Sales teams will often prefer using a flexible and easily maintainable platform to create sales quotes, rather than building their own 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. The platform must be agile and modifiable, so that new products can be added swiftly, without requiring weeks or months of development work. These facets of sales operations make pricing spreadsheets an excellent candidate since they can host complex calculations 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.
Zendesk is a cloud-based, intuitive-yet-powerful sales CRM platform. Zendesk offers customizable tools to build customer service portals, knowledge bases, and online communities. It makes accessing information easy for the entire team, anytime and anywhere – that’s why it is so popular.
For businesses using pricing spreadsheets for quoting and Zendesk as a CRM, SpreadsheetWeb offers an exceptional solution for connecting those spreadsheets to Zendesk, eliminating any friction between quote creation and typical CRM activities.
Let’s see how it’s done:
We assume that you’ve already converted your pricing spreadsheet into a web application. First, go to Zendesk’s Deals module and add matching custom fields, corresponding to the inputs and outputs from the pricing spreadsheet. Using matching names will be handy when we are mapping the fields between the Zendesk CRM and the SpreadsheetWeb application.
Next, install the SpreadsheetWeb extension from ‘’Settings’’ ''Apps'' ''Integrations''.
Go back to the Deals module and select SpreadsheetWeb. Click ‘’Add new 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 Zendesk custom fields 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 Zendesk 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 Zendesk 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 the ability 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, quoting applications converted from pricing spreadsheets with SpreadsheetWeb can be embedded seamlessly into Zendesk CRM and used in your company’s workflow to calculate and generate quoting proposals.
