What's Wrong with Spreadsheet-based Quoting

You could be hurting your business, if you are using spreadsheets for creating sales quotes. Spreadsheet-based quoting have several disadvantages that are likely to hinder your company’s growth prospects. Using spreadsheets is a manual process of quoting, which is considered to be one of the biggest time wasters for sales reps.

The following blog throws some light on various drawbacks of spreadsheet-based quoting.

Limited Scalability

Spreadsheets are a poor fit for a growing business. As you start offering more and more products and services, the complexity in your quoting will increase.  You will have to add rows and columns in your spreadsheets, link one spreadsheet to another as your business grows. The data in spreadsheet will become more distributed, thereby making it difficult to create and manage quotes with complex products. However the Best online sales quoting software is fully scalable and easy to use.

Vulnerable to Human Errors

Even the most experienced sales rep in handling spreadsheet can make mistakes in creating errors. Human errors like missed digits or calculation mistakes are too common and lead to inaccuracy in quotes. Although these errors are trivial, it can lead to lost opportunity of millions of dollars. On the other hand, with a sales quoting software, you substantially decrease your chances of creating errors with quoting. Accuracy is never a casualty when these software tools are used.

Slows Down your Quote Approval Process

Even if you have successfully put together a quote in a spreadsheet, you cannot send it immediately to the customer, since it will require approval from higher authority at the management level. The management will then verify manually whether the pricing and contract terms are followed while creating a quote for that specific customer. This is equally time consuming, which will cause further delay while the customer is waiting to receive quotes. On the other hand, quoting software come with a built-in approval workflow engine that enable you to automate the approval quoting process.

Longer Sales Cycle

When creating and approving quotes is itself a time-draining activity in Spreadsheets, how can you expect your sales cycle to shrink using spreadsheets. However, with a web quoting software, you create quotes in minutes and even the customer can approve the quote online. So in order to expedite your sales cycle, there is no alternative to using quoting tool.

Carries High Security Risks

Maintaining data confidentiality in spreadsheets is a concern since they are rife with security problems. When multiple users are accessing spreadsheets, there is high possibility that sensitive data may fall into wrong hands. Excel spreadsheet features like locking data with passwords are not secure enough to protect sensitive data. However, for secure creation and management of quotes, you can completely trust these quoting tools.

Also, most sales quoting software tools have their own mobile quoting app, which gives you a great opportunity to create and send quotes on mobile devices such as smartphones. So your end to end process of quote creation to sales order and finally purchase order can be done on your smartphones, making it even more convenient to manage the quoting process.