What's Wrong with Spreadsheet-based Quoting

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What's Wrong with Spreadsheet-based Quoting
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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
companys 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.
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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.
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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.