When you're a salesperson, Excel sticks to your skin. And for good reason: everyone knows how to use Excel. And everyone who uses it loves it. It enables them to complete their tasks quickly. What's more, if they share a file, it's easy to understand and get to grips with.
And yet, it's not a friend who only means well! Because it's easy to use and configure, right up to the breaking point.
In short, you feel it's not really working any more. And you're not alone. 88% of business spreadsheets contain at least one error. So it's time to stop, and choose a CRM solution that will enable you to centralize your data and information, without any errors (because Excel isn't a CRM). Here are 11 reasons to change.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a spreadsheet, you don't have access to this kind of data. This means you can't effectively coach your sales team.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
