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.

I was looking at a recent article by Denis Pombriant. I’ve known Denis as a perceptive analyst for a number of years, and fortunately he and I have mostly seen eye to eye about CRM fundamentals (although not always). Denis has the ability to look at all the stuff about the CRM space and to locate something lurking in there that most other people have missed.

The latest example of this that struck me was his observation regarding the spreadsheet. Denis wrote:

“I have always believed that, to figure out what new applications would be appearing in the near future, all you have to do is understand what people are tracking on spreadsheets.”

I see this observation come to life in my other world, as the head of a company specializing in delivering CRM solutions If I had to pick just one technology that was supporting the endeavors of most companies implementing their CRM, it would be Microsoft Excel. This is because the spreadsheet is the best list making tool in the world.

Recently (2002) I was an interim CEO for the Canadian division of a global bioscience company where their future sales projections depended on the spreadsheet. The giant spreadsheet would arrive from head office, and you typed into the part you for which you were responsible. You e-mailed it back, and it got rolled up with scores of other region’s results. Then you got it back again to see how you were performing. At that time there was no company-wide CRM tool—each region did its own thing. But head office wanted to know what was going on, so they used Excel to figure it out. A dozen business analysts were needed at head office just to keep the spreadsheet routine working.

Don’t get me wrong, of course, spreadsheets are powerful analytical and reporting tools, but, to use spreadsheets throughout an organization without any kind of connecting glue underpinning it is a recipe for waste of effort and inefficiencies. They don’t link very well, they don’t share common data very well—they are cumbersome and need lots of tender loving care to make them work. You manually dig the information out from somewhere else and type it into the spreadsheet.

The CRM system has to be the central repository that contains all the information (accurate and up to date) ready for the spreadsheet to use. Press a button and the CRM information automatically flows into the spreadsheet, which then automatically digests the data and spits it out into predefined formats. No one types data into the spreadsheet.

It is the reliance on the spreadsheet that slows a company down in evolving to a proper CRM solution. The attitude is, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and the pressure of continuing business prevents people from sitting back, taking a breath, and recognizing just how wasteful and time consuming the spreadsheet process really is. From my experience the best thing to do is to implement a solid CRM product in parallel, and to slowly wean the business off the spreadsheet, and relegate it to a pure reporting and analysis tool.