Excel Shoud be the Analysis and Display Engine for your Company
According to Microsoft. 99% of you use it as a big calculator. Workbooks with thousands of cells that do not communicate with each other and it take days to update. We can fix that ptoblem.
About Excel Consultants
I started using spreadsheets to solve sales and marketing problems in 1986, using Lotus 1-2-3 as marketing manager at Kane May. I quickly mastered the higher functions and ended up driving our new product development program through graphical interfaces for the benefit of management. I used our sales statistics show how effective our sales team of 16 really were, in the field. We would now recognise this as a basic dashboard to convey to senior management the meaning behind the figures they already had but could not analyse.
My motivation to set up a company to offer these services 25 years on, was that during a refresher Advanced Accreditation Course, Microsoft told me that 99% of users in commerce in the UK simply got it wrong. I thought, well, for a few, I might be able to fix that!
405
Customers helped
1,800
Spreadsheets created
1,000
Cups of coffee consumed
Later, using Microsoft Excel as a Sales Director at Wayne Kerr Electronics, I used Pivot Tables to unlock the sales history and separate it region by region to rationalise the territories and create a more level playing field for our sales team. I also used advanced techniques to develop accurate forecasts from the same team to feed into production to minimise surprises and reduce lead times.
Later still, I took this forecasting into our CRM business which applied correctly, removed the guesswork or optimism in a salesperson driven forecast. This led to work with our partners SymVolli who produced the most comprehensive ERP and Sales forecasting tool available for the price of a CRM system.
When I founded and then expanded a CRM business, it became apparent that all sales and marketing data capture should be within the CRM system and the accounts system, not in a spreadsheet. Yet many clients still use spreadsheets to capture and then report on sales figures. The reason for that is that devising a report within the CRM system is an expensive one-off task. And changing the report to meet changing customer needs is also complex and costly, so they revert to capturing data in a spreadsheet and doing the reports ad-hoc.
The solution was simple. Use your CRM (Salesforce, Maximizer, Act) to capture sales and marketing related data, like sales-call reports or forecast figures, use your accounts system to provide up to the minute sales figures and then use Excel to analyse and interpret those figures. Done correctly, this is pretty bombproof if your Excel workbooks are appropriately structured!
The reason for founding this company was that when we were updating our Microsoft Excel Expert accreditations, we kept on coming across this, “99% of Excel implementations in Medium-Sized Companies are incorrect.”
And “99% didn’t even use something as basic as tables”. Unfortunately, such fundamental failures in workbook structure mean that 99% of you reading this will have slow, unresponsive, hard to update spreadsheets, which deliver less than helpful information and hinder improvement across your companies. They take longer to create, longer to edit and rarely produce a report from your existing data promptly. They cost you a bomb, take up management time to update and then fail to deliver the insights you want to see.
So, we set out to offer services that could rectify this, building on 32 years of advanced use of spreadsheets. And because we also come with 30 years of senior sale and marketing experience and 15 years of CRM experience, we can look at how your use of spreadsheets relate to managing and improving a sales and marketing operation. For example, we can add to sales turnover. If you want to go the extra mile, we can add to profitability without reducing headcount.
It has been said, “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, to which we add, “If you cannot analyse it and cannot visualise it, you cannot manage it!!