What Excel does well
Excel is available in almost every office, people know how to use it, and you can set up a new list in a few minutes. You can add columns as you like, formulas add up revenue, and filters and pivot tables help with analysis.
For one person looking after a manageable number of customers, a well-kept Excel list is therefore often a sensible solution. There are usually no extra licence costs.
Where Excel hits its limits
Problems start as soon as several people work with the same list. If the file is sent by email or copied locally, several versions appear and nobody knows which one is current. If it is stored on a network drive, it is often locked because someone else has it open.
Excel also does not keep a contact history for each customer. Notes end up in a single cell, and older entries get overwritten. Mistakes happen easily: a wrongly sorted column mixes up addresses, and nobody notices a deleted row.
Data protection is hard to control in Excel. Anyone with the file sees all the data, and there are no access rights for individual customers or fields. Under the revised Federal Act on Data Protection (revFADP), which has applied since 1 September 2023, you should know who has access to which personal data.
What a CRM does better
A CRM is a shared database in which everyone works at the same time. Every change is immediately visible to everyone, and there is only one current version. For each customer, you see conversations, emails, quotes and orders in chronological order.
Tasks and reminders make sure quotes are followed up. Mandatory fields and drop-down lists prevent inconsistent entries. Access rights determine who may see and change which data, and the system logs every change so that you can trace it.
Signs that it is time to switch
Switching makes sense if one of these signs comes up regularly: several versions of the customer list are circulating. Employees ask each other who last spoke to a customer. Quotes are left without a follow-up. Customer data is entered twice, for the quote and for the invoice. When someone leaves, their knowledge about customers is lost.
Growth is another reason. If you are hiring new staff in sales or customer service, it is easier to switch before they start than afterwards.
How to move your data into the CRM
First, clean up your existing lists. Merge duplicate entries, remove outdated contacts and standardise spellings, for example for phone numbers, countries and salutations.
Then define the fields: which information do you really need, which fields are mandatory, and which options should the drop-down lists offer? Map each Excel column to a field in the CRM and test the import with a small sample before you transfer all the data.
Finally, train the team and set a cut-off date after which everyone works only in the CRM. Archive the old Excel list and stop updating it, otherwise you end up with two data sources again.
Frequently asked questions
Can I import my Excel list directly into a CRM?
Most CRM systems can import data from Excel or CSV files. Before you do, clean up the list and map the columns to the fields in the CRM. A trial import with a few records shows whether special characters such as umlauts, phone numbers and addresses come through correctly.
Isn't a CRM too complicated for a small team?
A well-configured CRM is often simpler to use day to day than a large Excel file with many sheets. The key is to set up only the fields and features your team really needs. You can add more features later.
What happens to Excel after the switch?
Excel remains useful for analysis and calculations. The customer data itself, however, is maintained only in the CRM. Most CRM systems offer an export that you can work with in Excel.