Tracking Sales Activity Data is crucial for Salesforce hygiene

barista editorial board

April 13, 2023 / 5 Min Read

Salesforce hygiene is a crucial aspect of managing a successful sales operation. Having clean, accurate data is critical for transparency, trust, and closing more deals. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of sales activity data and how it can be used to improve sales effectiveness, revenue operations data, and Salesforce hygiene.

 

What is Sales Activity Data?

 

Sales activity data refers to every action that your sales and marketing team takes to close a deal, including the engagement coming from prospects. These actions can include emails, meetings, attachments sent, phone calls, marketing campaigns, webinars, direct emails, and ads, among others. Sales activity data provides insight into what’s actually happening in the days, weeks, and months leading up to a sale. Sales activity data can supercharge your entire revenue operations organization when tracked and analyzed, as it helps you to orchestrate revenue data towards growth.

 

Importance of Salesforce Hygiene

 

Salesforce hygiene is the practice of keeping your CRM clean and up-to-date. This involves making sure that all data is accurate and not leaking, properly formatted, and free of Salesforce duplicates. Salesforce hygiene is essential for ensuring that your team has access to reliable information when making important decisions. It also helps avoid costly mistakes that can arise from using outdated or inaccurate data. Proper Salesforce hygiene requires regular maintenance, including data cleansing, deduplication, and ensuring that all data is properly categorized and tagged.

 

Using Sales Activity Data for Improved Sales Effectiveness

 

Sales activity data provides insights into how deals are being worked and where they stand. It can be used in a number of ways to improve sales effectiveness, including:

 

Avoiding happy ears and sandbagging for better forecasting:

Sales reps can be prone to human bias when forecasting. By using sales activity data, managers can check how the deals that make up the forecast are tracking, what’s real, and what’s not likely to close. This helps ensure that the forecasting process is accurate and avoids the risk of overly optimistic or sandbagged deals.

Identifying opportunities based on sales activity data:

When sales activity data is readily available and easily visualized, managers can spend more time coaching through deals with less engaged prospects or deals that reps are not paying enough attention. This improves opportunity management and ensures that the quarter is on track.

Benchmarks for top sales reps:

Sales activity data gives insight into what makes your most successful reps successful and how to replicate that throughout the organization. This helps improve productivity and ensures that best practices are being shared throughout the team.

 

Sales Activity Data and Revenue Operations Data

 

The benefits of sales activity data go beyond the sales team. For revenue operations teams, which includes sales, marketing, and customer success, sales activity data can help you orchestrate siloed CRM data and provide insight into where the entire organization can provide additional support. Revenue operations teams can use sales activity data to check how much sales activity certain accounts have. If high-value opportunities are showing signs of disengaging, the marketing team can implement targeted nurture campaigns to that account for air coverage. Sales activity data empowers the entire revenue ops team to impact deals at the most critical time.

 

Tracking Sales Activity Data

 

Obtaining accurate and timely sales activity data from sales representatives has long been a major obstacle for organizations. This process can be time-consuming and not always straightforward. Nevertheless, it is essential for organizational success. There are various methods to track sales activity data, each with its advantages and challenges.

One approach is to use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This software is intended to be the central database for all sales activity data, but keeping it up-to-date requires significant manual data entry. Unfortunately, sales representatives often lack the time for this upkeep.

Alternatively, sales and marketing software has made significant strides in tracking sales analytics in recent years. Outreach or Salesloft, for instance, provide data on the number of emails sent by each representative, including open rates and clicks. 

Another option is to implement CRM data automation, which involves using tools that capture sales activity data and automatically update your CRM. This approach is necessary because most sales systems do not communicate with each other, which leads to siloed data. However, synthesizing disparate metrics to gain a complete picture of sales activity can be a daunting task, which underscores the importance of CRM hygiene to ensure data accuracy and eliminate data silos. Ultimately, to effectively track sales activity data, organizations must find a balance between utilizing the latest technologies and implementing sound data management practices.

 

Maintaining Salesforce hygiene for effective revenue operations data

 

Maintaining Salesforce hygiene requires ongoing effort and a commitment to keeping data clean and accurate. Here are some best practices to follow for maintaining good Salesforce hygiene:

Implement CRM data quality rules

Data quality rules are a set of guidelines that help to maintain the accuracy and consistency of your Salesforce data. These rules can be used to prevent users from creating duplicate records, ensuring that fields are correctly filled out, and making sure that data is entered in a consistent format.

Train users on data entry best practices

Ensuring that all users follow best practices for data entry is critical for maintaining Salesforce hygiene. Train your team on the importance of accurate data entry and provide them with clear guidelines on how to do it effectively.

Regularly clean up data

Regularly cleaning up your Salesforce data is critical for maintaining good Salesforce hygiene. Set up regular data cleansing schedules to ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.

Invest in data management tools

There are several tools available that can help you manage your Salesforce data and maintain good Salesforce hygiene. These tools can automate data cleansing, duplicate record detection, and other data management tasks, making it easier to keep your data clean and accurate.

Salesforce hygiene is critical for effective revenue operations organization. By maintaining accurate and clean Salesforce data, sales managers can gain better insights into sales activity data, provide real-time coaching, and identify patterns for success. By following the best practices outlined in this post, you can maintain good Salesforce hygiene and ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.

 

Sales activity data with Barista AI

Barista AI automatically tracks sales activity from dozens of different systems in the customer stack, including marketing automation, CRM, email, calendaring, phone calls, video conferencing, and more, so your reps can spend more time selling and less time entering data to the CRM.

Barista AI also turn sales activity data into actionable CRM hygiene insights so you can drill down and see individual rep activity, team CRM hygiene across their entire account base, set benchmarks based on what successful reps are doing.