• Do your sales and marketing teams use spread sheets to manage their data?
• Do you sometimes wonder if the information in all of company's spread sheets is up-to-date?
• Would you like everyone in your team to be able to collaborate on the up-to-date information more easily?

If you're struggling with these types of questions, don't worry. You are not alone - conversations with customers just like you say business' are still carrying on much of their key data capturing & processing within spreadsheets.  It's time to move your sales and marketing information from spread sheets and into CRM software.  Why? Well this is what you get:

1. Better metrics for tracking sales success

A spread sheet can’t give a sales manager the metrics they need to build and stand over solid sales forecasts. These metrics include the ratio of leads to orders, the win rate of proposals, and quotations for leads. Measuring and tracking business metrics allows managers to apply an activity-based, or bottom up approach, to sales forecasts. This means forecasts are based on targeted activity levels, such as the number of leads and sales presentations, the number of proposals and quotes, and historically proven conversion rates.

2. No more nasty surprises

Managers shouldn’t have to spend hours preparing a report to find out what is going on with a sales or marketing campaign. They should be able to see their pipeline at a glance and identify priority accounts, opportunities, and customers that are at risk. To do this, managers need a dashboard of key metrics that alerts them immediately of a deal that has failed to close or a customer who didn’t re-order. There’s nothing more unnerving than an unexpected setback against a sales target. CRM won’t prevent these setbacks, but it will mean missed targets won’t come as a surprise

3. Your time, back

Managers who track sales and marketing campaigns with spread sheets are losing valuable working hours. They are spending time gathering information and preparing reports that they could spend overseeing key projects. Using a CRM tool, you can access relevant information about customer service and your marketing campaigns ahead of any meeting. CRM should save you time and enable you to ring-fence hours of your day that you can use to manage projects and company-wide initiatives.

4. Always up-to-date sales data

Spread sheets exist as standalone documents and, even if they link to supporting spread sheets, they lack the capabilities of a central database. Spread sheets are not suitable for storing large amounts of data and can become cumbersome to use and maintain if you have several hundred or several thousand entries. A central database that underpins a CRM tool, on the other hand, is a more convenient and efficient way or organising and collaborating on extensive customer lists, sales reports and data tables.

5. An audit trail

If multiple members of your team are working on multiple versions of a spread sheet it can become difficult to track changes and preserve the integrity of your data. If you move information from a spread sheet and into a CRM database, you can protect your data, track the history of changes and isolate errors more easily. There will always be a place for spread sheets in a business. They are a key business tool for anyone who likes to interpret and manipulate data quickly. Instead of relying solely on spread sheets, consider them as a complementary to CRM. You can even store important spread sheets and other documents within your CRM tool. This way, you can gain a real-time view of key sales and marketing information and make better business decisions.