Sales Tracking Software: What It Tracks, How to Choose, and When a Spreadsheet Is Enough

What is sales tracking software?

Sales tracking software is a tool that records your sales activity and the progress of every deal, from the first contact to the signed contract, and turns that record into reports you can act on. It answers three questions a sales team keeps asking: where does each deal stand, what did the team actually do, and which of those actions turned into revenue. The reporting side of it has its own entry in our glossary, under sales pipeline reporting.

Most of the pages that rank for this query are written by CRM vendors, and most of them end with their own product in first place. That is fair game, but it leaves two questions open: when is a spreadsheet still the right answer, and why do tracking reports go wrong even in a good tool? This guide covers both. You will find what sales tracking software tracks, the features to check with the question to ask in a demo, the main types of tools with examples, a way to choose by team profile, an honest section on spreadsheets with two free templates, and the part vendors rarely mention: the account data that goes into the tool.

Sales tracking software vs CRM

A CRM (customer relationship management system) stores every relationship with a company or a person: contacts, accounts, emails, deals, tickets, renewals. Sales tracking is one job a CRM does: following deals and activities through the pipeline and reporting on them. In practice, most sales tracking software is a CRM, or the pipeline module of one. A few tools only track one slice, such as calls or marketing sources, and plug into a CRM. If your question is "where are my deals", you need sales tracking; if it is also "who is this customer, what did they buy, who talked to them last", you need the full CRM, and the data it holds, described in our entry on CRM data.

What sales tracking software tracks: 4 families

Vendor pages list twenty or thirty metrics in a row. It is easier to think of them as four families, because each family answers a different question and breaks for a different reason.

1. Activity. What the team does: calls, emails, meetings, follow-ups, tasks done or overdue. It answers "are we doing enough of the right things?". It breaks when activity is logged by hand: the busiest reps log the least.
2. Pipeline. Where the deals are: the stage of each deal, its value, its age, how long it sat in each stage, and how many deals are open, won or lost. It answers "what is likely to close, and where are deals getting stuck?". It breaks when stages mean different things to different reps.
3. Results. What the pipeline produced: win rate, average deal size, sales cycle length, quota attainment, forecast accuracy. It answers "is the team getting better?". The twelve core pipeline metrics, with their formulas and a velocity calculator, are in our guide to sales pipeline metrics; we do not repeat them here.
4. Sources. Where the deals came from: campaign, channel, list, referral, event. It answers "where should the next euro or the next hour go?". The metrics for this family are in our guide to lead generation KPIs.

All four families have one thing in common, and it matters more than any feature list: every report is a count of records sliced by a field. Win rate by industry, pipeline by company size, meetings by country. If the field is empty on part of your records, the slice is wrong, and nothing in the dashboard tells you so. Part 08 shows which empty field breaks which report, with a calculator to check your own base.

Sales tracking software features to check before you buy

Feature lists look the same from one vendor to the next. What separates tools is how each feature behaves on your data, with your team. The third column gives the question to ask in a demo, on your own deals rather than the vendor's sample account.

The fifth question is the one most demos skip, and the answer tells you a lot. Some tools drop empty records from the chart, some put them in an "unknown" bar, some quietly add them to the biggest group. None of these is wrong, but you need to know which one you are reading. Follow-ups are the other feature worth a closer look: if reminders are your main reason to buy, compare them with dedicated sequencing tools in our guide to sales automation tools.

The main types of sales tracking tools

"Sales tracking tools" covers very different products. Listing a CRM next to a call recorder and a chat app, as some rankings do, mixes tools that track different things. Sorting sales tracking tools by type first makes the choice much shorter.

Forecasting and revenue intelligence sit across the last three rows. What a revenue intelligence platform adds on top of a CRM, and when it is worth it, is covered in our guide to the revenue intelligence platform.

Sales tracking software examples by type

A few well-known sales tracking tools per type, to make the table concrete. This is not a ranking: each line says what the tool tracks, nothing more, and the right one depends on the profile in part 06.

• Pipeline-first CRM. Pipedrive is built around the visual pipeline: deals as cards, activities attached to each deal, reports on stage conversion.
• Full CRM suite. Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot Sales Hub track accounts, contacts, deals and activities, with forecasting and custom reports; both connect to a large range of other tools.
• Activity capture and conversation intelligence. Gong records and analyzes calls and meetings, then flags deals at risk based on what was said and who was involved.
• Marketing attribution. Ruler Analytics links each lead and closed deal back to the campaign, channel or page that brought it in.

Several of these tools also add contact or company data to the records they hold. Our position is simple. For tracking deals, use the tool that fits your team. For the account data that goes into it, use Derrick: it fills industry, headcount, country and website on the list you already have, at 1 credit per company, with 100 free credits a month and no card needed. Part 10 shows how.

How to choose a sales tracking system

Most buying guides start with a list of tools. Start with your own process instead: a sales tracking system is only as useful as its fit with the way your team already sells.

Step 1: find where tracking breaks today

Write down the last three times you did not know something you needed: a deal that went cold without anyone noticing, a forecast that missed, a manager who could not say which channel produced last quarter's wins. Each one points to a family from part 02 (activity, pipeline, results or sources). That family is what the new tool must fix first.

Step 2: map your process before you pick a tool

List your stages, the rule that moves a deal from one to the next, and who owns each step. If you cannot write them down in ten lines, no tool will do it for you. Our guide to sales process steps gives a template.

Step 3: list the fields your reports need

Every report you want is a field you need. "Win rate by company size" needs a headcount field filled on every account. "Pipeline by industry" needs an industry field that uses the same values everywhere. Write the list before the demo, and check that the tool can make those fields required.

Step 4: test on your real deals

Import twenty real deals, including the messy ones, and run the reports from step 3. A sample account always looks good; your data is the test.

Step 5: measure adoption at 30 days

The best sales tracking software is the one your reps update. After a month, count the deals updated in the last week and the activities logged per rep. If the numbers are low, the tool is too heavy for the team or the capture is not automatic enough.

Sales tracking software for small business: which tool for which team

For a small business, the right sales tracking software depends less on company size than on how the sales team works day to day.

• Founder selling alone. A spreadsheet or the free plan of a pipeline-first CRM. Move when the signals in part 07 appear.
• Team of 2 to 10 sellers. A pipeline-first CRM with email and calendar capture. Adoption matters more than depth.
• Team that lives on the phone. A CRM with built-in calling or a call integration, so activity is logged without typing; add conversation intelligence once call volume justifies coaching.
• Team already inside an ecosystem. If marketing, support or finance already run on one vendor, its CRM often wins on integration alone, even if another tool demos better.

Can you use a spreadsheet instead of sales tracking software?

Yes, for a while, and it is often the right first step. A spreadsheet is free, everyone knows it, and it forces you to decide which columns matter, which is most of the work. Many teams that move straight to a CRM import a mess they never designed.

A spreadsheet stops being enough when you see these signals:

• Two or more people edit the same file, and rows get overwritten or duplicated.
• Follow-ups are missed because nothing reminds anyone.
• You cannot say when a deal entered its current stage, because the file only keeps the latest value.
• Emails and meetings live in inboxes and calendars, not next to the deal.
• Your manager asks for a report every Monday and someone spends an hour building it.

If none of these is true yet, keep the spreadsheet and make it a good one. We publish two free Google Sheets templates, no email required. The B2B lead list template has a Status column that works as a simple pipeline, next to the account columns. The cold outreach tracker template adds a dashboard tab that calculates your reply and meeting rates as you log each touch.

In Google Sheets, the Derrick sidebar fills the account columns of those templates (industry, headcount, website, and on paid plans a verified email with Email Verification) without leaving the sheet, and Find Duplicates, which runs in Google Sheets only and is unlimited, flags the rows two people entered twice.

The data that goes in: why sales tracking reports go wrong

Sales tracking software reports on the records it holds. Vendors talk about capture: logging emails, calls and meetings automatically. Capture fixes the activity family. It does nothing for the account fields that every segment report reads, and those fields usually arrive half empty, because they were typed by hand by whoever created the record.

Take a simple case. You import 400 accounts and the headcount field is filled on 240 of them. Your "win rate by company size" chart now describes 60% of your accounts. If the empty ones came mostly from one source, such as an event list, the chart does not just miss data: it describes a different population from the one you sell to. The table shows which field breaks which report.

If your list holds company names rather than LinkedIn company page URLs, Search Companies finds the page first, at 1 credit per company, so filling the account fields costs 2 credits per company instead of 1. Enrich Companies, Enrich Leads and Search Companies read LinkedIn, so they need your LinkedIn account connected through the Derrick Chrome extension. For a full audit of contact records, with decay and field-by-field checks, see our guide to contact management; for the rule that a record must be verified before it enters the pipeline, see "Stage 0" in the pipeline stages guide linked above.

To see what your own empty fields hide, enter your number of accounts and, for each field, how many records have it filled.

Moving from a spreadsheet to sales tracking software: 4 checks before the import

Every tool imports a CSV. The import is the cheapest moment to fix your data, because after it, every error is copied into reports, automations and forecasts. Four checks, in this order:

1. Remove duplicates. Match on website or LinkedIn company page rather than on company name, which comes in too many spellings. In Google Sheets, Find Duplicates adds a column that flags the duplicate rows, for free and without limit. The habits that keep a base clean after the import are in our glossary entry on data hygiene.
2. Verify the emails. Bounced emails count as sent in your activity reports and hurt your sender reputation. Email Verification checks each address at 1 credit per email, on paid plans. Verify the addresses you already have; there is no need to find an email and then verify it in a second pass.
3. Fill the account fields your reports need. The list from step 3 of part 06: industry, headcount, country, website. These are firmographic data, public and stable, so they can be filled for the whole list in one pass instead of record by record.
4. Freeze the list of stages and values. Agree on the stages, and on the allowed values for fields like industry and source, before the import. Map every old status in the spreadsheet to one new stage. A tool that starts with twelve spellings of "Software" will report twelve industries.

Then import a small batch, run the reports you listed, and check the "unknown" bars. If they are small, import the rest.

Fill the account fields first: the Derrick app, Google Sheets, Claude and the API

Derrick is not sales tracking software, and it does not try to be. It is the data layer that fills the records before they reach the tool you choose, and keeps them filled afterwards. The same actions run on four surfaces; pick the one that matches how you work.

• The Derrick web app. The default: import your CSV export, add a column per action (Search Companies if you only have names, then Enrich Companies for industry, headcount, country and website, Enrich Leads for job titles from LinkedIn profile URLs), and export the clean file to your tracking tool. Nothing to install apart from the Chrome extension that connects your LinkedIn account.
• Google Sheets. If you track sales in a spreadsheet today, the same actions run from the Derrick sidebar on the sheet you already use. It is also where Find Duplicates lives.
• Claude, or any MCP client. For a question about one account in the middle of a deal ("what size is this company, and where is it based?"), ask Derrick from a conversation in Claude or ChatGPT.
• The REST API. To fill new records automatically as they enter your CRM, call the API from your workflow, or through Zapier, Make or n8n. API and MCP access start with the Plus plan.

Costs, counted by steps: from a company name, 2 credits per company (Search Companies, then Enrich Companies); from a LinkedIn company page URL, 1 credit. Job titles add 1 credit per contact with Enrich Leads. Email Verification, 1 credit per email, is available on paid plans. For 1,000 accounts from their names, at 2 credits per account, the list fits inside the Standard plan (20 euros a month, 10,000 credits). On every surface, MCP and API included, the actions that read LinkedIn need your LinkedIn account connected through the Derrick Chrome extension. The full list of actions and their costs is on the features page.