3 hidden costs of quoting with Excel
While Excel does many things well, the sad fact is that it simply wasn’t designed with quoting and proposing in mind. It doesn’t give you the tools to create interactive templates, develop a guided selling process for your sales team, or provide real-time insights into customer interactions with your proposals.
All the time you spend building workarounds could be costing you a pretty penny.
To avoid these costly headaches of quoting with Excel, familiarize yourself with solutions that work:
1. You take too long!
Quoting in Excel can be a nightmare—one misplaced symbol in a formula, and everything errors out. The more you fiddle with formulas, the farther away your chances of winning go. Studies show that the first-responding rep has a much higher chance of closing than those that follow.
Solution: Kick Excel to the curb, at least for quoting purposes. You need a powerful engine that automates many of the manual tasks around the quoting process.
2. You’re repeating yourself. You’re repeating yourself
Excel doesn’t feed into your CRM, which means you have to pay someone to copy and paste info into every relevant location. What a pain!
Solution: Choose a quote and proposal automation solution that is tied directly with your CRM. Not every solution will. As part of the ConnectWise suite, ConnectWise Sell® is available right inside ConnectWise PSA™ (formerly Manage) so your sales team stays working within the opportunity.
3. Spreadsheet maintenance is pricey
Even if an existing employee takes this on as a side project, you’re still taking that resource away from revenue-building activities, just to spruce up your spreadsheet. Chances are, you’d get a much better ROI by investing his or her time elsewhere.
Solutions: Transfer that data into a quote and proposal automation solution. Many will automatically upload product/pricing info, and you’ll gain the ability to more easily manipulate the data. No more fussy formulas or manual data entry, just a clean, easy-to-use interface.
At ConnectWise, we pride ourselves on finding smarter ways to quote, propose, and close. In fact, we’ve got 8 years of R&D to prove it. We’re intimately familiar with the pains of trying to quote in Excel. It may seem like a great idea up front, but it just doesn’t hold water.