I wrote in an earlier post about my love/hate thing with Microsoft Excel. I hate it when it is used as a company wide solution for CRM, and I love it as a tool to analyze the data from a true CRM technology tool.

Well, I hope this one does not look like I’m backing off from my earlier statements. In sales automation done right, page 249, I deliberately introduced the idea that Excel could be used as a solid platform to use a lot of the sales methodology described in the book, in a sales automation application (SFA not CRM!) for the solo salesperson. The screen shot was from an early prototype Excel template in which we were testing out the ways that SADR handles the sales cycle.

I’m pleased to announce that SalesWays now offers a free beta release of the Excel Edition of Sales Cycle Manager, which should be downloadable as this post goes up. Many of the ways to characterize the sales cycle are just pure math. When did it start? When does it end? How much time in between? Calculate the three skill phases. Show where we are now in the cycle. Show the interactions that have happened. Excel is pretty good at doing that. When I thought about it, I figured that Excel could be a useful tool to get this done, so I mapped out a crude prototype and sent it to the SalesWays developers. They jazzed it up and it’s available for anyone to use—free of charge.

Although SalesWays can provide this free, I don’t want to downplay its power in managing a portfolio of opportunities. But this is a pure SFA product more oriented to the solo salesperson or small sales teams. It could be significantly better than the tools that they are currently using, and cheaper. It will certainly inject a dose of uniformity, consistency, and discipline into the way opportunities are managed.

Why give this away? Because we are so convinced that these new sales ideas can benefit everyone in selling that we are prepared to give it away to get it into as many hands as possible. It’s conceivable that we could create a ground swell of opinion to drive our more expansive enterprise software products and sales training programs into the organization.

If we find a firm following for this product, we will definitely consider ongoing development (adding SCMgr Expert functionality). Please try it and let us know what you think.