9 tools to efficiently track sales performance in your B2B business
We’ve put together a list of 9 sales performance tools that can help you monitor and enhance your sales performance – whether you're a small business, a mid-market player, or a large enterprise.
For B2B companies, improving sales performance is important, but not easy – customers can be demanding, the competition is intense, and the sales cycles are long. The best way to do it is with hard data – that only sales performance tracking software can provide.
You need these tools to track your sales performance and see how effective your sales process and practices are, and where you can improve.
You need a combination of CRM tools, sales intelligence software, and sales analytics tools. Thankfully, there is a wide range of sales performance tracking software tailored to the unique needs of B2B businesses.
We’ve put together a list of 9 sales performance tools that can help you monitor and enhance your sales performance – whether you're a small business, a mid-market player, or a large enterprise.
Before we dive into the list, let’s take a quick look at the parameters you need to consider for sales performance tracking.
Key Metrics for Tracking Sales Performance
To effectively monitor and improve sales performance, here’s a helpful (non-exhaustive) list of parameters to track:
- Revenue
- Sales Activities
- Conversion Rates
- Sales Cycle Length
- Deal Size
- Individual sales rep performance
Category 1: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
hese tools help organize customer data, track deals through different stages, log sales activities, and track deals through different stages. Their reporting and analytics capabilities enable teams to analyze key performance metrics and identify areas for improvement.
1. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the most widely used and highly regarded CRM solutions in the industry. Catering mostly to the enterprise segment, its features include lead and opportunity management, contact tracking, customizable dashboards, and real-time reporting.
On the performance tracking front, it comes with analytics and reporting capabilities that enable sales managers to track key sales performance metrics such as revenue, activities, conversion rates, and sales cycle length. This can help monitor the team’s progress, identify trends, and make data-backed performance assessments.
Here are some key performance tracking features and capabilities of Salesforce Sales Cloud:
- Real-Time Dashboards and ReportsUsers can create personalized dashboards with charts, graphs, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track revenue, pipeline, conversion rates, and other essential sales metrics.
- Activity Tracking: Salesforce Sales Cloud enables sales representatives to track their sales activities, such as calls, emails, meetings, and tasks. Users can log their activities directly within the CRM, associating them with specific leads, contacts, or opportunities. This tracking functionality provides a comprehensive view of the sales activities performed by each team member, helping identify patterns, evaluate productivity, and measure engagement with prospects and customers.
- Territory Management: Salesforce Sales Cloud supports territory management, allowing businesses to define and assign territories to their sales teams. This can in turn help managers track and measure performance across terrtitories.
Pricing: Salesforce Sales Cloud’s Professional Plan starts at $75/user/month billed annually.
2. HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is another CRM that offers sales performance tracking along with other sales activities like lead nurturing, and customer relationship management.
HubSpot Sales Hub can help you monitor and analyze sales activities, revenue, and conversion rates.
The key sales performance tracking features of HubSpot Sales include:
- Deal tracking: This capability gives you full visibility into the sales process and pipeline, enabling you to identify how different sales accounts fare.
- Email integration can help sales managers track email engagement giving them insights into how they are performing on prospect and customer interactions.
- Customizable dashboards and reports: This equips sales managers to create and monitor key performance metrics in real time.
Pricing: HubSpot Sale’s Professional Plan costs $90/month/user for a minimum of five users. It also offers a free plan with a basic reporting dashboard.
3. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM specially built for fast-growing sales teams and is focused on pipeline management and deal tracking – making it ideal for sales performance tracking. The tool's simplicity and focus on pipeline management make it an excellent choice for small and medium-sized businesses.
Its key sales performance tracking features include:
- Activity and communications tracking: It allows sales professionals to log and monitor their interactions with leads and customers. This helps track the effectiveness of various sales activities, such as calls, emails, and meetings, providing valuable performance insights into customer engagement.
- Detailed customizable reporting: It offers a visual display of pipelines with customizable stages and provides customizable dashboards and reports for key sales metrics, such as conversion rates, deal sizes, and sales performance.
- Drag and drop interface: To help teams visualize and manage their deals effectively. Pipedrive offers features such as email integration, sales reporting, activity tracking, and goal setting.
- ‘Deal rotting’ feature: This nifty “feature notifies sales reps or managers when a deal stays idle for too long, giving you continuous insights into sales performance.
Pricing: PipeDrive Professional plan with reporting starts at $39.90 per user per month.
Category 2: Sales Intelligence and Customer/Conversation Intelligence
This category of tools helps in sales performance tracking by capturing and tracking insights on customer interactions as well as sales rep performance. These tools show you how individual sales reps perform in sales meetings (using AI for conversation intelligence) and gather signals from such sales interactions.
4. Gong
Gong is a revenue intelligence tool – and an undisputed leader in the space. Its application in sales performance tracking comes from its ability to analyze sales conversations using AI to extract insight into sales reps’ performance.
Using Gong, managers can review call transcripts, analyze talk-to-listen ratios, identify key conversation moments, and gain valuable visibility into the effectiveness of their team's sales interactions.
Key sales performance capabilities of Gong include:
- Conversation intelligence: This helps track sales rep performance in sales meetings
- Deal and opportunity management: It integrates seamlessly with most CRM systems, providing managers a holistic view of their deals, accounts, and pipeline – so they can track deal progress, monitor pipeline health, and analyze conversions to gain insights into their team's performance.
- Reporting and analytics: Gong's robust reporting and analytics with visualizations of win rates, deal velocity, etc, can help sales managers to measure and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to sales performance.
Pricing: Gong has an opaque approach to pricing (you need to go through a sales call to know the pricing that applies to you).
5. MeetRecord
MeetRecord is a Gong alternative for sales intelligence that’s designed especially for small businesses and startups.
On the sales performance tracking front, it can help you use data and conversation analysis to track performance, progress, and adherence to sales best practices.
Its sales performance dashboard enables you to build custom reports (salespeople-specific or for the whole team) using sales call data and AI-powered call scoring for performance. This way you can easily understand what’s working, what’s not, who’s performing well, and whose performance needs to be closely tracked.
Pricing: MeetRecord’s Growth plan is priced at $59/user/month though it also has a Starter plan at $39/user/month.
6. Outreach
Outreach is a powerful sales intelligence tool that offers valuable features for sales performance tracking.
Here's why Outreach is a good choice for sales performance tracking:
- Prospect engagement tracking: It enables sales teams to track and monitor prospect engagement throughout the sales process – providing visibility into key actions such as email opens, link clicks, and content downloads, enabling sales teams to know how their outreach efforts are performing.
- Sales activity monitoring: Outreach also offers comprehensive tracking of sales activities, including emails, calls, and meetings. It captures data on the number of touchpoints made, response rates, and overall activity levels – helping measure individual and team productivity, identifying high-performing sales representatives, and tracking overall sales performance.
- Personalization: It also allows for personalized and automated outreach efforts, helping sales teams deliver tailored messages at scale. Performance tracking here can help identify which outreach templates and automation workflows are most effective, and learn how they impact overall sales performance.
- Customizable dashboards and reports: These provide insights into team performance, conversion rates, and revenue metrics.
Pricing: Outreach’s pricing model is available only available on request. Current estimates are that pricing starts at about $100/month/user.
Category 3: Sales Analytics and Performance Dashboards
These tools enable businesses to collect, analyze, and visualize data from various sources, providing valuable insights into sales performance metrics, trends, and patterns.
7. Klipfolio
Klipfolio is designed to help B2B businesses to track, analyze, and optimize their sales performance through customizable dashboards, seamless data integration, powerful data visualization, performance monitoring, advanced analytics, and collaboration features.
Its key features include:
- Customizable dashboards: Personalized views of sales performance metrics for tracking KPIs and monitoring progress.
- Data visualization: Present sales data in visually appealing charts, graphs, and tables for easy interpretation.
- Performance monitoring and alerts: Set up real-time alerts based on predefined thresholds to stay informed.
Klipfolio comes with prebuilt dashboard templates, making it an easy choice for sales performance tracking. These include:
- Revenue and sales volume dashboard
- Sales funnel dashboard
- Sales rep performance dashboard
- Sales target and quota dashboard
- Territory and regional dashboard
- Sales leaderboard, and more.
Pricing: Its Professional plan is priced at $300/month for 10 users (unlimited view-only users).
8. InsightSquared
InsightSquared is a data-driven sales performance improvement tool that provides comprehensive analytics and reporting.
With seamless integration with popular CRM systems, it provides real-time data for accurate tracking.
Its key sales performance tracking features include:
- Advanced Analytics: Gain deep insights into sales performance metrics with comprehensive reports and dashboards.
- Data Integration: Seamlessly connect with CRM systems to consolidate data and ensure accuracy in sales performance tracking.
- Customizable Dashboards: Create personalized dashboards to monitor key performance indicators and make data-driven decisions.
Pricing: InsightsSquared does not display its pricing on its website. However, estimates state that its pricing starts at approximately $65/user/month.
9. Looker
Though not specifically designed for sales teams, Looker is a great tool for teams looking for a customizable and DIY approach to sales performance tracking.
It is a popular and powerful data analytics and business intelligence platform that has robust features – making it a good choice for B2B companies looking to analyze, visualize, and gain valuable insights from their sales data.
Here's how Looker can help in sales performance tracking:
- Data exploration and visualization: It provides a wide range of data visualization options such as charts, graphs, and tables, enabling users to easily interpret and understand their sales performance metrics. These visualizations help identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in sales data, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
- Customizable dashboards/reports: Looker enables businesses to create interactive and dynamic dashboards that showcase key sales metrics, KPIs, and performance indicators.
- Integration: Looker seamlessly integrates with various data sources, including CRM systems, databases, spreadsheets, and other business applications.
- Ad-hoc querying and analysis: It also enables more technical users to perform ad-hoc queries and analysis on their sales data– and drill down into specific dimensions and metrics, apply filters, and extract insights.
Conclusion
When it comes to sales performance tracking, you need a well-rounded tool stack that addresses various aspects of sales performance management.
The success of your sales performance management relies on the combination of tools from the three categories discussed in this article.
We highly recommend assessing your requirements and selecting the best tools from each category to create your ultimate tool stack for sales performance management for your B2B company.
Here’s a quick summary to help you:
- CRMs like Salesforce Sales Cloud, HubSpot Sales Hub, and Pipedrive can provide a solid foundation for sales performance tracking. Depending on the size and stage of your business, pick the CRM that makes the most sense for you. Salesforce is a great fit for enterprises whereas HubSpot Sales Hub and Pipedrive cater to mid-market B2B companies and SMBs.
- Sales intelligence tools like Gong, MeetRecord, or Outreach can help you measure the performance of your sales reps and customer interactions.
- Lastly, analytics and business intelligence tools like InsightSquared, Klipfolio, and Looker can help you visualize data, gain deeper insights, and track key performance metrics. If you are comfortable with a hands-on DIY approach, Looker is a great choice; Klipfolio has the most exhaustive feature set, while InsightSquared offers more reasonable pricing.