Step-by-step guide to Salesforce activity tracking

The right customer relationship management (CRM) data is key to keeping deals moving through the sales pipeline.

Most B2B sales organizations are already using their CRM to track customer contact information and deal data. But to stay ahead of the competition and reach sales targets, sales teams need to go beyond just static contact records. 

Salesforce activity tracking is one of the most effective ways to boost sales performance and enhance the sales process.

In this article, we’ll dig into the benefits of tracking sales activity and how B2B sales can use Salesforce to do so.

What is Salesforce activity tracking?

Salesforce activity tracking is the function used by sales teams to document all their interactions with prospects and existing customers.

When tracking sales activity, a Salesforce CRM record or data entry is created every time a seller engages with a customer. This can include anything from email outreach and phone conversations to scheduled meetings.

Sales activity tracking enhances existing CRM data by providing sellers with a full history of customer interactions. This context empowers sellers to better engage and make confident decisions that drive higher-quality deals.

Why is it essential for your sales team to track activities in Salesforce?

Tracking sales activity enables sellers to source better opportunities and drive deals forward more effectively. 

Learn where your sales reps spend their time

Sales activity drives revenue, and thus is a crucial part of any business. Yet the Salesforce State of Sales report found that sales reps only spend about 28% of their week selling.

A sales team’s time is one of your most valuable resources as a sales-driven organization. Sales activity tracking provides sales managers with a clear picture of how sellers are spending their time. This allows you to easily identify high-performers, successful activity behaviors, and where there are opportunities to streamline the sales process.

Increase your win rate and open up more expansion opportunities

Richer customer profiles enhance decision-making. 

By tracking sales activity, organizations enrich the insights that sellers have when making deal decisions. This gives salespeople the confidence to source new opportunities and prioritize high-likelihood-to-close deals. For example, consider a seller who’s targeting a new prospect. With activity tracking, they can quickly see all past interactions with internal sales reps within Salesforce. If there has been a long history of communication with little to no pipeline progress, they might take that as a signal to deprioritize that account.

Sales activity tracking is also a powerful tool for uncovering trends in customer engagement. These insights enable teams to fine-tune customer engagement strategies and key sales activities—such as outreach cadences or even communication mediums—to drive deals forward.

Spot at-risk accounts and course-correct in real-time

In a high-velocity sales environment, sellers are often balancing multiple opportunities at different stages of the sales funnel. Unfortunately, this means customer engagement can sometimes slip between the cracks and put a prospective deal in jeopardy.

Access to up-to-date activity insights allows teams to quickly identify gaps and red flags in account engagement. Teams can quickly course-correct and adjust their engagement strategy to keep deals moving through the pipeline.

Activity tracking tools such as Affinity for Salesforce help sales teams stay on top of every opportunity by pushing real-time relationship insights right into Salesforce. From there, sellers can set notifications and triggers so customer engagement and relationship scores never fall below the optimal threshold.

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Uncover paths to warm introductions

A successful deal often relies on engaging with the right person from the outset. 

When teams track sales activity, they benefit from a complete history of engagement with all accounts and the contacts within them. Once that data is layered with relationship intelligence, sellers can access and understand the strength of every relationship between their company and those of prospects and customers.

This quickly surfaces warm introduction paths and saves sellers from spending valuable time attempting to track down the right connections. The result? Higher-quality deals that close faster. 

How to track sales activity in Salesforce

Tracking sales activity can feel like a burden on your all-too-busy sales team. Fortunately, there are many ways to streamline and maximize the return on your sales tracking efforts.

Here are a few steps for successfully implementing sales activity tracking in Salesforce.

1. Determine what activities are important for you to track in Salesforce

In an ideal scenario, tracking every activity is the best way to provide your team with access to thorough insights. However, it’s important to prioritize the activities that are most valuable for sellers, so they have the context needed to make informed deal decisions.

Common sales activities to track in Salesforce include:

• Email communications (both automated and manual)
• Phone calls
• Meetings (in-person and virtual)
• LinkedIn and other social media correspondence
• Seller tasks

2. Use automation in your sales activity tracking

Manual record creation is time-consuming, error-prone, and pulls focus away from what sellers do best: selling. In fact, 69% of sales managers estimate that their sales teams spend over four hours a week updating their CRM.*

Instead of burdening your team with activity tracking, Salesforce automation tools such as Affinity for Salesforce can eliminate the tedious data entry from your sales process. Affinity automatically creates and updates sales activity records in Salesforce, boosting seller productivity with access to real-time data in their workflows. 

When sellers can confidently rely on CRM activity data, they’re more likely to use it in their dealmaking—and prioritize data upkeep.

3. Establish goals based on your sales activities 

In B2B teams, sales targets and key metrics tend to revolve around win rates and revenue goals.

However, it takes sales activities to push these deals over the finish line. While sellers have limited control over customer budgets and timelines, they can easily control the rate and quality of their selling activities.

Establishing goals that ladder up to revenue targets can keep deals moving through the pipeline. Measurable goals also enable sales leaders to identify the activities or sellers that are underperforming earlier on in the sales cycle, rather than waiting until the end of the quarter when there are limited opportunities to make up for the shortfall.

4. Make data hygiene a priority

The usefulness of your sales data is directly tied to its quality. This is particularly true in the context of high-volume data such as sales activity. 

When data is inaccurate or missing it can quickly deteriorate the quality of your sales tracking insights. Not only does this decrease seller productivity, but it can lead to suboptimal decision-making, or even deter sellers from using CRM data altogether.

There are a few ways sales teams can prioritize data hygiene in their sales activity tracking:

• Log every activity in your Salesforce CRM. Incomplete data limits the usefulness of your activity insights. Without a full understanding of every customer interaction, sellers will miss the context they need for effective dealmaking
• Standardize data formatting and field: Ensuring consistency across activity data makes insights easier to access and understand. Formatting errors can also make it challenging to pull activity data into dashboards and activity reports. 
• Minimize manual errors: Automations can help sales teams track sales activity faster while reducing the risk of errors that come with manual record creation.

Remember: even if you’re staying on top of your data hygiene, Salesforce data cleansing should still be a regular part of your sales operations in order to maintain data quality.

Improve data hygiene and track activity with Affinity for Salesforce

Affinity for Salesforce helps sales teams source and close better deals by automatically enriching CRM data with sales activity and relationship insights. 

Teams that use Affinity for Salesforce:

• Save over 200 hours of manual data entry per employee every year. Affinity analyzes your team's emails and meetings to automatically create and update contact records in Salesforce.
• Close deals up to 25% faster with relationship insights. Affinity analyzes your company’s network of relationships to surface warm introductions that accelerate deal velocity.
• Get access to sales activity data in the tools they use every day. Affinity connects with your inbox and browser to deliver deal insights and Salesforce CRM data wherever your team is working to improve sales productivity and empower sellers to make better deal decisions. 

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Tracking sales activity in Salesforce FAQs 

What’s the importance of sales activity tracking?

Sales activity tracking provides B2B sales organizations with better insights into their customer engagement and relationships. By tracking sales activity, sales teams have access to a complete history of customer interactions, which can be used to identify the activities and behaviors that drive quality deals.

How can sales activity tracking in Salesforce improve your sales processes?

Sales activity tracking in Salesforce can improve the sales process in several ways. By tracking sales activity, sellers can:

• Access relationship insights to surface warm introductions that help close deals faster.
• Identify blockers or challenges in the sales pipeline and adapt in real time.
• Access richer customer profiles and relationship context to make better decisions and shortlist the right opportunities.
• Optimize customer engagement strategies and best practices based on historical sales activity insights. 

How can you track the performance of sales reps in Salesforce?

Sales reps are often evaluated on the amount of revenue they’ve generated or the number of closed deals. However, another way to track the performance of sales reps in Salesforce is through activity tracking. 

Sales activity tracking provides sales managers with clear insight into the day-to-day activities of a seller. By reviewing team member activities, sales managers can identify successful behaviors or potential performance issues earlier on in the sales cycle, so they can tailor feedback and coaching to help the seller course correct to maximize their sales.

* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.

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