When it comes to creating sales quotes, sales teams will often prefer to create their models in a flexible and easily maintainable platform, rather than building their systems using traditional coding. This is due to the nature of sales: it can require complicated calculations and logical operations but cannot be so rigid as to disallow the salespeople from closing the deal. It must be agile and modifiable, so that new products can be added swiftly, without requiring weeks or months of change requests. These facets of sales operations make spreadsheets an excellent candidate since they can host complex logical systems while still being sufficiently mutable to accommodate quick modifications and enhancements.
SpreadsheetWeb offers these businesses the ability to turn their pricing spreadsheets into full-blown web applications, including total support for the spreadsheet’s calculations and a variety of extensible features, such as customizable user interface design, database integration, and forms generation. Unlike using a client application (e.g., distributing the file-based spreadsheets), these apps can be provided to end users while concealing the entire calculation algorithm.
Zoho is a cloud platform that is user-friendly and budget-friendly, ideal for small and medium-sized businesses. Zoho CRM provides organizations with a complete platform for Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Customer Service, and Inventory Management.
It now also includes support for embedding SpreadsheetWeb applications, meaning that you can build your complex pricing applications with all of the features and functionality provided by SpreadsheetWeb, and then simply use them within your Zoho Deals module.
Let’s see how it’s done:
First, in Zoho CRM, go to the apps marketplace and install the SpreadsheetWeb extension.
Next, go to the Deals module and add matching custom fields, corresponding to the the inputs and outputs from the SpreadsheetWeb pricing sheet. Using matching names will be handy when we are mapping the fields between the Zoho CRM and SpreadsheetWeb application.
Now, let’s go back and add the application. The system will ask for the application link and its unique identifier, which can be found in your SpreadsheetWeb account.
If there are matching names between the Zoho and SpreadsheetWeb binding options, then the "Auto Populate" feature can be used to automatically detect and bind the fields between the two platforms. If you used different names between the systems, you may also add these bindings manually during this step.
Now that the application has been added successfully, you can run it. Click on the "Run" button and all of the inputs from the deal will be automatically populated into the SpreadsheetWeb application. Additionally, all calculations will be executed. Clicking on the save button will also write the data back to the corresponding Zoho CRM deal.
If you run the application for a particular deal again, the previously stored inputs can be changed. Also, if you make modifications within the Zoho CRM deal and run the application again, those changes will be saved, and the up-to-date calculations can be executed. Hitting the save button will write those changes back into the deal details again
SpreadsheetWeb also offers to create fully customizable PDF documents. Documents can include inputs and calculation results with advanced features like formatting, headers/footers, page numbering, conditional page generation. This professional proposal document can be printed, emailed, or shared with your customers.
In conclusion, with a SpreadsheetWeb integration, pricing spreadsheets created in Excel can be converted into web applications. Those applications can be embedded into Zoho CRM and used in your company’s workflow to calculate and generate quoting proposals.
