How to use a spreadsheet as a CRM tool?

My Singapore days. Those were the golden days. It was tough, but I learned the ropes quickly, enjoyed it, grew the business and earned a good name from the only client I was handling then.

I learnt quite a few things in such a short time frame.

I was up to speed in no time. I got to understand the local culture, work ethics, client expectations, and the importance of time.

I was [and am] not a party animal. Nevertheless, I enjoyed those office parties with the company of my colleagues. Did I say I love good food? Who doesn’t, right?

Coming back to work, the company I worked with had a problem. We were into IT Professional Services & Consulting.

We proposed suitable candidates to our clients for their IT Projects. While we recruited from local to some extent, we mostly hired from India. It’s not tough to understand why we did that.

Like most other companies we too had a problem. Call it a problem of plenty. Somewhere, I read recently that more is less. How true!

When you have 10 things to do, you can have a To-Do list and attack it one by one in the order of priority. What if you had 100 things to do? You may have to create blocks of time and attack a set of tasks during each block. Easier said than done.

In recruitment, when you propose candidates to clients, tracking them becomes difficult. Until you hear from one client, you cannot propose the same candidate for another opening. If you don’t send this candidate to the new client, somebody else will.

So, we had a tough time tracking the candidates. I devised a strategy for my client. Whenever I raised a requirement [job opening], I had a nomenclature defined in the title of the requirement itself. The title had the client’s name, date raised, skills, yrs of exp, etc. I don’t exactly remember what else I had in the name. But I added quite a few additional fields in the document we normally filled up when we raised a request to the recruitment team. Later, the head of recruitment advised the other sales reps to follow the same nomenclature & format.

Alongside, I also had a spreadsheet in which I had multiple sheets and moved candidates between sheets depending on which stage of the process they were in. I even colour coded the spreadsheet.

At a glance, I could say how many candidates were in the final stage at any given time. Report generation was very easy for me. My boss saw it & appreciated me.

It was a CRM of sorts, I mean Candidate Relationship Management. It cannot match a good CRM. Even today, you can run a basic CRM using Google Sheets.

But I am not undermining the benefits of a commercial CRM either. [I should know that.]

But if the needs are basic, then one can use Google Sheets.

Ultimately, what matters is:

1. Are you able to serve your customers well?
2. Are you responding to the market faster than your competition?
3. Are you achieving your numbers?
4. Are your individual goals in line with your organization’s goals?
5. Are you keeping your current customers happy?
6. Are the products/services that you sell, in tune with the market needs?

Happy Selling!

#b2bsales #crm #businessgoals #customersatisfaction #marketshare #recruitment #spreadsheetasacrm #kkrocks