Why spreadsheets won’t make the cut for growing sales teams

If you’re using spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets along with email for sales, you’re not alone. These tools are easy to access and understand, no doubt. But when it comes to managing a high volume of data and a large, growing sales team, these tools fall short.

Spreadsheets and emails are designed for specific functions, and customer relationship management, known by its full form CRM, is not one of them. To manage customer relationships you need to be able to look beyond data and understand the context behind every interaction. This context is obtained at every step of the interaction with the prospect—phone calls, emails, demos, face-to-face meetings, etc. A CRM software makes a crucial and pivotal difference by being able to access this context with minimal effort,  instantaneously.

why spreadsheets won t make the cut for growing sales teams why spreadsheets won t make the cut for growing sales teams

CRM vs. Spreadsheet vs. Email

Spreadsheets and emails are great at sorting data and managing email interactions, but not entirely at managing customer relationships. The table below lists common sales needs, drawing a clear distinction between what can be achieved with a CRM software and spreadsheets.

SALES NEEDS

CRM

SPREADSHEET

EMAIL

Storing contact details

YES

YES

YES

A 360° view of the contact

YES

NO

NO

Establishing sales processes

YES

No

NO

Prioritizing leads by their activities

YES

NO

NO

Tracking contacts’ activity on the website and in-product

YES

NO

NO

Customizing the tools based on your sales process/activities

YES

NO

NO

Cross-selling and upselling using contextual information

YES

NO

NO

Controlling data access through roles and permissions

YES

NO

NO

Retaining all functionalities across device types

YES

NO

NO

How a CRM software can help sales teams

With a popular CRM software like Freshsales, you can improve customer relationships and retention, increase sales and revenue, automate outreach processes and tasks, and more. Here’s a look at a few more reasons why Freshsales beats spreadsheets.

One place to access all data

Access multiple functionalities—email, phone, reports, activity tracking, automations—and have a 360° view of every customer. This helps focus on the human aspect of sales: reaching out and solving people’s needs.

Automate repetitive tasks

Automates mundane tasks like creating leads from webforms and chat, enriching and assigning them, and setting up follow up activities like calls and emails. You can also create intelligent workflows to update fields, create tasks, qualifying leads and more. Using workflow templates, you can automate sales activities without having to set up a workflow from scratch.

Stay ahead of your deals

Get complete visibility of deals across stages. Know how many deals are in each stage, and the potential revenue they will bring. Identify the hottest deals, and unclog your sales pipeline by spotting and eliminating stale deals.

Collaborate with teams for improved productivity

Information in Freshsales can be accessed by marketing and support teams to plan campaigns and respond to tickets using sales context. You can also easily collaborate with anyone in your company over a deal using the Freshconnect integration.

More context for meaningful conversations

Get instant context about the lead such as the pages they visited, features they adopted, the emails opened and clicked, etc. to make meaningful, and relevant conversations. The platform for CRM also sets lead scores based on these activities.

Data-driven decisions with advanced reporting

Create and track the right sales metrics to know the sales team’s performance, the revenue obtained from each region, the deals likely to close next month, etc. to address bottlenecks and resource allocation.

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