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.

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

SALES NEEDS

CRM

SPREADSHEET

Storing contact details

YES

A 360° view of the contact

YES

Establishing sales processes

YES

Prioritizing leads by their activities

YES

Tracking contacts’ activity on the website and in-product

YES

Customizing the tools based on your sales process/activities

YES

Cross-selling and upselling using contextual information

YES

Controlling data access through roles and permissions

YES

Retaining all functionalities across device types

YES

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.

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 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.

Commendations from our customers

“Overall, with Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM), we now have a repository of all our customers and prospects. We can access data on every single person who has ever done business with us and generate reports on our overall business performance.”

Phil Shelton

CEO

Shelton Development Services

“Our team got up and running with Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM) unbelievably quickly. Using Smartforms, we’re able to generate over a thousand website leads a month without any manual intervention, which is a huge benefit.”

Joey Frasier

COO

Shortlist

“We initially had Salesforce CRM but didn’t really use it. The instance was incredibly complicated because it allows for so much customization that you end up doing nothing. When we explored Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM), the first thing I remember saying is, okay, the interface is clean and simple.”

Germain Brion

VP of Sales

Chargebee

“The welcome emails never existed before Freshsales. You can sign up on our website and you wouldn’t receive a single thing from us. This went on for 10 years. Freshsales turned things around.”

Kevin Jordan

Co-Founder and Head-Sales & Business Development

OmniPACS

“We are now able to keep track of all our deals. We don’t lose track of them, or lose many deals because we haven’t paid attention to it.”

Jeff Harris

Vice President Business Dev.

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