popular saying goes, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” Start tracking your sales in Scoro, so you have reliable data on which to improve your sales results and grow profit. It also boosts employee productivity and helps to make better decisions faster. 

What's in it for the salespeople:

• Get a complete overview of ongoing and done business deals in the Pipeline. Real-time look into what you’ve closed, but also the potential deals you can win (therefore, get an estimation on your possible bonuses!)
• Easily prioritize which leads to continue to work with, which need a little nudge to get past the finish line, and for example, which are the truly valuable prospects that require your attention first.
• Quickly schedule follow-up activities to get back to the customer as agreed during the previous call.
• Full overview of each contact – every little piece of communication, sent documents, follow-up activities, past deals, etc. in one place.
• Fewer catch-up meetings – everyone can keep tabs on everything done in Scoro, in real time.

What's in it for the manager: 

• Get a complete overview of the whole pipeline, track the status of any deal in real time and forecast possible sales with the help of the Pipeline report. Plan your sales and create new leads to build up your pipeline instead of reacting when it’s already too late. View all client communication related to any business deal with one click.
• Get insight on how your team spends their working hours, what type of activities take the most of their time and which tasks could be optimized.
• See which products/services, markets, and industries bring in the maximum revenue.
• Compare various time periods to see whether you’ve been moving in the right direction. If needed, take action right away.
• See, who’s reaching their targets with no effort at all and who needs an extra push to achieve their personal sales goals.

Follow these 6 steps to get better at tracking your sales deals:

1. List your leads (opportunities) as contacts and categorize them to later easily segment and filter your contact database.
   
   a. Add categories and use them to track all important leads in your pipeline. For example, the categories for contacts could be Cold lead, Hot lead, Existing Customer, Ex-customer, Partner, Not interested, etc. You can later filter contacts by category, e.g. filter out hot leads to grab a potential customer’s attention when their interest is at its peak!
   
   b. Define tags to easily filter a long list of contacts by specific attributes, like their industry, number of employees, etc. You can use this data to create personalized campaigns for a well-targeted audience.
   
   
2. Track client communication by adding tasks and events to, later on, trace conversations and all done activities (make sure you link them to the correct client in your database!) in one single place. Anyone in your team can open the contact card and get a full overview of client history.
   
   PRO TIP: Use Scoro’s Smart Inbox to send emails to your task list as tasks.
   
   
   
   
3. Add follow-up activities with leads as tasks reminding you to get back to them. Just set the deadline accordingly and leave the task as not done. Mark it as done once you have completed the assignment. If you use calendar events for follow-ups, you don’t need to take any extra steps – calendar events are considered done when the event time has passed. When creating a task or event directly from the relevant contact card it is automatically linked to the contact.
   
   
4. Use activity types (for tasks and events) to get detailed reporting on how many sales activities (reach-outs) you do and how long they take. Make sure to add an activity type to each task and event. Predefine the list of activity types for your team –  add the activities you perform on a daily basis (the ones you want to track and get reporting on).
   
   A list of example activity types that might come handy in sales:
   Lead research
   Call: outbound lead
   Call: inbound lead
   Call: existing customer
   Meeting: potential customer
   Meeting: existing customer
   E-mail: potential customer
   E-mail: existing customer
   Preparing sales materials (e.g. presentation)
   Preparing a quote/offer
   Sales follow-up
   Internal sales meeting
   
   It’s essential to link all tasks and events to activity types. Without this data, reporting doesn’t even come close to its full potential.
   
   
   
   
5. Issue quotes and send them out as official proposals or use them for tracking purposes.
   
   a. If you issue many similar quotes, use standard quotes to save time on compiling each quote from scratch. All the data on the standard quote is automatically filled out for you.
   
   b. Make sure you have filled out as much information as possible on the service/product (rate) cards, as all this data (price, unit, description, quantity) is automatically added to the document when selecting a service on a sales document. You can still modify this data on the document if you wish.
   
   c. Use an estimated closing date on each quote to indicate the date you expect to close the deal by. This data is also used in the Pipeline report to calculate your potential revenue (pipeline value) for each month.
   
   d. Use the due date to state how long the offer is valid for the potential customer and to also track this information in the Pipeline.
   
   Note! You can use custom price lists for companies, set default discounts, due dates and more. 
   
   
6. Manage quotes in the Pipeline to follow how deals progress from one sales stage to another and easily prioritize your next activities (e.g. you might want to pay special attention to the quotes with high deal value or the ones with passed expiry dates).
   
   
   
   a. Customize statuses and use them to track leads in different sales stages. For example, quote statuses could be Opportunity, Negotiation, Closing, Confirmed, Rejected and so on.  
   
   b. Add a probability to each status (how likely you think it is to close the deal in that particular status).
   
   Tip! If you wish to use different probabilities for quotes in the same status just create several similar statuses (e.g. Closing – high probability, Closing - low probability). This helps to prioritize your leads but also generates more accurate results in the Pipeline report (weighted average of the deal).
   
   
   
   c. Customize the view by displaying the option “Expires in” to see how long the quote has until or how much it’s past its due date.
   
   d. Customize the view by adding the option “Days in status” to see how long the quote has been stuck in the status.
   
   Note! You can define an expiry time for each status – the maximum amount of time a quote can stay in one status before a visual indication (red) that it has been in a stand-still in this status for too many days. 
   
   

Other useful tips: 

• Easily filter out all contacts with whom there has been no communication lately (no tasks or events related to that customer). Go to the Contact list and select the filter “Activity missing”. Tick all the relevant contacts or select all of them at once. With a few clicks create and assign similar individual tasks to your team to get in touch with these customers.
  
  
  
  
• Change account managers/related users of multiple contacts at once with a mass command. For example, if the related salesperson has moved on to a different position and a new account manager needs to take over their assignments.
  
  
• If you want to track all your leads in the Pipeline even before sending out quotes, you can simply add a placeholder quote with 0 value to the Pipeline. This helps to track sales opportunities and remember to move forward with them when the time is right.
  
  
• Make sure to save filtered views (Contact list, Pipeline) as default views or bookmarks. This saves you loads of time and allows you to open your preferred views in one click without selecting any filters.

Read more on most used reports and how to effortlessly create them in Scoro.