A great way to jack up the sales of your company is by making your communications more efficient with your current and potential customers. You can achieve this goal by creating a CRM Excel template. With this, you can integrate sales, revenue tracking, and emails in an all-in-one document. You can also use a customer relationship management Excel template as a free and simple way to keep track of business leads.

CRM Excel Templates

Parts of a CRM Excel template

One of the most important features of a CRM Excel template is to keep track of communications with your customers. This involves following up on contracts, updating the status of leads, tracking sales, and scheduling future communications with new customers so you can convert them into regular clients.

A Google sheets CRM template can be a starting point for businesses which need a CRM solution. You can easily customize the Google sheets CRM because it’s simply a formatted table that has filtering, sorting, and display functions. CRM Excel templates usually incorporate the following parts:

  • Demographics
    Any company contacts should have the company, name, position or job title, email address, phone number, and so on. You can save any information which isn’t necessary for another worksheet.
  • Estimated sales
    This can either be the average yearly or monthly sales figure for any active customers. Based on these figures, the company can easily determine the importance of keeping such a customer. Potential customers can also have their estimated potential yearly or monthly sales.
  • Last contact
    Provide a field for these dates in your customer relationship management Excel template. This shows when you had the last contact and you can customize this portion to describe how long ago you had this contact. Use the Settings function of the spreadsheet to customize the required number of days to make the cell colored according to your needs.
  • Next contact
    This refers to follow up communications. Set aside a column to input the date of the next planned contact and also make use of the Next Action column where you input a code to describe your action for follow-up.
  • Notes
    There are several options to choose from on how to record communications with your clients or leads. You can add a cell for comments. Or you can create a Notes column with text wrapping. This isn’t recommended for lengthy notes as this makes the table appear messy. You can even use a separate worksheet to input notes for every individual communication.
  • Sales log
    Should you decide to create a sales report, you have to find a way to document individual sales. The easiest way to do this is with a different worksheet. You can later add a Pivot Table so you can summarize data or you can make your own Excel dashboard where you display relevant summary data.
    If you decide to use a separate sheet to record each sale you’ve made, then you may also want to create a summary of the sales in the Google sheets CRM.
  • Contact log
    You can use a different worksheet where you record the details regarding each contact you have. You can also use the same formula as the one in the Last Contact column of the CRM Excel template so you can automatically pinpoint the last contact date for a particular person.
  • Contact details
    To automatically get the mobile number and other contact details about any person, you can use a specific formula which you can find in the Google sheets CRM template.

Customer Relationship Management Templates

Tips for using your CRM Excel template

When it comes to creating a CRM Excel template or a Google sheets CRM, you may use Microsoft Excel. Here are some tips so you can get the most out of this application even if you’re a beginner:

  • Make sure that there aren’t any columns with duplicate names
    You might get an error message that reads “Failed to Generate Excel” when you test the capabilities of the Excel template functionality for the first time. This error occurs because your view has two columns using the same name. In such a case, you have to make some small modifications to successfully consolidate the listed columns in the file.
    An easy way to prevent this error is to be very intentional in terms of the fields you add to the template. Check the box to select “all fields” for the opportunity entity. You may discover some duplicates out of the box as against custom fields which have the same name.
    You need to put in some extra time and effort to specifically validate which fields you have added to the new file and to understand the reason why you’re including each field.
  • Set PivotTables to refresh the data automatically
    You need to set PivotTables for automatic refresh when you enter new information in the CRM template. You have to right click on the PivotTables then click refresh when the template opens. You can completely avoid this inconvenience with a very simple step when you set up the template in Excel.
    Just uncheck the save data option. This makes sure that the exported data isn’t stored with the CRM template you’re creating.
  • Use several sheets in your Excel workbook
    Making use of additional sheets in your Excel workbook allows you more control in terms of formatting. This can also help keep your template looking nice and tidy. Using several sheets also makes it easier for you to add PivotTables since the number of columns and rows vary in a lot of cases.
    It’s very easy to add new sheets. At the bottom part of your Excel window, you’ll see the list of tabs. To add a new tab, click on the plus arrow. Don’t forget to give unique names to each of the new tabs you create to avoid any issues.
  • Select the default sheet you want the file to open to
    If you’re working with several sheets, you would always want to start with one of those sheets each time you open the file. To ensure that this sheet always comes up when you open your customer relationship management template Excel file, make sure that it’s the sheet that’s visible when you click the save button.
  • When using Excel Dashboards, hide the “data” worksheet
    There are times when you want to see all of the details of the data behind the graphs, charts, and analyses you’ve made. But most of the time, all you want to see is the summary. To do this, hide the sheet which contains the CRM data. Don’t worry, this won’t cause any issues when you use the template.

Use Google Sheets to create your CRM Excel template

Spreadsheets are very easy and convenient to use because, with them, you can calculate, modify, and input any data you want then store the information digitally to access the next time you need them. While you only had the option to use Excel in the past, we now have the choice to use Google Sheets.

When you create a Google sheets CRM template, you can use Google Sheets to format and analyze your data using standard spreadsheet functions and tools. You can also use this to collect data from the internet and automatically run complex workflows. Here are some tips to guide you for making a CRM Excel template on Google Sheets:

  • Create a form for your spreadsheet
    One of the best features of Google Sheets is that it can import data automatically from other sites. It also has a form tool which you can use to collect the data you need and save it on your spreadsheet directly.
    Then embed the form directly on your website with a link or a button or share the link through social media. When the visitors of your website click on the link, they get redirected to the form where they can fill it out. After that, the data they input gets saved automatically to your spreadsheet.
  • Create your contact management system or CRM
    Managing your contact and customer data using a Google sheets CRM template is a modern take on the time-tested business practice. Making use of Google Sheets makes it easier to organize and move data around as needed. Also, you can create a detailed spreadsheet using a simpler format.
  • Use Web Scraping to qualify contacts
    Adding this feature which automatically copies data from other sites to your sheets is a very simple process. With Web Scraping, you can get almost any type of data you need from a wide range of URLs with the use of the IMPORT function.
    If you encounter any errors, try making changes to the URLs in the sheet which contains your customer data or enter a couple of form submissions manually using valid links.
  • Create an Outreach System through email and social media
    It’s quite common to make social media profiles and emails part of your CRM. To do this, include these fields in your form so that anyone who fills in your form inputs these details which, in turn, you can use to reach out to them.
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Tagged:BusinessCRMCustomer Relationship Management
TemplateLab December 18th, 2022