5 things you can do with CRM (but can’t with Excel)

As a spreadsheet tool, Excel is great for collecting data and making quick calculations. But if you’re looking for a single solution that stores data and helps you act on it, Excel is not that solution.

Because Excel wasn’t built for it.

A CRM (customer relationship management) is built precisely for this. Think of Sales CRM as a single solution for creating, storing, sharing, processing and reporting data. Obtaining customer details is great, but if you can manage customer relationships effectively, there’s nothing like it.

Here are 5 things you can do with Sales CRM, but can’t with Excel:

1. Send emails

There’s no way to integrate Excel with your email client. But you can connect your email to your CRM. You’ll be able to send and receive mails, run campaigns, and get metrics (open rates, click rates)—all from within the CRM.

2. Make calls
   

You can’t place calls from your Excel, of course. But from a CRM, you can not only make calls, but also have them auto-logged and mapped to the respective lead’s profile! You purchase numbers, assign them to your sales reps, and voila! They’re off making calls.

3. Collaborate in real time

This is probably the most annoying part of Excel. You create a file, share it with your teammates, and they make changes to it. Then they send this revised file back to you, and it continues. In this constant back and forth, there’s a high chance that you end up working on an older version of your document. With CRM, this problem is non-existent. You log in to your account, you have all your leads, deals, and accounts in one place, and you’re ready to go! Plus CRMs these days are largely on the cloud, which means storing and sharing data is easier.

4. Automate sales processes

In Excel, you manually enter a new lead’s contact number, email ID, or their company’s location. This process can be tedious and prone to errors. Imagine if you could automate it! By syncing the web form on your website with your CRM, lead capturing can be automated—and that’s just one example of sales automation using CRM.

5. Track customer behavior

In Excel you probably have to run through a bunch of comments (packed into different cells) before you get context into emails, calls, and appointments with a particular lead. In CRM, inside each lead’s profile, you can find all the interactions you’ve had with them. These interactions are often arranged chronologically, so it’s like a linear timeline of sorts. Knowing everything about your customer on one screen is the first step towards customer relationship management.