Separation Anxiety: 8 Liabilities of Using the Perfect Sales Spreadsheet

Is using Excel inhibiting your sales success?

Is separation anxiety preventing you from leaving a sacred spreadsheet in the dust and investing in sales automation? For most executives, it’s not a matter of if their spreadsheet is dangerous, it’s a matter of when they’ve suffered enough loss to finally move on. It’s time to understand the costs of maintaining status quo to your bottom line.

  • 80%+ of revenue is from existing accounts. Problem: skinny pipeline, expiring accounts.
  • No accountability or visibility. Problem: no real-time reporting.
  • Your price book is on the streets. Problem: no centralized, secure database.

Although accessible, familiar and seemingly inexpensive, spreadsheets and word processing tools carry high costs and liability often ignored by those relying on them. 

8 common high cost spreadsheet factors:

  1. Reliability: The perfect spreadsheet is perfect only until it is provided to another person.  Replication of mistakes costs companies literally thousands of dollars annually.  Over 90% of quoting spreadsheets carry formulaic and pricing mistakes.  Ignorance is bliss until the tipping point is discovered, typically on a customer site after the sale(s). 
  2. Security: There is none.  Critical company cost/sell information is released easily, with no idea of when it leaves or who received it. 
  3. No visibility: No idea of sales prospecting activity, lead generation or outcome, or any real-time sales information resulting in extreme difficulty for performance improvement.
  4. Outdated Products & Services Pricing: Updating products/services list is an impossible task and one that every sales team complains about.  Net result: mistrust of your spreadsheet and “updating” of estimates as they are built with whatever the sales team feels is better information.  Downstream effects include mistrust of the sales team and its accuracy and gross profit loss.
  5. Lost Opportunities: Time to sale increases dramatically as sales people maneuver a disjointed work flow.  No indication of lead management, copying, cutting, pasting, just trying to get quotes out.  More than 40% of companies take 3 days or longer to generate a quote!  Guess who’s attacking your prospects during this time?
  6. Lost Productivity: Repeated manual data entry.  The number one complaint of selling teams are manual processes that waste time.  Multiply admitted hours by three.  Typically, 3X is the magic number the same piece of information is re-entered by separate resources into company “systems”.  Add human error and multiply again by three!
  7. Missing front end: creating estimates and proposals is a must. A lack of active prospecting for a full sales funnel is a recipe for drought.  Visibility into lead tracking and management is vital to sales growth and profitability. No excuses!
  8. No scalability:  Manual processes and decentralized data kill business growth.  You need a sales team enabled by automation.  The work within the parameters of a system that enables them and lets you sleep at night.

ROI is a “no-brainer”.  The significant decrease in redundant resource hours alone makes an automated sales process an easy investment. 

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WeSuite, sales management software from “contact to contract”, enables growth and success at all levels of the organization.  Accountability, visibility and real-time intelligence are game changers for increased selling power and profitable growth.  Champion sales leadership with an efficient work flow, centralized real-time data and professionally and consistent branded output.  All of which translates to higher sales earnings, a connected process for the organization, and a solid foundation for growth.

Click here to learn more.

www.wesuite.com
[email protected]
914-920-3400

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