High-performing sales teams don’t just happen — they know which activities drive the best outcomes and cut the ones that don’t add value.
To build a consistent pipeline that fuels ongoing results, sales reps and sales managers need to know that they’re executing the right activities every single day. With the help of intelligent technology and data-driven insights, reps and managers can understand where and how they can allocate their time, energy, and resources for the highest return.
In this post, we’ll look at 11 data-backed sales activities that build pipeline and drive predictable sales results. We’ll also cover how to use technology to analyze and improve your sales processes.
What are sales activities?
Sales activities are the day-to-day actions, tactics, or practices that reps and sales managers execute. These activities usually focus on results, like winning a big opportunity or exceeding a sales quota. However, without the right processes and technology, reps may spend a lot of time on tasks that don’t move the needle.
Sales activities can be divided into two categories: qualitative and quantitative
Qualitative Sales Activities
Although qualitative activities can’t be measured by data, they do provide insight into how your sales team is doing, provide a way to motivate, give insight into customer satisfaction, and illustrate the overall picture of sales performance.
Examples of qualitative sales activities include:
- Contacting new prospects or existing customers
- Presenting your product or service
- Nurturing strong client relationships
- Following up diligently
- Ensuring customer satisfaction
- Fostering brand awareness
Quantitative Sales Activities
Quantitative activities give you raw numbers that help you understand the efficiency of your sales team. You’re able to see the number of new opportunities, new leads, amount of revenue last quarter, etc. These insights help you assess your sales team, coach reps who need help in a certain area of the sales cycle, and model future growth based on past performance data.
Examples of quantitative sales activities include:
First Stage to Won:
Visits to Next Stage (Average Number of Visits):
Visits to Next Stage (Total Efforts):
Leads Created by User:
Pipeline Status:
Value of Pipeline:
Leads Created by Territories:
Loss Reasons:
By understanding which sales activities yield the strongest results, sales teams can make the most of their time.
11 Sales Activities That Will Move The Needle In 2023
Monitoring and tracking key sales activities lets you know where the sales team is at as a whole — you can identify what’s working, what’s not working, who needs coaching, and so on and so forth.
Having a grasp on the following 11 activities will set your organization up to increase sales.
1. Manage your daily sales activities with a CRM
Lack of tracking is a problem sales managers face when trying to identify the most important sales activities. CRMs fill this gap by helping a sales team keep track of contacts, accounts, deals and activities.
CRMs fill this gap by helping sales teams keep track of contacts, accounts, deals and activities.
SPOTIO’s Field Sales CRM gives sales leaders visibility into how top outside reps are making it happen and where leads are falling off in the sales process, with features like:
- Sales pipeline visibility
- Next best action to take
- Simplified and automated prospecting
- Reporting and KPIs
- Leads won and win rate
SPOTIO also lets reps access sales material and contracts from their mobile devices, with support for:
- MP4
- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- PNG, JPG, GIF
That means reps don’t have to return to the office to access critical files and can keep conversations moving forward.
2. Strategically assign sales territories
Sales territory management is the process of using data to segment customers and prospects to better track sales, streamline prospecting, map visits, and enhance productivity in the field.
In addition to cutting out the noise of low-return accounts, thoughtful sales territory management aligns salespeople with the most appropriate customer base — whether that’s by geography, vertical, expertise, or past relationship. It allows a sales team to focus on viable accounts and spend more time in the field making face-to-face contact.
SPOTIO’s territory management software enables managers to create custom maps of different territories for assignment to sales reps. The user-friendly mobile app lets reps see and manage their territories, add notes about each lead, and share information with other reps.
3. Close more deals in less time with smart routing
Sales reps have the potential to waste hours of valuable time wandering aimlessly without a strategic plan for how they’ll structure their day. Smart route planning is an essential activity to ensure each member of your sales team is making the best use of their time.
Route planning software, such as SPOTIO Routing enables reps to see exactly where to go, what to do, and the most efficient way to get there. Sales professionals can set up meetings, update notes in real-time, and prospect new accounts in between meetings.
4. Examine your sales data for insights
These days, there’s copious amounts of data available to sales teams for tracking the activities that produce the best results. Most organizations have data at their fingertips, but only the best teams put motions in place to use that data to augment activity and improve results.
Some useful activities to measure include the volume and timing of email, sales calls, meetings, marketing campaigns, and phone calls. By monitoring your data, you’ll be able to track the activities that lead up to a sale.
Some examples of tracking data:
- Pipeline activity inside territories
- Historical prospect, contact, and opportunity data
- Real-time insights of rep activity and performance
- Performance tracking
- GPS-verified location tracking
- Colorized data views
- Real-time rep visibility
Smart CRM solutions like SPOTIO field CRM go beyond aiding the sales team by tracking and organizing data so sales leadership can easily analyze it.
5. Automate Follow-Up Activities
Sales reps are almost always juggling tasks and priorities. Between prospecting, nurturing, working a deal, or closing there’s a lot to be done. To ensure the pipeline flows smoothly, sales reps can automate important tasks to make sure nothing falls off the radar.
SPOTIO’s appointment setting functionality syncs with Google and Outlook calendars and lets users create appointments for themselves and other team members. It gives users the ability to see busy and available times for anyone on the team and book appointments accordingly.
6. Focus on the best prospects
One way to optimize time in sales is to focus on the most qualified prospects in your pipeline. Specifically, you want to focus on those prospects who have shown interest in your product or solution — the ones who just need a little push.
When you’ve identified your best prospects, your role is to keep them engaged. One example of a sales activity you can perform is sending an email with a link to an article your prospect would find useful. Another thing you can do is stay active on social media where prospects can see the way you interact with happy customers.
7. Pursue Cold Leads
Sales managers may want to assign someone the task of checking in with cold leads. Situations change, and a cold lead that wasn’t ready to buy six months ago might now be working with a bigger budget or encountering a new pain point they need to solve.
This sales strategy is a good one for the end of the year, when businesses are firming up the next year’s budget.
8. Segment Lead Management Activities
One way to make your lead management activities more efficient is to segment your leads. For example, you could segment leads by where they are in the sales process, their annual revenue, or other attributes.
With SPOTIO Lead Machine, you get instant access to lead demographics and can filter leads by more than 200 data points. You can also color-code leads in a map view, for quick reference when in the field.
By segmenting your leads and lead management activities, you can organize your time to focus on certain types of activities in bulk. You can use templates and repeatable behavior to be efficient and stay focused
9. Use a sales tracker to pinpoint bottlenecks
Instead of monitoring every move a sales rep makes outside the office, you can use SPOTIO sales tracking technology to see sales data. A sales activity tracker will help your team identify which activities are driving results, as well as which ones are not, so you can improve the sales process.
If performance is down, you can go straight to the source of the problem and correct it. Likewise, if you notice certain activities are driving a lot of sales, you can dedicate more resources to them and scale. Tracking and acting on sales activity data is one of the few ways sales teams can control their outcomes.
Sales management should be tracking both quantitative and qualitative data. Qualitative data helps you paint a bigger picture of how customers view your company. Quantitative data can be used for more concrete things.
For example, you can create clear sales goals like increasing your lead generation by a certain percentage over the next quarter. After the quarter is up, you’ll have some data on what part of your sales funnel is generating the most leads, and what parts need work.
10. Nurture customer relationships
The most successful teams focus on nurturing their customer relationships to fuel repeat and ongoing sales. In fact, a Bain study cites that repeat customers are known to spend more than 60% more than new customers.
The best way to nurture customer relationships is to learn about their business, understand their biggest challenges and goals, and focus on how your product or service can help them reach their potential. You can do this by ensuring you celebrate their successes, either via social media or with an acknowledgment phone call.
You can also keep them engaged by ensuring they’re the first to know about any new product releases, services or company news.
11. Communicate with your team
All great relationships hinge on the quality and consistency of your communication habits. Great communication ensures that everyone involved is clear on expectations, marching toward the same outcome, and familiar with where they stand. Poor communication, on the other hand, often leads to mismatched expectations and disappointment.
Clear communication defines desired outcomes, maximizes productivity, minimizes churn, and perhaps most importantly, prevents frustration and failure. For sales teams that spend the bulk of their time on the road, clear communication is critical.
To get the best results, effective sales managers use a mix of communication tools — in-app chat, email, team meetings, dashboards, and one-to-one conversations — to keep the lines of communication active.
Some sales enablement solutions like SPOTIO include a team chat feature that encourages sales rep engagement and creates an open feedback loop with managers. With the ability to talk with individuals 1-on-1 or chat with a specific group, these tools improve communication across the team.
Which Sales Activities Add Value For You?
Successful sales organizations know that the secret to success is to work smarter, not harder.
Nobody has more than 24 hours in a day, so the key is to find ways to make the most out of your time with a focus on the sales activities that add value and accelerate sales.
With CRM capabilities designed for reps in the field, territory management functionality, route planning, scheduling, sales tracking and more, SPOTIO is the perfect tool for improving the efficiency and visibility of all sales activities.
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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at [email protected] or comment below.
SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.
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