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Why Should I Stop Using a Google Sheet and Start Using a CRM?
– Rebekah Hedge
There is a point in time for every sales professional and business when it becomes more beneficial and less time consuming to use a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) rather than a google/excel sheet to track their book of business.
A single sales person will often start with a spreadsheet or Google sheet. As the company grows, that sheet also grows and unfortunately, the process fails to evolve with the growth of its contents. CRMs offer teams and individuals better opportunities for correspondence with clients and with one another. CRMs also have many other attributes that come along with that necessary procedural growth.
CRMs allow for better organization. Rather than keeping multiple tabs of a spreadsheet with stages of projects and old projects archived in one large file, CRMs allow for profiles to house all of the history for a single client in one space. Additionally, tags, which are a typical feature of a CRM, allow for faster dissection of data. For instance, tagging data allows the user to pull information for specific types of clients (commercial, residential, large, small, etc.) quickly for both reporting purposes and efficient mass communication.
Pipeline features provide a clearer picture of the sales process and often allows you to analyze the length of time spent in each cycle of the process, which can be an intricate analysis process if done through an Excel or Google sheet. These features help point management teams in the right direction when it comes to coaching sales staff and identifying the bottleneck of their sales process.
Dashboards and reports provide quick overviews which would take a significant amount of time with data in sheets. To be able to quickly see the percentage of clients in each stage of your pipeline, is something that will never be possible in a Google/Excel sheet. Having those overviews at a glance can help sales managers quickly view the status of multiple projects with minimal effort which allows for more accurate forecasting and better budgeting.
CRMs come in a multitude of costs, features and specialties. These options are often overwhelming and can intimidate someone that is looking to make the move on their own. Finding a consultant that does not have a tie to any one specific company is the best option for choosing the avenue and funnel that your company best fits in. For people that feel that they cannot afford a consultant to help, it is often less expensive than you think. If you are still a bit gun shy about working with a third party (ahem, KHIT Consulting), make sure to thoroughly vet your options, including reading unbiased reviews that exist somewhere other than the vendor’s website.
If you are looking for a consultant to help walk you through the process of moving to a CRM for the first time or want to change to a new CRM, please reachout to us at KHIT Consulting. I would love to help you through the process!
Questions? Contact us via email: [email protected]
