Moving Away from Spreadsheets: How to Know When It’s Time

The spreadsheet conundrum... Joe Smith, sales director for Great Start-Up Number 5 Billion and Thirty-One, puts on a blindfold and reaches out blindly for something, ANYTHING, to help him organize his team’s deals and commissions. He’s hopeful. He’s waiting. He knows he’ll come back with something. We’re talking metaphorically, of course. He’s not actually HOLDING a spreadsheet, he’s using Excel—because it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s free and easy to learn. And for a while, you know what? It works great. He can use VLOOKUPS and shortcuts to navigate. He can import booking results and activity metrics from Salesforce or his CRM. He can get so good at it that packaging complex algorithms becomes second nature.