Fact: The power of Excel is also sometimes its downfall.
Yes, it’s robust, highly extensible, and incredibly adaptable. As you’ll soon see through this article, it has a seemingly endless number of uses. It’s a workhorse.
But that formula-packed environment comes with a caveat: complexity. Complexity is the Achilles’ heel of Excel and it’s this same complexity that powers up its utility.
So: how do you simplify the bevy of numbers, formulas, scripts, macros, and so much more available to you in Excel in a way that’s actually usable for your business?
Start with an Excel sales tracking template. You don’t need to build Excel files from scratch — if you can harness the power of templates, you can access a boilerplate-level of functionality before adding to the sheet and customizing it for your own use.
Let’s take a look at just four ways in which an Excel sales tracking template can fire up diverse aspects of your business.
Why Use Excel Sales Tracking Templates?
If you’re wondering, “why use Excel tracking templates?” the proof really is in the pudding here. Every Excel file begins with a simple spreadsheet GUI but the possibilities from there are endless.
You can create a static sheet that simply acts as a spot to capture data entry. Or, you can create a dynamic sheet that “talks” to or pulls data from other, related sheets based on simple but powerful scripts you write. There’s almost no use case where a basic Excel spreadsheet won’t get you started off on the right foot.
And if you thought Excel was limited to the world of accountants and analysts, think again. As Jake Sheridan, creator of “Sheets for Marketers” (the Google version of Excel) says, “[I use Sheets for] project management, reporting, speeding up keyword research, and automating…”
Need a Gantt chart? Start with Excel. Creating a critical path method visualization? Excel allows you to go from spreadsheet to calculation, using the MAX function to generate this data automatically.
4 Excel Spreadsheet Tracking Templates To Boost Revenue
#1: Daily & Weekly Sales Activity Tracking
At the end of the day, what you don’t track doesn’t matter. On the other hand, what you do track, grows.
So tracking your daily and even weekly sales numbers can help you gain insight into where you’re at and use it as a way to create new benchmarks for performance moving forward.
#2: Biz Dev (Leads & Prospects)
Whether you’re in startup mode or you’re experiencing a season of grow-and-scale, leads and prospects are the lifeblood of your business. Biz dev is a crucial part of your operations and, often, it’s hard to track those conversations and details in a quantifiable and visible way.
This simple but powerful Excel tracking template puts the most essential information about sales leads and prospects right upfront and then adds a few more sections that you can use: “Chance of Sale,” “Forecast Close,” and “Estimated Value.” These columns are perfect for hooking into other tracking spreadsheets or even upload into software suites built for deal tracking and sales teams.
#3: Activity-Based Cost Tracking
Accountants and financial advisors will be familiar with this type of Excel tracking template. If you’re looking to create a financial tracking system in Excel, you can use this specific type of cost tracker to give you a snapshot of direct, indirect, general, and administrative costs.
#4: Marketing Reports In Excel
Sales, biz dev, and financial outlook. Up next is another engine of growth: marketing.
The good news is that there’s a wealth of metrics and KPIs you can define, collect, and track. The problem arises, though, when you’ve got all these numbers and reports floating around without any cohesive way to view or visualize them.
That’s where an Excel template for marketing comes in. You can track both metrics and spending across multiple channels and initiatives — which makes it even easier to view ROI and cut out or revisit strategies that are simply not working.
Excel sales tracking templates give your business a way to work with, analyze, and harness data for key decisions down the road. The best part? You can always convert this data and feed it into other tools when you’re ready to make use of more powerful tracking features in done-for-you software.
