Why RevOps Teams Are Still Stuck in Spreadsheets—And How to Finally Break Free

Here’s how to finally break free from the spreadsheets that bind us.

Being wrong and being late are the two worst fears in RevOps. And when data isn’t accessible or modifiable, these fears actually become reality. The adoption of the modern data stack brings good news, these fears can be solved! So why aren’t more companies making the shift? Here’s how to finally break free from the spreadsheets that bind us.

Every year (maybe even more frequently!) your sales leadership comes to you, the RevOps team, for a shiny, new territory carve. Your current toolkit and workflow most likely looks something like this:

• 200,000-record CSV exported from Salesforce, “refreshed” each morning
• 12 tab G- Sheet from PeopleOps, with the CRO’s signature static conditional formatting
• Laptop running hot enough to boil water, bringing new life to the term “heat map”
• Both screens dominated by CSV’s, bar charts, and gnarly nested IF’s

And so, you go on-and-on, tweaking one zip code or one geographical boundary, refreshing the data in the tool, and looking to see if the results of your work make sense. Days, if not weeks go by, and finally you arrive at your final determination. You share your findings and plans in a slide deck, and upon final approval, you finally send your finished_territory_model_final_final_v2_do_not_touch.csv to your Salesforce team for upload.‍

Sound familiar?

Why Teams Are Forced Into Spreadsheets

There’s the saying ,”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” For RevOps it goes more like, “It’s broken, but I can fix it if I Excel hard enough.”

In short, RevOps teams stick with spreadsheets for three key reasons:

1. Our business partners love to drill down. If a model doesn’t have a line-by-line to gut check, it may as well be witchcraft.
2. Legacy BI tools are not flexible enough to handle the data acrobatics of RevOps. We need to be modular, adaptive, predictive, and performant. When your BI tool doesn’t allow at-your-fingertips scenario modeling and user input, the only other option is the world’s beefiest spreadsheets.
3. Our data is disparate. When vital business info is siloed off between a data warehouse, CRM reports, custom SQL views, and long-lost Google sheets, to make it all talk to each other RevOps has to bring it all down to the lowest common denominator: the spreadsheet.

The thorn in RevOps’s side is that the reasons we fall back to spreadsheets are the same reasons we miss a forecast, misplan headcount, or butcher a territory.
We spend both our (and our sellers’_ time splitting off drill-able csv’s. We build spreadsheet models that require an accountant, a consultant, and a psychic to parse, input assumptions, and reconfigure scenarios. We make vital business decisions with sprawling and stagnant data, with every refresh across 12 systems of record eating into our schedule. 

If RevOps can move past relying on a reliable workaround in spreadsheets, we could start winning a few forecasts.

A Flexible, Accessible Data Stack

Data becomes modifiable: You need to be able to add context on the fly. You also need to be able to change your forecast as new information comes in, as opposed to relying on this baked forecast you started on 8 weeks ago. You need to spend the first three hours of your day doing Real Work, not wrangling refreshes to modify a scenario assumption by 11 basis points. With Sigma’s Input Tables, the old, frustrating workflow vanishes overnight. 

Building a workbook to leverage Salesforce data, product usage data, call data, and beyond, fundamentally changes the way sales teams can plan, how leaders can better understand gaps in quarterly calls, and Chief Revenue Officers can finally see their full book of business in a way that wasn’t possible before. Take this one step further, and you can leverage Hightouch to send forecasts back to Salesforce for a fully powered data application.

Data becomes accessible: With Sigma and Input Tables, your data warehouse and Sales Leadership can be in lock-step; planning that once took days-to-weeks now takes seconds-to-done. Data is always fresh, inputs to newly-proposed territories give feedback instantaneously, and any team member can easily work with you on this with Live Edit. Best of all, your CRO can drill-down from Sigma to spreadsheet with only a right-click. 

Sales and revenue planning are part of the largest teams at most companies. Yet the tools we’re giving these teams simply aren’t very good. It’s almost hard to believe this number of businesses can even function this way. RevOps teams are builders, and there’s a better way to predict pipeline, manage territories, and plan a new fiscal year. When 'good enough' no longer cuts it, it's time to move beyond Excel. Sticking with spreadsheets? Sure! I'll also take a pager and a cassette player to go, please.