Quick Tips April 18, 2016 Kristie

How To Track Sales in Daylite & Leverage New Features

Tracking sales is crucial to winning new business. With an overwhelming number of possibilities for your customer to choose from, you need to be actively tracking sales with multiple touch points to make sure you’re winning each potential business opportunity that comes along.

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“If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.”
–Bob Hooey

Tracking sales involves crafting your own sales cycle with multiple client touch points at the right time. In this post we’ll outline the key steps of building your own sales cycle in Daylite, and how you can leverage some of the new features in Daylite 6 to make tracking sales even more efficient.

Step 1. Capture each business opportunity

To track sales you first need to capture them so you can keep track of how many potential business deals you have going on so you can prioritize. This is done in Daylite by creating an opportunity and filling in as many details as you need so you no longer have to rely on your memory alone to recall important information about the potential sale. You can use the details field to jot down the scope of the sale, capture important info and dates by customizing your own opportunity fields, or organizing information into a form. If you know the estimated value of the sale, you can attach a price tag by creating an estimate. You can create an estimate just for internal use so you have the amount captured, or you can send the estimate to the lead or client.

You can even link important documents, photos, or web links such as Dropbox or iCloud documents. Now in Daylite 6, you can link those photos, documents, or web links to multiple items. If you have a file that is relevant to a sale as well as a person, you can link it to both the opportunity and the contact. This way you can quickly jump to the file from either the contact or opportunity in Daylite.

Dropbox

Step 2. Keep track of the important people

Tracking sales often involves contacting more than one person. You may have a main point of contact, but also need to get in touch with their accounting department, head of the company, etc. Adding all the people and companies relevant to an opportunity makes sales tracking easier because you can visually see all the people involved and quickly jump to their contact information when you need to initiate a call or email. It allows you to see a history of opportunities you’ve had with a person when viewing their contact record.

After adding the relevant people to the sale by linking them to the opportunity in Daylite, you can then define each person’s role within the opportunity. This helps you keep track of who each person is in relation to the sale – this is especially important when tracking sales in a team. You may remember which person is the main point of contact, but if a team member needs to review an opportunity, they might not remember which person to contact. Having the role defined within the opportunity makes it a no brainer.

In Daylite 6, we’ve added the ability to edit and create new roles & relationships on your iPhone or iPad. This way you can capture new business and record the people involved even when you’re on the go.

sales tracking relationship iPhone

Step 3. Organize everything in one place

Tracking sales can involve a lot of back and forth communication. There’s reminders to follow up, emails that need to be sent and responded to, and phone calls to keep track of. To keep everything organized and easy to find, link everything to the opportunity in Daylite. Whether it’s a note from a phone call, an upcoming appointment, or emails, link it to the opportunity so you have a full history that you can later reference.

From the opportunity, you can create a new task, a new note, or appointment using the new Quick Link Buttons in Daylite 6. By creating a task, appointment, or note right from within the opportunity, it will automatically be linked.

OppQuickLinkButtons

Later when you need to refer back to an email or a note for example, you can filter or search within the Activity View to find what you’re looking for.

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Step 4. Track sales with a pipeline

Pipelines allow you to visually track what stage each sale is in. They help you to visually track what steps have already been completed, and what still needs to be done. You can create a simple pipeline that just breaks down a sale into stages, or an advanced pipeline that includes steps within each stage.

You can create one sales pipeline for all your opportunities if they follow a similar sales cycle, or create multiple sales pipelines so you have one for each of the various types of sales that require a different flow. Your pipelines in Daylite aren’t set in stone either.  As your business changes and evolves, you can adjust your pipeline to continually improve your sales cycle.

In Daylite 6 we’ve made it easier to visually track your sales pipeline by refining the look of pipelines and adding a progress bar within each pipeline stage. As tasks are checked off within a pipeline stage, the progress bar moves ahead accordingly. If a task within a pipeline stage is overdue, the remaining part of the progress bar will be highlighted in red. This allows you to quickly asses how close you are to a stage being complete as well as easily identify when something is overdue and needs your attention.

OppPipeline

Step 5. Prioritize what needs to be done

While tracking sales for multiple business opportunities, there are often things that come up that require your immediate attention. In a perfect world, each step would be followed in sequence to complete a sale. Since we live in the real world where we need to quickly adapt to new changes and unique circumstances, we’ve added additional flexibility by introducing Task Lists for opportunities. Task Lists allow you to sort and prioritize things that need to be done within flexible “buckets”. When there’s a number of things that need to be done for a specific sale that aren’t part of the pipeline, you can use Task Lists to group to-dos together and reorder by drag and drop.

sales tasks prioritize

Another new features in Daylite 6 is the Smart Filter Bar within opportunities. This lets you quickly filter your tasks within a sale by category, keyword, or by team member. When working in a team, sometimes it’s overwhelming to see everyone’s tasks all together. You can use the Smart Filter bar to view just the tasks that you are responsible for.

sales tracking team tasks

If you have tasks that need to be tagged with the Keyword “urgent” or you have specific tags of your own, you can also quickly filter and view just these tasks by selecting the keyword from the Smart Filter Bar.

Watch this video to learn more about how to use Task Lists and the Smart Filter Bar.

Step 6. Review your sales regularly

Tracking sales requires keeping a close eye on everything happening both for a particular sale as well as overall in your business. It’s good to get in the habit of reviewing your list of active opportunities so you can check the status of each one and make sure it’s moving along. The Opportunity Highlights in Daylite 6 make it easy to quickly get a quick update on the state of each opportunity as you scroll through the list. The Pipeline & Tasks Tab show you how many tasks are remaining and highlight if there are any overdue tasks.

OppDetailsActivity

It’s also a good idea to review your sales funnel using the Insight View so you can asses whether or not you have a healthy sales funnel. The Insight View shows you in interactive graphs what stages of the pipeline your sales are in. Having the majority of your opportunities in the tail end of the sales pipeline is an indicator that it’s time to focus on getting new business so you’ll have a steady flow of business coming in over time.

sales tracking report

This is a strategy that Martin Weiss of Biz:Xpand uses to make sure he has a steady flow of sales that are incoming, in progress, and near closing to ensure future sales success.

By following these six steps, you’ll stay organized and track sales efficiently so you can grow your business without feeling overwhelmed by all the moving pieces. For additional tutorials on tracking sales with Daylite, watch our Winning New Business course and read our previous post on Key Performance Indicators & Report Views to Track Sales in Daylite.

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