Even today, many sales teams still use Excel or Google Sheets to manage prospects, track visits and organize their activity. Although accessible and widespread, this use quickly shows its limits when it comes to structuring sales development, analyzing performance or collaborating effectively.
Excel is not a CRM. It doesn't provide reliable tracking, a global view of your business, or automation of repetitive tasks.
In this article, we explore 11 concrete reasons why Excel is no longer enough to manage a sales team, and why it's time to switch to a CRM tailored to field salespeople.
Excel is one of the most widely used tools in sales. It's simple, accessible and familiar to everyone. It lets you carry out tasks quickly, create your own templates, and easily share files with colleagues or your manager.
In an environment where time is often at a premium, and in-house tools are sometimes difficult to get to grips with, Excel has the advantage of being intuitive and flexible. On the face of it, it ticks all the boxes when it comes to tracking sales activity.
But this apparent efficiency soon reaches its limits:
And the evidence is overwhelming: 88% of Excel files contain at least one error. As your business becomes more structured, as your teams grow, as you need to analyze and not just record, Excel becomes more of a hindrance than an asset.
Excel has long been the default tool for tracking prospects, recording key figures or creating follow-up tables. As we've just seen, it's flexible, accessible and lets you do a lot of things... as long as you don't exceed a certain level of complexity.
But as soon as your sales activity intensifies, when several sales reps are working together, or when you're looking to structure a real customer follow-up, Excel quickly reaches its limits.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is more than just an enhanced spreadsheet. It's a solution designed to manage business relationships as a whole, in a structured, collaborative and scalable way. Where Excel works in silos, a CRM centralizes all customer data, records exchanges, automates certain tasks, and enables more precise business management.
By continuing to use Excel to manage your sales, you are depriving yourself of essential functionalities: real-time tracking, automatic reminders, dynamic reporting, fluid coordination between teams, data security, 360° view of the customer, etc. The risk is twofold: loss of efficiency in the field, and loss of strategic information for management. The risk is twofold: loss of efficiency in the field, and loss of strategic information for management.
Excel is a calculation tool. A CRM is a sales management tool. To confuse the two is to expose your sales force to numerous operational bottlenecks - often invisible, until they cost you an opportunity or a customer.
Are you constantly losing important customer data in your spreadsheet?
Excel or Google Sheet are perfectly usable tools when you don't have more than a few people working on a common file, and fewer than 100 points of sale or contacts to keep track of. After this limit, things become more complex.
As your business grows, it will be impossible to keep all your data in one spreadsheet, due to its diversity, quantity and source of input. De facto, you'll forget, or worse, constantly omit important details about a prospect or customer that could slow down or even hinder your distribution.
Sound familiar?
Don't know who turns prospects into customers?
What are the actions that produce the best sales results? How is follow-up carried out? How often is a store visited? How many prospects have accepted the innovation you're pushing for the summer? How many times did the sales rep call after his first visit? How quickly did he push his offer? etc...
In short, which actions generate the most results?
Unfortunately, with a spreadsheet, you can't track and compare multiple data points, and therefore aren't able to create a sales model that performs.
With no way of safeguarding these events, each salesperson will sell in the way he or she thinks works best. This can be beneficial or disastrous, depending on the profile.
A good methodology and follow-up of actions taken will enable your sales force to perform much more reliably over time, and enable you to better manage your distribution and growth objectives.
Does entering data into your spreadsheet take up too much of your sales force's time?
Have you ever measured how much time you or your sales reps actually spend on data entry rather than sales? To find out, take a tool that measures the time spent on each application, or use your phone to time it. Do it for a week, and ask your teams to do the same, with sincerity.
How many hours did each member of your team spend on Excel? Five hours? Ten hours? Oops, more than a day...
In France, 67% of a salesperson's time is spent on dedicated to non-sales activities. In other words, your sales force starts selling at noon on Thursday...
While the time spent creating, maintaining and updating your sales spreadsheet is theoretically sales time, it won't make you sell more.
Do you need to manually share documents with your sales team?
There are few things more frustrating than having to search through all your computer's files, shared folders and sent emails in order to get your hands on a file or the latest version of a spreadsheet.
If you hear this several times a week, it's a sure sign that it's time for a change.
Don't have an effective way of assigning tasks to your sales reps?
You don't have a way to assign tasks and actions to each account, or it's too time-consuming to do so.
This brings us back to a point made earlier: to know what action to take, you need to be able to analyze previous information. Don't you have an Excel spreadsheet listing all the tasks and exchanges with your prospect/customer? Headache ahead...
What's more, the assignment is usually made at a Monday morning meeting, with a reminder by e-mail at best, or orally more often than not. It's much more likely that some of the tasks will be forgotten, and that's how you lose an important store or restaurant.
You don't have a clear picture of what your salespeople are achieving individually?
In a spreadsheet, you don't have access to this kind of data. This means you can't effectively coach your sales team.
Are your sales reps unable to work together effectively to close a sale?
When sales people work with a prospect and help them move forward, business can flow more smoothly. However, your spreadsheet doesn't give them enough information to do this effectively.
Instead, sales people will step on each other's toes, ask for the same information over and over again, send the wrong documents and generally annoy your prospects. This leaves your company disorganized and disconnected from its audience, which is rarely the brand image you want to project.
Is your sales cycle getting longer and longer?
Instead of optimizing your sales activities to shorten the cycle, it seems that you and your team are increasingly confused.
As you add new prospects and customers, it can feel like you're drowning in a sea of information and tasks, and your memory fails you when you need to remember important information, tasks, calls and so on.
Would you like to compare data and key performance indicators from one year to the next, but can't?
If you want to compare data from one year to the next (or even just compare quarters within the same year), this can be very difficult to do with a spreadsheet. While you can get a good overview of totals on the sales dashboard in your CRM spreadsheet template, there's no way to compare data from different date ranges.
At least once, you or a member of your team has lost an important document before a meeting or appointment?
And I don't need to tell you, it's the worst feeling in the world.
Either you had to redo the document from scratch in a hurry, or you had to go to the meeting without it. Whether it's a presentation, a contract or any other important document, it can't be stored in your spreadsheet along with the contact details.
With a CRM, however, you can store your documents directly with your contact details, eliminating the need to hastily recreate a document at the last minute.
With CRM's Calendar feature, you'll receive alerts when meetings are about to start, and will have all contact or point-of-sale information to hand before they begin.
Is your spreadsheet insecure and easily copied and shared?
Although there are some security settings in Google Sheets, anything stored in the cloud can easily be sent and accessed by others. And even if you don't save your spreadsheet in the cloud, it's still easy to copy and share.
Worse still, if your spreadsheet is saved offline on a computer, it can easily be lost if that computer crashes.
If you're worried about security, it's probably time to switch to a CRM.
We've just listed 11 reasons why you should do without Excel, but we could list just as many on why you should adopt a CRM solution. So don't wait any longer, go for it.
Excel can be useful, but it wasn't designed to structure business processes. As your business grows, your sales outlets multiply and your teams expand, its limitations become apparent: manual management, frequent errors, difficult collaboration, lack of consolidated vision...
A CRM (coupled with SFA software) was designed for just this purpose. It's a real business tool, designed to support salespeople in their day-to-day tasks. It centralizes customer data, automates repetitive tasks, facilitates the work of sales reps in the field, and gives you an overall view of sales performance.
In addition to data management, a modern CRM also includes practical functions to support sales staff in the field.
Where Excel simply records information, a CRM allows you to take orders, attach documents, take photos at the point of sale, organize your rounds geographically, and even automate reminders. These functions are essential - and must be taken into account when drawing up your specifications - in a mobile sales environment, where every interaction counts, and where the tools must be simple, fast and operational.
Here's a simple comparison to help you understand the fundamental differences between these two approaches:
Excel has long been a practical ally for managing contacts, organizing rounds or tracking sales. But as your business grows, its limitations become a hindrance: data entry errors, difficult collaboration, lack of visibility, scattered data...
A CRM tailored to your field sales force enables you to structure your activity, make your data more reliable and improve your team's performance. It centralizes information, facilitates exchanges between head office and the field, and gives you precise dashboards to help you make better, faster decisions.
If you're still using Excel to manage your sales, it's probably time to switch to a solution designed for your day-to-day challenges.
👉 Find out how our sales CRM is tailored to your field team: contact us.
