Excel to CRM | Freshsales

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 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.

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 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.