Updated February 23, 2023
Consistently hitting your sales goals isn’t automatic – and it’s not always a guarantee. You need to create and follow the right processes to truly maximize your sales potential. One thing that can help you out is using sales call tracking sheets so you can get more out of your cold calls.
Keep reading to get our overview of the topic and to find actionable tips and templates to help you get started with tracking sheets.
Understanding sales call tracking sheets
The purpose of using sales call tracking sheets is to get more out of your cold calls. They provide an easy way to record and track the data you generate while making calls.
If you use these consistently, keeping tabs on the results of your cold calls over time becomes very straightforward. You can analyze your performance to identify trends. Then you’ll have a comprehensive list of what you need to improve as a cold caller.
How tracking sheets help you get new business leads
Working with sales call tracking sheets can help you get more new business leads. Tracking sheets can improve your efficiency by making it easier for you to keep track of how well you’re doing over time. They also give you the opportunity to try out new sales strategies to reveal how your numbers are impacted. If you’re tracking this data already, it becomes much easier to quickly understand whether or not those new tactics are working.
What to track
The simplest way to understand how sales call tracking sheets work is to consider what you can track, like:
Total calls
Total calls are one of the most obvious things you can track. The idea is to keep a running tally, day-after-day, of the number of calls you get through in the time you spend completing cold calls.
Doing this will give you a great sense of how your efficiency evolves. But it doesn’t provide you with any information about the effectiveness of your cold calls.
Number of decision-makers contacted
This metric can be a very useful one to track for B2B salespeople. If you keep tabs on the total number of decision-makers you reach in a day, then you can get a sense of how effective you are at breaking through organizational gatekeepers.
Perhaps more importantly, you’ll get a keen understanding of how your effectiveness waxes and wanes over time. You’ll notice drops in efficacy quickly and will be able to easily see whether any new strategies you try are working or not.
Total appointments generated
If your sales typically involve appointments before they happen, then your goal with cold calls is to schedule as many follow-up appointments as possible. With this type of sales call tracking sheet, you’ll easily see how effective you are.
Total sales/dollar amount of sales
This data probably won’t be worth tracking for B2B salespeople since most B2B sales won’t take place on an initial cold call. But it can be the perfect metric for someone in B2C sales.
You’ll just need to decide whether total sales completed or the dollar amount is a more useful metric to track. Total sales is a better fit for those who only sell a single product at a set price. The dollar amount of sales is a better metric for people who sell multiple products at varying price points.
Custom metrics
You are by no means limited to using sales call tracking sheets for only the following metrics. You can also develop your custom metrics.
For example, maybe the first step you take towards converting a new lead is getting them to sign up for a free trial of your service. If so, tracking how many trial sign-ups you get from cold calls each day could be the best metric for you to track.
The idea here is that you don’t have to use sales call tracking sheets in the same way. If you identify a metric that makes more sense for you, track it instead.
Tips for getting more out of sales call tracking sheets
There are various metrics for cold calling you can track – and even helpful, free templates to use. But if you want to get as much out of this practice as possible, we recommend adhering to the following:
Start with an excellent understanding of your goals
Every salesperson’s goals will be different. And what those goals are will impact which tracking sheets you should be using.
For example, it wouldn’t make sense for someone who doesn’t talk to decision-makers to use a sales call tracking sheet focused on how many decision-makers they speak with in a day. But this could be the perfect metric to track for someone who has to convince a decision-maker to buy their product or service to get a sale.
Compare your sheets to other salespeoples’
Even though sales call tracking sheets help you understand your sales journey, it can be challenging to know how that compares to others.
You might not see any meaningful change in the number of calls you make each day if you track that metric over time. That doesn’t tell you much on its own. But if you compare it to other salespeople in your organization, you could learn a ton.
Use your sales call tracking sheets to test new strategies
Sales call tracking sheets can help you run data-backed tests to determine which sales strategies work best for you.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say that you’re tracking your total sales numbers each day. In the beginning, you could use your standard sales tactics to get a baseline measurement of roughly how many sales you get in a day with normal strategies.
Then you could try adding a new strategy to the mix. Then you can track how your success rate changes by introducing the new strategy.
Sales call tracking sheet ideas for 2022
There are a variety of ways to track your sales calls, and the metrics you track depend on what matters to your business. You can design your own custom sales call tracking sheet, or create your own template based on these guidelines:
- Combination sales call template: Track phone calls with customers and/or track your monthly sales call goals. A combination template allows you to track calls, sales, contact information, and more all in one spreadsheet.
- Daily call tracking template: Track the details of your daily calls, including duration of the call, description of the conversation, and other important call notes. You can create this template for inbound and/or outbound call tracking.
- Sales data tracker: This basic sales data tracker will allow your whole team to visualize sales data. It might include number of won and lost opportunities, average deal value, average time to close, and other sales metrics. Include a sales call planner to help you organize your outreach activities and manage performance. See one example here.
- Sales activity tracking template: Track all of your sales activities with this template, including emails, leads, calls, meetings, orders/sales, and more. This will allow your team to eliminate bottlenecks to make your sales pipeline more efficient.
- Customer service call template: In order to document customer service calls, you’ll need a space to record case ID numbers, customer notes, call descriptions, and actions to take. Customize the sheet by adding more columns that are necessary for your process.
- Advanced customer service tracking template: Track customer service calls and monitor overall call performance with this sheet, including KPIs for each representative. You’ll be able to record the number of calls answered, the average duration of each call, and the call abandonment rate.
Choose whichever sales call tracking spreadsheet structure works best for your business, and get started!
Other types of tracking to improve your sales performance
Sales call tracking sheets are an effective way to improve, but they’re certainly not your only option. Here are some other tracking options that can help you work towards a better sales performance.
Email tracking
Data shows that email marketing has an ROI of about $36 for every $1 spent. But you’re only going to be able to reach that level if you’re using the right tactics.
Email tracking is a great way to assess your performance with metrics like:
- Total emails sent
- Percentage of emails opened
- Click-through rate
- Sales won via email
As with sales call tracking sheets, your email tracking sheets will give you some insight into which email marketing metrics you’re good at and the areas that could use some work.
Social media tracking
If your company markets via social media (it should be), then you may also want to deploy tracking sheets for those efforts. Some valuable metrics to track on social media include:
- Total reach
- Impressions
- Conversions
- Response rate
- Follower count
Keep in mind that the metrics that matter most and your performance in each area can vary from platform to platform.
For example, your statistics on LinkedIn will likely be quite a bit different than they are on Instagram. It won’t usually make sense to compare these two data sets as though they were precisely the same.
Instead, it’s better to define unique marketing and sales goals for each social media platform. That way, you better understand how well you’re performing on each platform.
Sales goal tracking
It’s also a good idea to get into the habit of tracking your sales goal performance. For example, you could look at metrics like:
- Daily sales figures
- Total quarterly revenue generated
- Monthly and weekly sales goals
- Your performance compared to other salespeople in your organization
The idea is to see how consistently you’re hitting your sales goals over a period of time.
Tracking this data may help you discover you’re struggling with a particular goal, indicating that you need to change some of your sales strategies to resolve the issue.
Sales pipeline tracking
Many salespeople now use the idea of a pipeline to visualize how customers progress through their sales journeys. If your company uses a sales pipeline too, then it can be helpful to track your performance in this area as well.
Here are some of the metrics that matter most in this area:
- Pipeline velocity (the speed at which leads move through your sales pipeline)
- Total number of leads in your sales pipeline on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
- Sales cycle length
- Pipeline growth rate
- Deal conversion rate
When you keep tabs on metrics like these, you’ll better understand how much money is moving through your pipeline at any given time. This should help you make more accurate sales forecast predictions.
Get more out of your leads with LeadLander
If you want to start getting more out of the leads from cold calls, check out LeadLander.
With LeadLander, you can:
- Identify undiscovered leads
- Feed your sales funnel
- Get the data you need to optimize your web pages to close leads
- Receive real-time updates when prospects return to your site
- Sync inbound lead flow with marketing campaigns
Experience the LeadLander difference for yourself by signing up for a free 14-day trial of our service here.
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