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When you’re first starting out, it makes sense to use the tools you have at your disposal. But there comes a time in every business when you have to bite the bullet and get the right tool for the job. Excel is one of those go-to applications that are often used to do jobs it wasn’t designed for.
Excel is a fantastic spreadsheet tool with some great features to manage financial and numeric information, is easy to use and you can quickly get a spreadsheet up and running. But if you are using an Excel (or any other) spreadsheet to manage your customer and prospect contacts, then you are probably starting to realise it’s not a good fit for purpose and are no doubt experiencing some pain and challenges.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution is purpose built to manage customers and prospects, and there’s more than a few reasons why it’s preferable to Excel.
Firstly, let’s start with some of the core information you will typically be needing to record.
- Customer, Prospect and Lead company information with segmentation, industry or other categorisations, and contact details (HO phone, address etc)
- Company contacts (usually multiple at each organisation), with contact details, or individual customers and prospects.
- Opportunity and/or Order information, such as value or deal size, expected close dates, notes, products and/or services to be purchased – usually with the need to capture more than one product
- Interactions – both planned (future) and historical interactions, so that you have a full history of your communications and meetings, plus links or copies of any emails sent or received.
- Process steps, which may reflect the sequence in which a deal, contract or order must proceed within the business, with various people needing to add, update or interact with that data depending on their role
- Critical dates – start or end dates of contracts or programmes or work, and any other important dates or milestones throughout your sales or order processes. Some fields or dates may need to trigger tasks and activities for follow up or action.
- Other associated information, such as marketing lists, invoice or finance details etc.
It becomes obvious that the data set and process can start to get quite complicated, with lots of relationships between the differing types of records, which is very difficult to manage in Excel. It is feasible that with an extremely in-depth knowledge of Excel and utilisation of advanced formulae and techniques that you could build a spreadsheet to capture and structure some of the information above, but it would be cumbersome to maintain, could not capture or reflect all elements, and would still not solve the challenges we are about to explore. So, let’s explore some of the challenges for Excel when attempting to use it as a CRM.
Security & Access
Accessing Excel is like any other file on your network – anyone with permission can access the entire file. If more than one person starts updating the file at the same time, then you’re going to get problems. You can’t define roles or allow people to access data that is only relevant to them.
CRM allows you to define security and access so that staff can only access the solution if they are licenced, with multiple staff able to access the solution simultaneously, while only accessing and updating information that is relevant to their role.
Data structure and duplication
Excel uses rows, and each row reflects a different record. So, if you have more than one record per customer or prospect (e.g. multiple contacts, opportunities or sales), it has to be added as additional rows and the customer information needs to be duplicated. And if you want to reflect multiple products under each opportunity or sale, then the complexity for Excel just increased exponentially. Having multiple records introduces data duplication and the potential for errors, and you might be double counting records.
It also means that data in Excel must be represented as rows, going across the screen, and cannot be structured in forms for intuitive data capture or improved user experience.
Excel is great in that you can capture data quickly and easily. Within cells you can capture free-form notes, or even add multiple contact names or dates all within the same cell (to get around the lack of relational data structures). But that flexibility is also a disadvantage as the integrity or usefulness of that data is severely limited.
CRM uses relational database techniques to allow relationships between different records (such as one-to-one and one-to-many), so that a single Customer can have more than one contact, opportunity or sale, and that any sale could have multiple products. Records are presented on a form for each record, that can be arranged and structured for intuitive data capture and an improved user experience. And this is all without having to duplicate or repeat the core customer information, as it is linked to the single record, not repeated. So, you have that full single customer view.
Adding & Deleting information
In Excel, adding new rows (records) and making sure all calculations are inherited needs a lot of forward planning and can introduce inconsistencies within the data. And anyone can delete a row, a column or a cell (field) – without an audit trail or ability to recover that data. (Yes, SharePoint will allow you to recover an older version of the file, but you will lose any changes made since the backup.)
With CRM you can restrict who has delete capabilities (generally a select few), and there is full audit trail of changes made to critical records. Users cannot add or remove fields unless they have very specific permissions (which is generally not the case). CRM is not as flexible as Excel, but it introduces security and peace of mind regarding the integrity of your valuable data.
File copying & duplication
With Excel, it’s so easy to copy and start another spreadsheet (would you be happy if a salesperson took a copy home?). Perhaps one of your users has another purpose for some of the core data (maybe a marketing list, or an order run-sheet), and they’ve taken the core spreadsheet as a base, but then added their own columns and different data, and now maintain it as a separate file. It could still be on the network or saved to their personal device. We’ve seen cases where more than a dozen files exist with similar core information spread throughout the organisation. Now you have multiple sources of customer information that will evolve and grow independently. We’ve seen cases where it takes a few weeks each time to get all the different sources together to just do a simple mailing each month.
In CRM, if a different business unit, department or set of users has different requirements to the core users, then additional forms (or fields) can be added just for them (with security if needed), linked to the core or related information – removing the duplication and maintaining that single customer view.
Workflow and business process
In Excel, you can define columns and a series of cells to capture important information and dates, so long as there is a one-to-one and consistent relationship. But Excel is static, and cannot dynamically create new records or pathways for capturing new data – for example: if a date is reached, create an activity for a staff member to follow up; or a business rule now requires a different process to spawn to capture different data.
The power of CRM is the ability to overlay business rules as to how data is captured or manipulated, and the ability to have multiple business processes (sequences of stages and steps) that users need to follow to manage important interactions, processes, contracts or orders, engaging the right staff member as required, capturing the relevant information, escalating to management (if required), or triggering an email or communication to a supplier or the customer as conditions are met.
Linking with other data such as Outlook
If you’re using Excel to capture customer and product information, your staff will still be using other tools such as Outlook for email, calendars, and to-do / activity interactions. Excel cannot link to these standard toolsets to record all of the interactions your staff have had (or plan to have) with customers, and there is no guarantee that even the names for customers and contacts are the same between Excel and Outlook.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM integrates with Microsoft Outlook so you can link an email, meeting or to-do with a record in your CRM (or visa-versa, by generating that email or activity from within CRM), so that you can easily manage and record all of your interactions, and maintain that single customer view.
Summary
When you’re starting out it’s natural to build an Excel spreadsheet to start capturing your basic data – the information was simple, and only used by one or two key staff. But as your company grows, more staff are now needing to use that spreadsheet, the information it needs to capture grows, and different versions start growing up like weeds. No doubt you’ve experienced many or all of the challenges described above and are wondering how to move forward. You’ve reached the point where you are now managing your business on what we call the spreadsheets and miracles approach – it’s a miracle if something doesn’t go wrong.
It’s time to evolve and put in place a solution that will provide you more flexible and powerful capabilities to help you manage your business as it grows – with more customers, staff, data and processes – with better control, security, data integrity, integration and insight. And that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of capabilities, features and functions that CRM can introduce to your business to improve account management, sales, service and marketing.
We have helped many small businesses in their journey from Excel to CRM. Contact us to find out how we can help you.
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In the lifecycle of every business, there comes a point where you need to take the leap and invest in business enabling technologies. But when is the right time?
Too often, we’re happy to invest in hiring another person – after all business is booming – but baulk at the cost of systems and processes to do things better and more efficiently with the people you already have.
Businesses who are looking to invest in a CRM for the first time, have one thing in common – they’re growing and feeling some pains and strains as a result.
In the end, the old adage rings true – what got you here, won’t get you there.
Here are some signs that it might to time to take the leap and get a CRM.
1. You’re suffering growing pains
When you’re starting out in business, you just make do. You find inventive ways to do things that work for the time being. But as you grow, the temporary fixes start to break under the pressure and that introduces risk into your business.
Maybe something has already gone spectacularly wrong, and you realise that you’re getting too big for cobbled together solutions.
2. You don’t have consistency in the way you work
Left to their own devices, your staff will find different ways of doing the same thing. For every sales legend who builds his own password-protected sales pipeline spreadsheet, there’s another who swears by post-it notes.
That’s where CRM comes into its own – taking your best practice process and applying it consistently, so you have full visibility of activity and pipeline. You need to know who your superstars are, and who’s taking an easy ride.
3. Spreadsheets don’t cut it anymore
Don’t feel guilty about your spreadsheet addiction. It’s common because it works … for a while.
For sure, we’ve seen some impressive Excel workarounds in our time, but they don’t scale well. Excel is a great calculator, but it doesn’t win any awards as a database.
If your business has a spreadsheet addiction, you’re probably already feeling the pains of sharing, updating, reporting, corruption, broken formulas and data loss. Not to mention a lack of a single source of truth about your customers when you need it.
4. You’re losing track
When you had a few staff and a trickle of customers, you used to know what everyone was working on and where it was at. But as your team grows, and your customer list gets longer you are struggling to keep up with who is doing what for whom. What’s more, all of your customer history is stored in your collective memory, and that can walk out the door any moment.
Often it’s your customers that suffer, getting poor service or being forgotten. CRM helps you to keep a track of your customers and prospects and the activities you need to do to service their needs. What’s more, it does it in an automated way, so nothing or no-one gets the accidental brush-off.
5. You don’t have oversight
Without a system of tracking, you don’t have system of reporting. And without reports you can’t see what’s behind you, let alone what’s ahead. You’re flying blind.
With a CRM, you can easily and diligently track your sales pipeline and know when you need more staff or product before the deluge hits. You might not know this, but you can use CRM to track and manage any type of process in your business, not just sales. Imagine being able to pin-point bottle necks in your delivery process and direct resources to the right areas. Extend your solution even further to manage orders – even integrate with your finance system. It’s all possible and you can bite it off, bit by bit.
If you’ve been nodding your head while reading this, it’s time to get started on your CRM journey.
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Ever wondered whether your business is the right size to get value out of an investment in CRM? That’s something only you can answer. The reason is, it’s not about size, it’s about growth, and the symptoms that surface as a result.
In a previous article we talk about some of the common pains that lead to a business considering a CRM. Now we want to tackle some of the assumptions you might be making about investing in a CRM solution that might be holding you back from taking the leap.
We work exclusively with Microsoft Dynamics CRM so, naturally, we’ll focus on this solution by way of example.
Assumption 1 – Mainstream solutions like Dynamics CRM are only for very large companies with call centres
Not true. The underlying assumption here is that Microsoft Dynamics is complex and expensive and that’s not really the case. It can be complex, but at the core, it’s very simple. And it’s certainly not the most expensive solution on the market.
The beauty of Dynamics CRM is that it’s so scalable. And scalability means you can scale up or DOWN. If you don’t need all of the functions, focus on the ones you do. We can even hide the parts you don’t need so you have a ‘clean’ solution without the distractions of the extraneous functions.
The advantage of this is that the functions are there when you do need them, without having to upgrade or change solutions. See Assumption 4 for more on this.
Assumption 2 – We don’t have enough people to justify it
This raises the question, how many people is enough people. Well the minimum number of Dynamics CRM licences is five, so if you have more than five people who interact with clients, you’re definitely not too small by this definition. [Edit: As of 1 December 2016 there is no minimum number of licences}. And that’s not just sales people – that’s anyone who needs to access client records. Even the person who answers your phone might need access to create phone call records and set tasks for call backs.
Really, size doesn’t matter. If you’ve got more than a couple of people accessing the same records, your current Excel spreadsheet methods of sharing, tracking and updating information are likely to start causing big headaches. Or if you’ve got more than a handful of clients that you have ongoing relationships with, a CRM is certainly going to help you keep track of things.
Assumption 3 – Cheap or free is better for your first CRM
This is a common fallacy and false economy. By all means, do investigate different CRMs and try them out for free. Use this process to work out what your needs are.
But beware! A cheaper CRM is only cheaper now. But later, when you find that you need more functionality that your cheap CRM doesn’t have, you’ll need to migrate to a new solution that does. By then, you’ll have a database full of data that you need to migrate.
Believe us. You do not want this if you can avoid it.
Migration of data is not a job for the faint hearted. You’ll need to pay someone like us to do it for you, and the costs can add up especially when the data structures are different between the systems and if you’re managing documents within your CRM.
Choosing a flexible solution now, that can grow and flex with you, is going to be more economical in the long run. A flexible solution like Microsoft Dynamics CRM means that when you want to add functionality or make further customisations, your data stays right where it is in the same format, while your CRM functions are expanded.
Assumption 4 – CRM only focusses on Sales pipeline – we’ve got bigger problems
If sales pipeline management is only part of your problem, the good news is that it’s also only part of the solution. Sales pipeline management is just one business process that you can manage and support in CRM. We’ve customised some pretty awesome solutions for clients who need to manage everything that comes after the sale – tracking the stages of the project to deliver their product or service to the customer.
Buy a flexible CRM like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and the world is your oyster.
Assumption 5 – We need to have an IT department to manage something like this
Nah. Not these days. The game changer was a thing called ‘the cloud’ or ‘SaaS’ (Software as a Service). You don’t need expensive infrastructure like servers. You don’t need to manage upgrades or patches. Your data and your software is stored securely by Microsoft (within Australia). It all happens magically and remotely with 99.9% up-time guarantees attached.
CRM is a business solution, not an IT solution. You just need some business acumen to know how your own business needs to function. No IT boffins required – we’ll supply those.
Want more reasons to get moving? Contact us – we’ve got a million reasons to get into your first CRM.
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A good question without a simple answer. It’s not simple because CRM can be different things to different businesses. But let’s not tackle that yet, let’s look at CRM in its purest form.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and, as a software solution, helps your business interact with your customers better. CRM can improve your internal processes, provide better service to your current customers, or help you win new ones – and giving everyone that needs it a complete view of your customer’s history with your business. And all the while CRM is giving your management improved visibility over these processes so they can make better decisions.
The key business processes that most CRM systems commonly focus on are the parts of the business that most commonly interact with customers, that is sales, service and marketing.
CRM for sales management is focused on getting your salespeople and others involved in the process of selling, a common set of practices. When everyone is following the same processes and recording their progress in the same way, getting a handle on your pipeline and performance is a breeze.
CRM’s service functionality helps you to manage your customer’s requests and issues. When a customer makes contact and action needs to be taken by someone in your organisation, CRM helps to ensure the action is assigned to the right person and is actioned in right timeframe according to your consistent resolution process. This information continues to be stored against the customer record so everyone is aware of the customer’s history. This is what creates happy customers and drives loyalty.
CRM supports your marketing efforts with tools to help you communicate with customers or prospects and an automated and targeted way. With tools to help you to select the right customers for your campaign and track their responses, measuring the success and return on investment is made easy.
Ok, but having said this, every business is unique and CRM is used as a platform to create some pretty unique solutions for all types of business. This is why CRM systems are generally flexible and customisable tools for businesses.
This is both a blessing and a curse. You can’t buy a CRM, plug it in, and have it work for you straight away. It will always need some introspection and planning on your part to decide what your business uniquely needs it to do to support your processes and how you work – then, some configuring and customisation to make the solution a match for you.
We’d go so far as to say, that if someone tells you that their CRM solution will work for you straight of the box, you should run a mile. It just isn’t possible to have a single configuration that drives success for everyone.
Having said this, CRM solutions have a common set of functions that help support organisations in dealing with their customers and prospects – or whomever it is that they interact with and need to keep track of – for example, members, applicants, suppliers, patients.
Layered over the top of these core functions, needs to be a user experience that enhances productivity. One of the key reasons why CRM systems seem to fail to deliver, is because your people won’t use a system that they don’t see value in. The key is to make sure you build or configure your CRM to help, and not hinder your staff, so it’s not another step to complete, but an essential part of the process.
This is why we work exclusively with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and have done for years. Let’s face it, everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Outlook and the Microsoft Office suite so there’s an inherent productivity advantage in the seamless integration with these products.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM does all of the standard stuff you’d expect, but there is also a limitless number of ways to set up to suit a particular business need. Some of the world’s largest companies, use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and so do small businesses. It’s that flexible and scalable.
Talk to us about what you want to achieve with your CRM. We’re here to help you make your CRM exactly what you need it to be.