Why managing your Sales Pipeline with Excel is not a piece of cake 🎂

With Christmas round the corner, everywhere you see cakes and so the title seemed more apt for this time of the year 😉

Here is a recent conversation I had with a customer (rather, lead). He contacted me asking for some modification to an Excel template. This was a Sales Pipeline Tracker template, which he had downloaded (& started using) from this website.

I have uploaded the file here with the customer's data masked

https://docs.zoho.com/file/4ogu8568be2e1b3584c61a04203a17674007d

Some issues in using Excel are immediately obvious as soon as you glance through the Excel file.

Like a bachelor pad 🙄

Ever went into a bachelor pad and seen the mess? Same with the Excel data in here. Once you open the file, you can notice immediately that the data is not properly organised. See the first column for Client Name. Some have just first name, some just the last name, some have full name. Sometimes, it is just the initials! There is no specific idea of what that field exactly is. The word 'specific' is key here. When your data cannot be specific, it leads to several issues which we will come to, shortly. 

Who's in there? 👀

It's like searching in the dark. See the 'Client Details' column and you will see what I mean. The data is not in a searchable format. If I have to just extract all emails of all the clients, this is simply not possible. Because this column is having all the details : address, phone, email. Sometimes, all of it, sometimes just one of them, and so on.

Let's consider just the email field/column. You can see that the email is hidden in many cases, at the end of a long line, or sometimes luckily, it is just the first. So you really can't see clearly enough to quickly spot all the emails. 

Let's consider two more columns 'Status' and 'Technician'. You can see they have a lot of empty values. What do they mean? How do you search for something like, say, deals which were not lost? Will you search for 'blanks'? But isn't there a meaning in your specific business context for 'blank' status?? 

Where's my Granny? 👵

Every house needs a granny ; one who would keep going around the house and ensuring decorum, and that things are in place. Where is the Granny in your Excel? ; one who can enforce proper data entry? It's not possible. And when you cannot enforce or validate something like, say, a specific column can have only a specific set of values, how can you ensure that only valid correct data in in the system?

All hands on the steering wheel

Imagine everyone holding the steering wheel when you drive the car?! 🙄 This is exactly what is happening here with Excel. You are no more the Super User / Administrator. Everyone is, literally. Because anyone in your office can change any data in the Excel and you are never going to know. It can be super crazy with columns having unknown data (which you didn't expect) and columns having data that should have been entered elsewhere. I have seen many such examples, having worked with businesses over the last five years now. It is not like spreadsheet is not good, but it just isn't cut out for this type of purpose, which is so central to your business growth.

After several years of putting up with messed-up data, some business owners realise that it's time to get a proper application in place with fine-grained access control, and have approached me for a solution. But when I open the Excel and try to feed the data into the application, that's when they also discover how messed up the data is. Often, it takes several days for the business owner to just clean up the data and ensure correct data is in the right places. So, don't think about the initial effort needed in setting up a system as a big thing. Think of how your Excel will look several years later, and when you don't even know/track what has gone in/out of the Excel meanwhile, and not sure if all the data is in there.

Here is a sample application for Sales Pipeline Tracking, created with a cloud-database called Zoho Creator.

OPEN SALES PIPELINE TRACKER APP

Play with it. This has complete access control (you can give different access rights to your staff, based on their roles in the company), versioning, backup of your data (so you can recover / compare in case something's changed/deleted accidentally), full validation so you are in control that messy/incorrect data doesn't enter into the system, notifications (via text messaging / email) on crucial deals, and much more!

See this application & see the Excel. Which one do you want to run your business on? Decide for yourself!