One of the most useful software a business can use is Excel. It is not dedicated to contact management, nor is it specifically designed to be an accounting tool or calendaring program. In reality, Excel can be all of those things, as well as anything else you wish.
Flexibility is Excel’s greatest strength. Spreadsheets are essentially simple programming tools that enable you to store and arrange data and analyze it in a variety of ways.
Once you are familiar with the basics, you will be able to create some impressive and useful spreadsheets for managing many business-related activities. Since you will likely already own the software, you will save considerable money and have fewer compatibility problems.
Let’s see how to turn Excel into a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool with minimum effort and maximum results.
Using Excel: The Basics
Excel starts with a table that users can customize as they see fit before using the dynamic elements. A simple setup is handy because it allows you to display all of your contacts’ names in the same column and show their contact information, notes, and histories in separate columns.
Sales teams might include details like personal information or comments pertaining to future conversations in notes. Meanwhile, for marketing teams, information might be included regarding the number of purchases a customer has made and relevant data regarding customers’ interests and preferences.
Organizing Contacts With Filters
Do you still keep track of clients manually? There’s a way to do it through one of the most useful features of Excel: filters. On Excel’s newest version, you can sort and filter your entries by clicking the “Home” tab and selecting the “Sort and Filter.” button.
You should ensure that you have highlighted the top row for the columns you would like to change, then select “Filter.”
Conditional Formatting
Conditional formatting is yet another great Excel feature. You can access this function from the “Home” tab, where you can customize colors and other formatting settings for particular cells.
For example, you may want to create a spreadsheet that highlights those contacts you have not contacted in a while if you update your contact list every time you speak with a customer.
This way, you’ll be able to see the contacts who haven’t been contacted lately, and you’ll know which may need a follow-up.
Formulas
It is also possible to achieve the above result with formulas. Formulas let people calculate user-defined queries automatically.
For example, you can use these formulas to find the difference between two dates, calculate measurements, compare the contents of cells, and lookup value ranges.
In each formula, an equal sign is preceded by a space, followed by the specifics of the formula.
VLOOKUP
You can look up information on other worksheets using VLOOKUP, one of Excel’s most efficient features. You can use this function to keep a list of data about your contacts that can be used to easily get additional valuable information about them.
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