Sales manager: Excel expert or manager?

Have you ever stopped to think how much time you spend over the day trying to gather the information you need to make a decision? It would likely scare you if you began tracking it and thought about how ineffective this time is.

If a Sales Manager spends 1 hour over the course of a day accumulating and manipulating data in Excel in order to figure out what is going on with their team, products, region, etc. they are losing over 250 hours a yearfighting to get actionable information. This means they are not doing all of the things that they need to be doing as a Sales Manager during those hours.

What happens if you are not an Excel expert? Or if you simply don’t have the time to spend gathering and manipulating the data in Excel? You rely on gut instinct. This may work some of the time but it is a dangerous gamble for the business, especially when sales are the future of your business. Relying on gut feelings could be placing your business at risk.

Managers should be managing, not spending their precious time working Excel to bring information together so they can make a decision. These are time wasters that are distractions which lower the organizations performance.

I suspect that you as a Sales Manager don’t enjoy your time spent searching for data and pouring through it trying to make sense of it. You would rather arrive at an understanding quickly on what is performing and what is not. Taking this insight and creating plans and strategies to improve sales and taking proactive measures to ensure that you meet your targets. You would like to know what sales representative needs your extra assistance and motivating them to reach their full potential.

The good news is that all of this time trying to get actionable information and insights are not necessary. There are easy to use, self-serve tools that allow the Sales Managers to actually manage with accurate and current information. It can bring data together from different sources and allow for the associations between the information to lead to better, enlightened decisions.

What are you going to do with the extra 250 hours a year you will free up?

Take a few of those minutes now to learn how you can get control and recover those lost hours: