Is your most critical business system Microsoft Excel?

In our time as CRM consultants, we’ve seen Excel being used to support all kinds of business processes.

And we get it. Excel is a great tool.

Most people know how to use it, and it couldn’t be easier to get started.

If anything, problems arise when your Excel spreadsheet becomes too successful!

You start to use it for more and more things. More rows of data with more and more colours.

Then you add more columns as more data fields become necessary.

Then it grows to additional worksheets as you try to meet the needs of the different stakeholders. Additional worksheets result in ever more complicated formulae and interlinking.

Once you start linking out to other spreadsheets, invariably stored on network drives, you’ve really created a monster, and one that needs to be dealt with.

If you are reading this newsletter, chances are that you’ve already been there and you may now be using a CRM system.

However, just because there’s a CRM system in place, it doesn’t mean that Excel isn’t still lurking around somewhere, secretly growing to become your next unplanned business critical system!

As you might imagine, we see this all the time.

Organisations come to us saying that they’ve hit the buffers with Excel. If they haven’t got a CRM system in place, this is usually a sign that one is needed.

And, if they have got a CRM system in place already, it’s usually a sign that there’s opportunity to make more of what you’ve got.

This could involve integrating your existing CRM with your other systems, or even moving to a different CRM product that’s better suited to your needs.

In our latest blog article, we’ve been exploring the challenges of Excel vs. CRM.

If you’ve been on the fence about whether to move from Excel, why not take a look at the common traits we highlight that signal it’s time to move on from Excel?

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