Build What We Need, Not What We Asked For

Google Sheets Gone Bad

A new client hired your firm to improve its sales operations. The company’s sales system struggles to keep pace with its rapid growth. By the time the managers see sales reports, the information is outdated. Management wants accurate, real-time information from sales.

You meet with the client’s CEO and VP of sales to learn about their sales information challenges and discuss ideas for improvement. The VP explains how sales reps use Google Sheets to track leads, accounts and opportunities. Each rep has at least one worksheet. They share the worksheets with their direct managers and the sales VP.

To provide reporting for senior management, a sales admin combines the reps’ data into a master worksheet. This time-consuming process is error-prone. Each sales rep has set up worksheets their own way. Some have separate worksheets for leads, prospects and customers. Some separate their lists into tabs. Others have one long sheet for everything. None have standard column naming or layouts. Even the reps with separate worksheets have each one in a different format.

The sales admin painstakingly copies the data from the rep’s sheets, transforms it into a standard format and pastes it into the master worksheet. Data often gets lost in the transformation process. Sales managers have to double check their reps’ worksheets to ensure the master is correct.  If it isn’t, they track down the admin and request an update of the master. The admin often has a backlog of these requests.

The CEO and sales VP feel exasperated even describing their sales process. They want the sales admin to spend more time on operations and less time cleaning and transforming data. The CEO wants to eliminate sales managers checking each rep's shared sheet for changes. The sales VP asks about importing data to their master worksheet from the rep worksheets in real time. They want to lock the reps’ sheets while that happens. The CEO is also curious if there's a way to validate the data as the reps enter it into their sheets.

Defy Solution Gravity to Escape the Chaos

After taking all of this in, you acknowledge that they are on the right track, having their sales data accessible from anywhere. Picking up on the CEO’s wish to validate data as the reps enter it, you propose Sales Cloud from Salesforce. 

The Sales VP cringes at the thought of adopting a new platform. He asks if there’s a way to update their master worksheet with changes a rep makes to his or her worksheet. You indicate that your firm could develop an integrated Google sheets solution, but they still need to standardize and validate the incoming data. This intrigues the CEO. Rolling up the reps’ sheets seems like a quick fix for the short term. Perhaps a larger investment in a complete solution will pay off in the long run. They could defy the solution gravity of Google sheets to fulfill a broader range of needs.

You show them how Sales Cloud works. They like having standard lead and opportunity status that reps would pick from lists. When you show a list view of opportunities, they see the similarities to the worksheets the reps have used. The reps no longer have to worry about worksheet formats and can focus on entering clean data into a single place, where management can view it through a report or a dashboard. The CEO gets excited when she sees the dashboard.  

You mention they can also view their data in Sales Cloud data from Google Sheets. This makes the sales VP enthusiastic. They ask for their account manager at your firm. They want a quote for Sales Cloud as soon as possible. You work out the licensing with them and pass it to the account manager. She gives them a quote on their way out, leaving them amazed. The CEO asks for a proposal, looking forward to taking a huge leap forward in their sales operations.

Listen for what the client really needs behind a requested solution.

This is the seventh in a series of posts about unknowns in the discovery process.