Often times, we’ll see that sales pipelines might be tracked manually or, perhaps even better, tracked through Excel. But, there can be a step up that could be even better.

That can be doing it in Excel, but do it in database format. That offers a couple advantages:

1. You can produce different pivot table reports from that particular database.

2. The data would be in a format that you could do dashboard reporting with interactive, what-if charts in Crystal Xcelsius.

Of course, if you’ve got a much larger operation, you might already be doing some decent tracking through a CRM tool to track your customer relationship management activity. Even there, there might be some benefits to taking that data and exporting it over into Excel.

Consider not just tracking the sales dollars and, perhaps, number of leads, you could also track the different stages of pipeline activity. Now, think of the keep steps in your sales process. You could put in projected dates, actual dates. This calculates the project time between steps and the actual time between steps. You’d get some great insights in terms of how you’re performing against expectation in your pipeline.

You could also update this fairly easily, by updating changes in dates for existing accounts in the pipeline and for accounts that are projected off in the future, but now are becoming known accounts that are active in the pipeline.

So, to get a better handle on your sales pipe line and dollars involved in order to have to have some better forecasting, consider Excel being more than just a spreadsheet Use it as a database input tool, which can drive some more sophisticated reporting and help you better gage how the pipeline is really doing.