Switching from Excel to a Customer Relationship Management Software

An excel was used in the past years to run their sales and marketing activities. Some B2B company uses excel to keep track of all customer details now-a-days, because it is easy to use and well known by employees. Why do so many sales, marketing professionals still using excel to manage their customer lists. However, when it comes to sales or marketing purposes, Excel falls short in a number of areas: multiple users can’t access easily at the same time, storing huge data is cumbersome and it is difficult to view, difficult to analyze customers current statistics in excel.

Excel Spreadsheets

Excel's advantages are offset by more disadvantages. Excel spreadsheets are great calculators, but, they are not good databases. We can store lots of data’s in excel but it is difficult to retrieve, manage that data over long time. Only limited interface capabilities an excel have.

CRM

The modern environment requires one business to interact with another via the web. According to a Sweeney Group definition, CRM is “all the tools, technologies and procedures to manage, improve, or facilitate sales, support and related interactions with customers, prospects, and business partners throughout the enterprise”. It assumes that CRM is involved in every B2B transaction.

In other words CRM enables you to concentrate on your organization’s relationships with individual people, whether those are customers, service users, fellow workers or suppliers. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business from HR to customer services and supply chain management.

Excel's Disadvantages

• Multiple users can’t access at a time or easily create modifications
•  May take a long time to review, comprehend, and use spreadsheet data
• Difficult to share data
• Possible to lose data
• Too easily transportable to outside the business -- maybe even to competitors

CRM's Advantages over Excel's Spreadsheets

In CRM, we

• Develop strong, long-lasting relationships with customers through more personalized service.
• Improve profit by reducing costs through streamlined, more efficient operations.
• Respond quickly to customer requests and needs.
• Know where to up-sell and cross-sell.
• Manage leads and track sales for selling more products and services, quickly, easily, and cost-and-time effectively.
• Overcome Excel's disadvantages.

In Excel

• Easy to use
• Well known by most employees
• Economical for a small database with transactional sales

Why CRM Software

However, to more efficiently manage and profitably use data, other B2Bs use web-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software. A CRM consists of a database and a user-interface with which you can easily create, update, manage, process, share, and report data. By choosing the right CRM software can help your sales team identify the best leads and can help your marketing people to see the ROI for each campaign.

Currently, many CRM Software’s available in the market to take care of all sales & marketing activities.  Picking out the right CRM for your business means obtaining the software that best suits the company’s needs.CRM software comes with many features and tools, and despite the fact that many CRM products offer similar features.