Excel was not invented for tracking business opportunities, and certainly not for team communication. And yet, it is probably the most used CRM. It can do a lot, but over time you will realize when contact management—and especially monitoring the company's operations—becomes complex and unsustainable within it. Don't let it reach the stage when it is too late!
How does it usually work in Excel? A deal list here, a contact table there, a shared file named "FINAL_v7.xlsx". It works precisely until the moment when the main part of the work starts happening between your people. And perhaps one of them stops functioning and updating the tables.
The first realization is that Excel only shows snapshots—the status right now, not the history, and certainly not the development of relationships. Sales, follow-ups, promises, and context live in emails, phone calls, or video calls and calendars, not in the rows and columns of a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet is therefore always more or less outdated, and no one really knows whether to trust its content. Let alone build any further analysis or procedures on this data. Business owners will generally claim that the problem is people's discipline. It isn't. The problem is that you should be using something else.
The second disadvantage is the lack of clarity regarding where a specific business case stands, where it got stuck, and why. Excel stores data. It does not preserve continuity.
The third problem comes afterwards: a lack of confidence in the data. When numbers require manual explanation ("this deal is actually hot, trust me"), decision-making slows down or reverts to intuition. At that moment, Excel is not helping, and the team even loses trust in it, causing cooperation to fall apart.
Confess, how many similar tables do you already have in the company's history? And when were they last updated?
Real customer history accumulates in Outlook threads, attachments, meeting invites, and replies. Excel stands outside this world. Every update is a duplication during which something always gets lost. The more active the customer, the less accurate the table is.
This is where Outlook CRM comes into play—not by being generally better than Excel, but by accepting where data and relationships are.
When customer records are directly connected to emails, meetings, and tasks, the system stops demanding that people report work after it has happened. The work itself is the record. That is the logic of solutions like eWay-CRM, which take Outlook as their home, not as an obstacle to be avoided.
The realization that business owners come sooner or later is simple but expensive: Excel fails not because it is bad, but because business relationships cannot be conceived in tabular form. Understand this before you have to complicatedly migrate extensive databases into CRM tools. The sooner your CRM works where communication takes place, the better for you!
