Complete Guide to Salesforce Activity Tracking

Data can accelerate deals, but bad data will slow you down. Effective sales interactions and decisions depend heavily on the quality of the data in your CRM. 

According to a recent Affinity survey, 65% of sales managers believe poor quality outreach is due to missing context from previous interactions. By tracking this type of engagement activity, you can enrich your CRM data and equip your sales team with the information they need to have more productive, relevant conversations that close deals. 

In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits of activity tracking in Salesforce. plus how you can automate the process to keep your CRM clean and free your sales team from manual data entry.

What is Salesforce Activity Tracking?

Salesforce activity tracking involves documenting all of your company’s interactions with prospects and customers, which can help close more deals and increase revenue.

Activity tracking relies on creating entries in your CRM when your sales team engages with prospects and existing customers. For example, when a seller sends and receives emails or schedules a meeting, that information should be logged directly in Salesforce.

Benefits of Tracking Engagement Activity 

Implementing Salesforce activity tracking offers several benefits, from improving data accuracy and Salesforce adoption to increasing seller productivity.

Improve data accuracy and encourage CRM adoption 

Inaccurate or missing data can negatively impact the quality of your reporting and gleaned sales insights. Not only does this hinder decision-making, but it can discourage your sales team from using Salesforce.

Automatically logging engagement activities in Salesforce is an easy way to improve your data hygiene and ensure sellers have access to a complete history of interactions.

Understand where sales reps are investing the most time

Your sales team’s time is one of your organization’s most valuable resources. Salesforce activity tracking gives sales managers a clear picture of how sales reps spend their time, making it easier to identify opportunities to streamline processes and reprioritize activities.

Identify at-risk accounts 

In today’s competitive sales environment, sellers are balancing a lot of potential deals in various stages of the sales funnel. And although it’s important to keep prospects engaged, it can be challenging to keep tabs on all of them. 

By capturing engagement activity in Salesforce, it’s easy to uncover potential gaps before they become a problem. This allows your sales team to adjust their engagement strategy so they can keep prospective deals on track.

Boost efficiencies with AI and automation

Automating repetitive tasks like activity capture can reduce the time sellers devote to manual, time-consuming CRM tasks, freeing about 20% of their capacity. Additionally, AI can significantly enhance decision-making in the sales cycle.

For example, along with providing a history of engagement, some activity tracking solutions enrich Salesforce records with biographic, firmographic, and experience data, providing sellers with the additional context they need to qualify deals and personalize outreach.

How to Get the Most Out of Activity Tracking

Ideally, every sales interaction should be tracked in Salesforce, including phone calls, meetings, and email communications. This can be done manually, but sellers are often too busy to navigate to Salesforce between activities to log calls and emails.

Here are a few steps you can take to get the most out of your activity tracking efforts. 

1. Identify the activities that you want to track

According to a recent Affinity survey, over the past year 41% of sales managers have seen an increase in the use of CRM data to drive deals. By identifying the essential activities that directly influence your sales – such as email outreach and customer meetings – you can tailor your activity tracking to suit the needs of your business.

2. Use a tool to automate activity tracking 

Implementing an automated activity tracking tool enhances data accessibility without disrupting existing sales processes. Not only does this save sellers time, but it also mitigates the errors that often come with manual data entry, empowering sellers to confidently make informed decisions.

3. Prioritize CRM data hygiene 

Clean and accurate data ensures everything from reliable analytics to more effective decision-making and outreach. One way to quickly improve data hygiene is to use tools that automatically create and update Salesforce records for you. These automatic updates can be extremely valuable to customer-facing teams due to the timeliness; for example, contact updates such as current job title or location.

Maintaining data hygiene accelerates operational efficiency and fortifies trust in the CRM system, enhancing Salesforce adoption among team members.

4. Use activity data to uncover relationship insights 

Activity data isn’t just about ensuring accountability and productivity, it also provides valuable insights into relationships. With a tool that layers relationship intelligence on top of activity tracking, sales teams can easily identify which of their coworkers can provide a warm introduction to a prospect and close deals faster.

5. Make Salesforce more accessible with inbox and browser extensions 

In addition to automatically capturing activity data, some solutions offer Salesforce extensions for Google Chrome, Gmail, and Outlook. Along with improving CRM accessibility, these extensions surface activity data so sellers can easily see the history of engagement at the account and contact level. 

Elevate Your Approach to Activity Tracking

Affinity for Salesforce encourages sales teams to use Salesforce throughout the sales process by automatically updating and enriching CRM records with activity and relationship insights.

With Affinity for Salesforce, you can: 

• Automatically capture engagement activity: Affinity automatically creates and updates CRM records by analyzing your company’s email and calendar activity. Affinity’s solution tracks all activities and automatically enriches your Salesforce records, providing extra context for salespeople to use during prospecting and outreach. 
• Improve productivity and efficiency: Affinity’s Chrome and Outlook extensions allow your team to access, update, and create Salesforce records directly from their inbox and browser. This improved accessibility encourages sellers to actively engage with your CRM.
• Surface network and relationship insights: Affinity uses AI to provide up-to-date relationship intelligence so sellers can quickly identify who can provide the best introduction to a top prospect. Relationship scores are calculated using the recency and frequency of interactions between your colleagues and your company’s expanded network of connections. These scores uncover which of your colleagues has the strongest relationship with the contact you want to engage with.

Summary

Salesforce activity tracking can significantly improve your sales process by increasing data accuracy and boosting seller productivity. With Affinity for Salesforce, it’s easy to capture engagement activity and use relationship insights to make data-driven decisions that lead to increased revenue and growth.