Achieving digital transformation with Salesforce: Why it is time to move away from legacy spreadsheets

What’s the sales team’s biggest challenge? It’s getting things done on time using spreadsheets, which is often reactive and standalone. While organizations have become masters when it comes to relying on spreadsheets to track sales, customer data and creating reports, they seem to forget that spreadsheets have their own share of shortcomings.

Which company doesn’t like to increase its sales? But it turns out that 80% of sales people’s time is spent on gathering all the data like contact details surrounding clients, project status or marketing plan in an Excel spreadsheet. But there are some tasks a simple spreadsheet simply can’t do, like if an organization needs multiple sheets to track a different kind of data, there is no way to track customer relationships, and information spread across disparate devices and sales personnel.

Gaining insight about customer or lead is beyond your capacity

When most sales teams use excel, they do so with one thing in mind. To gain insight into each customer or lead.

However, as with any technology, the usage of spreadsheets brings significant challenges surrounding business and technology. Spreadsheets should be the fuel for business decisions by providing a visual cue for where customers or leads are in the sales cycle. Unfortunately, sales people spend their maximum time trying to understand where they stand with each deal before they can get the full picture of the customer.

Also managing a situation where a customer call is handled by different persons can be complex and difficult because there is no way to find out what was discussed. And that means organizations have to ask everyone in the team when they last had a call with the client and asking them to update spreadsheets with the same, it can be an intensively manual effort if you choose narrowly focused tools for specific use-cases.

Do you have this problem? Getting a Salesforce can solve this.

Your team is struggling with manual reporting

Does your team complain about manually creating reports to figure out how your sales are doing or have trouble converting leads it? If the answer’s yes, then you’ve got a problem with manually creating a report that is time and resource-intensive.

In many organizations, creating reports is still an intensive manual task that is performed by sales teams to analyze the amount of time that goes into converting those leads to customers. Poor reporting creation in sales should be taken seriously as this will prevent from having a clear understanding of why some leads are falling through the cracks or where prospects are getting stuck in the funnel given the lack of proper sales funnel to track the process.

No one in sales likes to miss target goals but if there is no easy way to reach the targets because of a lack of answers that can give insights into why some things are working or not.

Feeling this pain? It’s probably time to deploy Salesforce

Customer segmentation and one-size-fits-all

Which organization doesn’t like to segment customers that can allow them to accurately reach a customer with products and services tailored to suit their individual needs, instead of one-size-fits-all? 80% of a sales effort’s success depends on segmenting customers – which are all tasks a spreadsheet simply can’t do. This is where Salesforce comes in handy.

Is your team wasting time and missing out on sales

Is your team spending all their time digging through email, folders, and files just to find out who last spoke to the client? If so, it can seem impossible to find the time they need to plan for new leads or engage as many as customers possible.

If you are seeking to capture all the important sales history, you need to ditch the spreadsheet and give your team Salesforce.

How confident are you about successfully using advanced CRM for your business needs? Despite organizations experimenting with Salesforce, only a few have been able to successfully extract value sustainably.

So deploying them wisely is what differentiates a successful Salesforce Consulting Service provider that has extensive experience in Salesforce integration and customization from those that are less successful. Find out how Prime’s Salesforce Consulting Services can transform your operations, create customer value, what policies they have in place, and what strategies they do—and don’t—follow to realizing the potential of your Salesforce implementation and its applications.

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