Why Excel is an Ineffective Sales Tracker (and What to Use Instead)
Why Excel is an Ineffective Sales Tracker (and What to Use
Instead)
Most of the
businesses use Excel as their sales tracker tool to keep track of their sales.
Many organizations consider this tool to be the best in the market when it
comes to tracking sales activities. However, on a real-time basis Excel is not
an ideal sales tracker tool. It can be a herculean task to track sales activities
for those sales professionals who don’t have hands-on experience or have little
knowledge of Excel. Besides this Excel is a manual tool that leaves room for
errors and also it limits the thorough analysis. Generally, users face a hard
time keeping all the formulas and formatting in mind too.
Sales tracker
tool is a basic need for any sales professional. Also, in the absence of an
effective sales tracker, it becomes extremely difficult for senior management
to oversee the chaotic situation happening on any particular sales. Sales
tracker is essential to keep a track of hundreds of sales calls, thousands of
emails and with the help of a sales tracker, constant changes to the sales
pipeline can be made easily.
So, as we know
the importance of a sales tracker tool now, let us dive into a few facts that
prove Excel an ineffective sales tracker tool. Excel works great when it comes
to storing detailed information but without detailed knowledge of complex
rule-sets, formulas, and functions of Excel it is not possible to extract
intelligent insights from that detailed information stored inside Excel. It
requires a lot of practice and time to use Excel efficiently.
In addition to
this, large spreadsheets entailing numerous rows and columns of data look complex
to understand and it becomes too difficult to gain any insight or to pinpoint
any error at a glance. Besides these challenges let us look into a few other
challenges as well that make Excel an ineffective sales tracker tool:
Room for Error: We all are
humans and bound to make errors. The manual entries done by users are more
prone to errors that result in inaccurate report generation later. It becomes
almost finding a needle in a haystack when it comes to pinpoint mistakes
because Excel entries are not automatically time- or name-stamped. Thus, Excel
leaves room for error always.
Excel is difficult to learn:
Any sales tracking activity in Excel deals with a lot of data entries. It
requires a high level of expertise and in-depth knowledge of formulas and
formatting that is not everyone’s cup of tea. It takes a good amount of time to
be master in Excel that potentially reduces your team’s overall productivity.
Monitoring is a challenge:
Identifying bottlenecks of team’s day-to-day activities in the sales process is
crucial and important for senior management. Real-time monitoring is essential
for the sales process and for that senior management need to see records. Here
a perfect sales tracker is meant to help in real-time monitoring but
unfortunately, Excel fails here too.
Thus, a perfect
sales tracker tool should improve the efficiency of the sales process, not make
it more complex. With these challenges and issues, Excel isn’t the best
software to track or analyze any sales activity. So, what should businesses use
to make the sales process a cakewalk? Well, the answer is CRM-(Customer
Relationship Management tool). CRM acts as a perfect sales tracker tool that
helps in improving your sales process by refraining you from formatting endless
spreadsheets.
CRM software
offers a unified platform bringing all your leads and contacts into one central
platform. It provides a shared database of contacts that you can nurture by
keeping in regular touch with them through email or one-on-one sales activity.
It not only stores contact information, but also provides a detailed picture of
what customers bought and when, how many interactions they had with sales and
marketing representatives, and so on. Let us look into a few benefits of using
CRM:
Intelligent Insights: The best
part is, users, don’t need to do any manual sorting or data management. The CRM
does it all. Senior management can see the latest progress and updates in their
sales processes, allowing them to stay focused on potential bottlenecks. CRM
software offers various intelligent insights that help to make the right
decisions at the right time. Through various reports and dashboards, you can
evaluate the performance of the online campaign and can build future sales and
marketing strategies. These intelligent insights are in the form of real-time
reports which are highly customizable and enable the sales and marketing team
to work in sync to achieve the desired result and plan future strategies to
generate greater revenues.
Real-time activity monitoring is easy: CRM makes it easy for senior management to assess their team’s
performance with real-time activity feeds. Every single action taken by a sales
executive is automatically displayed on one screen as they occur. Any time a
sales executive records a new task or action in the application, it gets
displayed in real-time as a collective feed. This feed can be filtered by
action or user, giving senior management a detailed picture of specific reps or
processes.
Automatic call recording and email integration: Most of the sales professionals dial numerous calls and send
multiple emails on a daily basis. It is not an easy task to keep a track of all
calls and email but fortunately, with the help of CRM’s email integration,
sales professionals can easily send and receive emails directly through the CRM
app. Each and every email gets automatically recorded and displayed in the CRM,
that helps executives and senior management to keep track of response times,
email outcomes, and following up with prospects. CRM also enables a user to
make, receive, and record phone calls directly in the CRM app. These
integrations are the only reason why most of the businesses these days opting
CRM to fulfill their sales tracking needs.
Easy Accessibility:
Nowadays, CRMs are mobile-friendly, so it helps those businessmen and employees
who are engaged in travelling profile; it enables them to access their sales
and marketing campaign performance anytime from anywhere. It also helps upper
management to get in touch with their subordinates remotely. Even the
executives on the field can make the most use of it by feeding the data anytime
from anywhere that enhance productivity and also saves time.
Excel’s complex
features and manual entry requirements make sales tracking less efficient. On
the other hand, CRM provides great features of automation, intelligent
insights, and real-time activity feeds that keep senior management apprised of
everything that’s happening within their business, without giving up extra time
and resources.
