CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and includes the processes used by organizations of all sizes for retaining existing customers and acquiring new ones.

What is CRM software?

When people use the term CRM, they are often speaking about a CRM system. This is a software platform that organizes a company’s relationships with customers, prospective customers, vendors and more. Learn more about CRMs in this blog post.

Who should be using a CRM?

Any business that handles sales or marketing of products or services can benefit from using a CRM. This includes both B2B and B2C businesses. The teams most likely to use a CRM in any business are Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. Sales - A CRM helps your sales team be well positioned to upsell and cross-sell your products and services. Sales teams can also use click-to-call functions to help save time and make it easy to keep track of all your interactions with prospects and customers so nothing falls into the cracks. They can also generate highly specific quotes as they seek new business and to run reports and invoices for existing customers. Marketing - A CRM helps your marketing team gather valuable information from your customers, making it easier to target marketing efforts precisely and effectively. When you can aim your marketing campaigns at a specific audience, you’re far more likely to reap a good ROI, and you don’t waste the time and money that often results from an undifferentiated marketing campaign, which can end up feeling like spam. Customer service - CRMs help support teams efficiently resolve issues, and make it easy to connect customers to the right person at all times.

When should a business start using a CRM?

Most companies wait too long to implement a CRM, often falling into chaos and making both customers and employees irritable. By the time you’ve hired employee number 10, you’re likely to need a CRM. At this point, communication starts to get more difficult, and the lack of a CRM is probably resulting in a lot of wasted time and effort. A good test is if you feel that you’ve outgrown your spreadsheets, it’s time for a CRM. If you aren’t able to identify where new customers have come from (and whether they’re responding to your marketing campaigns or not), it’s time for a CRM. If you don’t know what your salespeople are doing, it’s time for a CRM.

What is the difference between an on-premise CRM and a cloud CRM?

The big difference between on-premise and cloud is where the software and data are stored. With on-premise CRM, the software is located on your company’s servers and on employee computers. The implementation process typically takes more time, more IT resources, and is more complex. However if your organization has especially strict security protocols, this can be the ideal choice. With an on-premise implementation, upgrades will take longer, and your IT team will be taxed to provide service to the CRM. You’ll typically be charged per implementation. Cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRMs are operated on and store data on the vendor’s servers. The vendor is responsible for the uptime operation of the system and provides customer support. You’ll need a strong internet connection to run a cloud-based CRM, but you won’t need the expense of dedicated servers. Upgrades will occur at all times, so the platform will be constantly evolving. You’ll typically be charged by seat.

Sales Tracking Software for growing revenue

Track your sales team’s efforts and activities in a convenient CRM

Why choose Insightly CRM sales tracking software?

Affordable yet powerful

Get modern, robust features in a cloud platform, but skip the enterprise prices.

Scalable

The CRM that’s built to scale. It will grow with you…but you’ll never outgrow it.

The CRM you’ll love

Easy to adopt and use across your entire organization every day.

Build and Convert Sales Pipeline

Convert quality leads to opportunities, actively manage every step from opportunity to close, and grow your business faster than ever.

Adopting Insightly has helped us close deals faster because the entire team collaborates on providing mission-critical detail in the CRM. From my perspective as a sales leader, the support I get from the team to capture this information and close opportunities is absolutely critical to our success.

Ian Pund, Senior Vice President of Sales,
Noble BioMaterials

Sales Pipeline & Lead Management

Start acting on leads and create opportunities

Capture relevant details about each lead
Prioritize leads with your teams, and distribute based on criteria you set
Empower teams to get a real-time view into where each deal stands

Sales Lead Tracking & Opportunity Management

Create velocity through your sales process

Leverage your pipelines to track, manage, and nurture deals efficiently
Get insights into what’s moving your business forward, and where the risks are
Manage opportunities in customizable pipelines
Drive more velocity through the sales and delivery process

Increase Productivity

By supporting intuitive, automated, and scalable processes, teams are empowered to close deals and deliver services faster and more efficiently.

“By leveraging Insightly, we were able to shave 50% off our timelines. Insightly allows us to seamlessly push data to each project directly, which empowers us to move onto the next step in our process instantly.”

Joanna Falcone,
VP Systems and Process Development

Business Workflow & Process Automation

Automate repetitive, manual tasks so your team can focus on what matters most.

Eliminate the risk of human error
Reduce the number of redundant tasks and processes
Scale faster with email, reminders, onboarding stages and much more
Free your team from low-value tasks and improve employee engagement

Validation Rules & Advanced Permissions

Preserve data integrity, capture quality data, and deliver great experiences.

Make your CRM even more valuable to your business by ensuring that every business-critical field and object is updated with validation rules
Ensure accuracy and data compliance
Help teams perform efficiently and stay on track by delivering data access to the right roles and profiles with advanced permissions
Take control of your data by making sure the right people have the right access at all times

Products, Price Books & Quotes

Create a complete record of your offerings and make it easy to close the deal.

Drive process improvement and clarity by helping your teams add the right products to the right opportunities at the right price
Create deal velocity, configure and price quotes directly from opportunity records and keep track of the status with quote pipelines
Quickly and seamlessly generate PDFs or email quotes directly from Insightly
Customize your quotes with branded templates

Project & Task Management

Create seamless post-sale transitions, ensure crisp communication, manage projects, and complete them faster.

Seamlessly convert opportunities to projects after the deal is closed
Copy all corresponding details, records, tasks and more from the opportunity directly in the project for complete visibility into customer requirements
Use pipelines and milestones to enhance cross-team communication
Tailor every project with custom fields and page layouts to deliver great outcomes to your customers

Build Lasting Customer Relationships

Show customers and prospects you know them by capturing the right information about every interaction and using your data to deliver great experiences.

Our motto is this: If it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen. If you have an idea, explore it. Get the process on a white board and work with your Insightly team to see if it’s possible. Odds are, the answer is yes.

Jennifer Nietz,
Vice President, COACT

Customer Relationship Management

Relationships are everything. Improve every connection you make and grow your business by delivering efficiently on your promises.

Create a single source of truth for every customer relationship
Break down communication silos by capturing the right information about every deal and making it accessible to key stakeholders in every department
Improve your business processes, elevate the experiences you deliver, and grow your business faster than ever

Customizable CRM

Every business is unique. Configure the CRM and information to match your business processes.

Intuitive customization empowers you to easily mold Insightly to your unique business needs
Save on cost with intuitive, easy customization – no expensive third party developers required
Improve communication, collaboration, and CRM adoption while driving great business outcomes

Customer Email Management

Make all your communication even more effective with Insightly.

Deliver complete visibility to all your teams across every single customer email interaction
Drive deal and project velocity by tracking and managing each customer communication in Insightly
Facilitate proactive communication by picking up the relationship at exactly the right place

Get real-time performance insights

Create real-time, customizable data visualizations in minutes with the data that matters most to your business.

Because operations and sales all utilize Insightly, we’re all empowered to deliver great customer experiences. Insightly delivers a great way for us in operations to understand and get ahead of what’s coming.

Amber Livingston,
Operations Manager, Multifamily Utility Company

Performance Dashboards & Reporting

Create customizable charts and visualizations in minutes with the data that matters most.

Customize around your unique KPIs so that your key metrics are visible at a glance
Make decisions based on what’s happening with your business in real time
Get to a single source of truth for your business, save time on handoffs across teams, and create consistency
Create up to 100 shareable dashboard cards on the Professional Plan and an unlimited number of cards on the Enterprise plan

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Do more, better, faster

Increase your teams’ productivity by automating and orchestrating workflow tasks, sending emails, updating records, executing custom code, firing webhooks, and much more.

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Customers drive productivity with Insightly CRM

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Solar company shows how Insightly helped them triple revenue without tripling the team.

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Experience Insightly CRM for yourself

Keep everything safe and secure

Our entire team uses the Insightly platform too, so we ensure your data is as secure and safe as our own. We work with customers every day to make sure that their data security requirements are met and exceeded.

SOC 2 Type II certified
Single-sign-on via industry standard authentication protocols
Two-factor authentication support
Encryption of data in transit and at rest
EU/US Privacy Shield and GDPR Compliance
HIPAA Compliance

Work from anywhere

Manage everything on the go with award winning mobile applications for both Android and iOS.

Scan business cards

Take the drudgery out of data entry by uploading all contact information from any business card in just one click.

Update your projects in real time

Road warriors can quickly update the other members of the delivery team on the status of their tasks, milestones, and deliverables.

Move opportunities along

Field salespeople can easily change the status and amount of an opportunity—or create a new one—right at the client’s location.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is sales tracking software?

Small businesses typically start tracking deals in a spreadsheet and then graduate to a CRM – customer relationship management platform. The CRM will have pipeline management tools, dashboards and reports to help track and forecast sales data.

What is sales management software?

Sales management software is another term for CRM – customer relationship management system. CRMs track prospects and leads as they move through your pipeline to become customers, and then manage upsell/cross-sell/resell activities as well as referrals. Sales management software will typically have dashboards and reports to use in forecasting.

How do companies keep track of their sales?

While some can use a spreadsheet, most businesses choose a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to track sales. CRM systems are designed to help businesses manage existing customers while also helping move prospective customers through the pipeline.

Sales Tracking Software

Are you still relying on manually tracking your sales performance using Excel spreadsheets? Perhaps you’re not fully aware of the power of modern sales tracking software. It can be the difference between a stagnant business unable to achieve sales goals and one able to scale and grow.

Sales tracking software allows businesses to monitor the different aspects of the entire sales process. This includes everything from how deals flow through your pipeline and how many leads are followed up to sales cycle lengths and win rates. Doing so can help you analyze the whole process and improve it so that it works better.

How To Track Sales Performance

There are many ways to track, measure, and monitor sales activity using tracking software or a track sales app. In general, here’s how to track sales performance effectively in five basic steps:

Step 1: Set Sales Goals. Generate a set of goals and expectations for your sales team.
Step 2: Measure Goals. Establish KPIs to measure short-term and long-term goals.
Step 3: Customize the Dashboard. Use custom sales performance visualizations.
Step 4: Streamline the Sales Process. Optimize sales efforts with automation.
Step 5: Share Insights. Use performance results to help the sales team improve.

Nowadays, all types of businesses must deal with a large amount of customer data (known as “big data”) — data that can be used to your advantage. Sales tracking software and apps can be used in various industries, including technology, business services, financial services, media, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, e-commerce, retail, etc. For example, a brick-and-mortar can use a retail sales tracker.

Companies can use big data to help them:

Provide better customer service
Track sales performance
Create personalized marketing campaigns
Improve overall business operations

In turn, companies can significantly increase their revenue and profits.

Using big data, you can set your sales team up for success using sales KPIs. KPIs (Key performance indicators) are metrics designed to help you measure the performance of your sales team based on predetermined goals. These KPIs can be aligned with company goals and objectives to measure how your sales team’s performance impacts your business.

Most small businesses and startups use Excel spreadsheets to track sales. However, as you collect more and more data, it becomes impossible to keep track of everything, let alone forecast sales or know how to improve the sales process. That’s why a modern customer relationship management (CRM) system with sales tracking features is essential.

Sales Tracking App

In addition to sales tracking software, you can use a business sales app to help you monitor and improve sales performance. A simple sales tracking app is instrumental when it comes to making data-driven decisions.

A sales tracking app is a mobile application designed to build sophisticated integrations between your existing CRM system and hundreds of applications used throughout your organization.

There are many benefits of a sales tracking app like Insightly AppConnect:

Is ready to use out-of-the-box
Includes hundreds of prebuilt app connections commonly used daily
Gives you the ability to quickly and easily create workflows without writing any code
Can be automatically scaled based on data flow
Provides safe and secure integrations

Using a sales app to connect all the business applications you already use saves you time and money. Also, sales tracking software and apps empower you to run your business smarter and more efficiently so you have happier customers and greater profits.

Sales Tracking Spreadsheet

As mentioned, new and small businesses usually forego a CRM system. Instead, they opt for a sales tracking spreadsheet, such as a sales tracking spreadsheet with Google Sheets or a sales tracker with Excel spreadsheets. There are pros and cons to consider if you’re thinking about using this manual method.

How To Track Sales in Excel or Google Sheets

You can use Excel, Google Sheets, and similar software to keep track of sales. In Excel, it’s common to use a weekly sales tracker Excel template and a monthly sales tracker Excel template. This involves manually inputting all your customer data and sales activities.

Using spreadsheets is easy for any sales leader and team to implement. The software is most often already packaged in the company’s business applications, such as Microsoft or Office 365 Suites and Google Workspace. Unfortunately, spreadsheets aren’t an ideal way to track sales because they’re:

Time-consuming
Labor-intensive
Lacking features for business growth

Disadvantages of Using Manual Sales Tracking

As a business leader, you may question the need for CRM and sales tracking software. While you prefer the manual spreadsheet method, you may not realize how much it’s likely to hold you back from excelling in your business.

Running a business without CRM has many drawbacks:

Data silos cause sales teams to have to search for information from various places
Data is spread out, making it difficult to see the big picture for making decisions
Customer relationships are hard to understand and strengthen
Spreadsheets limit the control you have over all the data
Productivity is lacking with disjointed efforts across teams
Sales leaders remain confused because they don’t know what’s getting done
Bad and insufficient data becomes hard to fix and prevent

The most successful businesses use data to help them make informed decisions. As opposed to using manual methods with spreadsheets, sales tracking software is the best way to go about that.

Best Sales Tracking Software

The best sales tracking software and the best sales tracking app may vary depending on your needs. However, there are some basic requirements that you should consider when deciding on the best software or best apps for sales reps.

Every team member should use the following sales tracking metrics:

Pipeline Metrics. Measure how well a sales pipeline performs (e.g., the number of deals, the average deal size, the length of the sales cycles, etc.).
Activity Metrics. Measure daily tasks sales reps perform (e.g., sales calls, outreach emails, field visits, new leads, etc.).
Productivity Metrics. Measure team effectiveness (e.g., lead response time, percentage of deals won, conversion rate, etc.)
Results Metrics. Measures overall success of the sales team (e.g., meeting quotas, customer satisfaction, churn rate, etc.)

Whether using the best sales app or software, it’s crucial to go through every step, from setting sales goals to sharing insights with sales team members.

Online Sales Tracker

We’ve discussed sales trackers that can be used in CRM software, Excel spreadsheets, and even automation integration apps. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

An online sales tracker can be a website sales tracker or an app to track sales of items. According to the Motley Fool, the ten best online sales trackers available in the market include:

Insightly
Pipedrive
HubSpot CRM
Agile CRM
Bitrix24
Close CRM
Salesforce CRM
SugarCRM
Vtiger Sales CRM
Zoho CRM

There are many benefits to using an online sales tracker. The one that you select should do an excellent job of tracking three metrics:

Conversion Rates – In sales, it’s all about converting leads to actual customers. This metric is one of the most important to track because it can help you spot areas needing improvement. For example, a low conversion rate could mean a sales member may need to refine their sales pitch or follow-up.
Sales Lead Sources – This metric helps you determine where most of your sales are coming from, so you can adjust your focus. For example, if most sales come from leads generated from social media ads, you can prioritize that channel and spend less time and money on others.
Revenue Per Sale – Tracking this metric helps uncover issues where your sales team might miss out on revenue. For instance, your sales rep could be having more success upselling rather than selling base products, which account for much more of your business’s revenue.

It can be confusing to know how to track sales performance, especially when using manual methods such as Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets. However, the data you collect plays a huge role in helping you to make decisions — data-based decisions (or lack thereof) can make or break your business.

As you can see, it’s vital to implement a sales tracking system into your business operations. The best sales software allows you to track key metrics, including conversion rates, lead sources, and revenue per sale. Without a CRM, you’ll experience data silos, lower productivity, the inability to understand customer needs, and many other issues.

At Insightly, we understand the challenge of handling big data and keeping track of sales performances. Look no further if you’re looking for a new and improved sales tracking platform. Your sales team is sure to love our CRM and sales tracking software.

Don’t take our word for it — try us out to see the impact technology can have on your business firsthand. You can take a test run of Insightly CRM. It’s built for fast-growing companies like yours, whether it’s a startup, SMB, or enterprise. This flexible, customizable CRM suits any industry, from manufacturing and insurance to solar and sales.

Simply create an account to sign up for a self-serve free trial or watch a demo at your convenience.

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Run your business on Insightly All-in-One.

Choosing the right CRM to align teams

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Earn referral fees and grow your business with CRM and related services.

Why choose Insightly CRM sales tracking software?

Affordable yet powerful

Scalable

The CRM you’ll love

Build and Convert Sales Pipeline

Sales Pipeline & Lead Management

Sales Lead Tracking & Opportunity Management

Increase Productivity

Business Workflow & Process Automation

Validation Rules & Advanced Permissions

Products, Price Books & Quotes

Project & Task Management

Build Lasting Customer Relationships

Customer Relationship Management

Customizable CRM

Customer Email Management

Get real-time performance insights

Performance Dashboards & Reporting

Do more, better, faster

Customers drive productivity with Insightly CRM

Experience Insightly CRM for yourself

Keep everything safe and secure

Work from anywhere

Scan business cards

Update your projects in real time

Move opportunities along

Frequently Asked Questions

What is sales tracking software?

What is sales management software?

How do companies keep track of their sales?

Sales Tracking Software

How To Track Sales Performance

Sales Tracking App

Sales Tracking Spreadsheet

How To Track Sales in Excel or Google Sheets

Disadvantages of Using Manual Sales Tracking

Best Sales Tracking Software

Online Sales Tracker

Run your business on
Insightly All-in-One.

Insightly’s weekly video series/podcast for
go-to-market leaders