Recently, we talked about how Excel reaches its limits while showing you some pros and cons of the good ol’ spreadsheet when prospecting with Excel. But today we want to show you why you should stop using the Excel Spreadsheet for prospecting. Why? Because it’s time to move to an integrated online spreadsheet.
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How to manage prospecting with an Excel spreadsheet
We all are familiar with the basic and clean layout of the Excel Spreadsheet. Indeed, most have confidently used it on several occasions before. It has its perks and works just fine if you want to make a list of names and numbers. But its time as a supportive tool used by salespeople has come and gone.
The Excel Spreadsheet is easy to set up and edit, hence why so many small businesses gravitate towards it. Plenty of sales people work from Excel Spreadsheets, especially when they go into cold calling mode.
What are the limits of an Excel prospecting spreadsheet?
But once the phone calls are over and prospects have shown interest in the service, there is no way to move the suspect to a more powerful tool. Plus, it’s difficult to keep track of the people you called or schedule follow ups. Why? Because no lead management tool is in place.
This is the limit of the Excel Spreadsheet. The next natural step is to deploy a CRM system. Most businesses are hesitant to take that step. The tools are too complex, and require lots of data entry and useless information before the sales person can start working on it.
What’s the alternative to the Excel prospecting table?
Sales people need an online, integrated Excel-like spreadsheet that allows them to call their prospects, add comments and other important information and have a more powerful tool when they happen to be real leads but all in one place.
Inside noCRM.io all this is possible, and you can work directly on your spreadsheet and turn your prospects into leads with just one click. Once a lead is created, you can track its history, add comments, create follow-ups and set reminders for the next action, all synchronized with your calendar in order to stay on top of your to-do’s every day.
Sales Spreadsheets on Steroids
The Excel spreadsheet gives you a straight forward view on your data. In fact, it shows you only your plain data without analytics or any sort of data insights sales manager could use to assess their sales strategies. It does so because it was never designed to be more than a spreadsheet. It is great at what is is supposed to do and is doing it’s job. However, it can’t be used in a business context, and will continue to fail if not used correctly.
Small businesses don’t need a tool to manage their customers – they need a tool to turn their leads into customers. We at noCRM.io took the best of both worlds, the simplicity and clean layout of the Excel Spreadsheet, refined and tweaked it here and there, added some features such as #hashtags and instant lead creation. We implemented all this into our lead management software – giving you
a fully integrated, easy to use and up to date prospecting list.
You can log activities on each unqualified prospect, you can even start calls from within those prospecting lists.
If you want to see yourself how simple and easy working from a spreadsheet is, we invite you to go to our website and test our service for free. You will join over 8,000 sales managers and SMB owners who already boosted their performance without changing their way of working.
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FAQ
Excel is an accessible, easy-to-use tool for creating a list of contacts for your prospecting. It enables sales reps to easily find or enter contact data for their prospects.
While Excel is a great tool for creating a list of contacts to call, once your prospects have been qualified, it becomes complicated to follow up and keep track of your activities. For example, Excel doesn’t allow you to receive reminders, so you don’t forget to call prospects again. The file can also quickly become difficult to use when endless information is added to it.
