• Spreadsheets have limited reporting and analytics features, making it harder to efficiently find and share information while leaving important insights hidden in your data.

• They also produce large amounts of poor-quality data about relationships and deal flows while failing to protect the quality of a firm’s existing data.

• ‍At the same time, spreadsheets keep teams and data disconnected from each other because they aren’t designed around the investment banker’s workflow.

• ‍‍In addition to saving over 200 hours per year, per individual user, the average firm upgrading to MadeMarket can expand their deal flow with one additional transaction for every five managing directors.

Excel is an excellent program for a lot of things but it’s not a CRM. In contrast to simple spreadsheets, a CRM like MadeMarket connects all of your data and workflows on a platform that’s designed to help you optimize and expand your deal flow.

From draining your team’s time with tedious tasks, to leaving insights lost in your data, these are the most important reasons why you should stop using Excel and get a purpose-built CRM like MadeMarket instead.  

Spreadsheets have limited reporting and analytics features, making it harder to efficiently find and share information while leaving important insights hidden in your data.

Though Excel offers a variety of useful data analysis tools, these features are designed for a broad variety of use cases that don’t often address the kinds of questions bankers have about their deals, projects, and relationships. Similarly, these tools can make it harder to quickly organize and share information, like buyers lists and client reports.

As advanced analytics and artificial intelligence become more accessible, the limitations of spreadsheets will have a greater impact on the competitiveness of firms. From relationship insights that lead the way to a firm’s next opportunity, to KPI data that helps them optimize their deal flow, tech-enabled firms are using advanced CRMs to discover and close more deals, faster.

With a variety of intuitive dashboards and auto-generated reports built around an investment banker’s most important questions, MadeMarket makes it easy to discover and share insights about your relationships, operations, and deal flows.

Our relationship IQ feature, for example, analyzes the digital record of every interaction between users and their contacts to help teams discover the best path to a new target or client opportunity. Meanwhile, our easy-to-use report-building tools help teams produce buyers lists up to ten times faster and client reports up to fifteen times faster.

‍Spreadsheets produce large amounts of poor-quality data about relationships and deal flows while failing to protect the quality of a firm’s existing data.

Excel doesn’t have protections to ensure that data is accurately logged or to protect the integrity of other data that’s connected to it. Meanwhile, as the amount of data in a spreadsheet grows, its complexity and the likelihood of error grows too. Over time, this makes it harder to ensure that data about deals, contacts, and projects remains accurate and safe. At the same time, tracking the history of changes and errors in a spreadsheet can be hard, which makes all of these challenges all the more difficult to manage.

Ultimately, teams depend on accurate data to move quickly and make good decisions. Over time, bad data can lead to slower decisions, missteps, and missed opportunities, while increasing the amount of time it takes to complete data-oriented tasks. At the same time, having bad data stored on the wrong platform places hard limits on what firms can do with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, which are only as smart as the data they use.

With simple and automated tools that help your team log and capture more accurate and standardized data, MadeMarket helps you improve the quality of the information you rely on while protecting the integrity of your existing data. Meanwhile, our platform also makes it easy to track changes and updates.

In addition to having more reliable data, MadeMarket’s easy-to-use tools help teams capture a larger amount of data as well. As a result, features like these help your team save countless hours of manual data entry, around 200 hours per year for each individual. Altogether, with a larger amount of higher-quality data in a more secure platform, a purpose-built CRM like MadeMarket helps teams move faster with clarity and confidence.

‍Spreadsheets keep teams and data disconnected from each other because they aren’t designed around the investment banker’s workflow.

Instead of centralizing all of your relationship, project, and deal flow data on one platform, spreadsheets keep information siloed. At the same time, instead of focusing on the unique workflows of an investment banker, Excel is designed in a relatively generic way to simply organize information.

When relationship, project, and deal flow data gets stored across spreadsheets, critical information becomes harder to efficiently access and verify. At the same time, the workflows that depend on it become harder to manage. Altogether, when this data is separated from project management workspaces on a platform with very few collaboration tools, teams and projects slow down.

By centralizing all of your data and workflows on one platform, MadeMarket helps firms work smarter and faster, together. With dashboards and workspaces designed around every stage of an investment banker’s deal flow, our platform organizes data in more intuitive and accessible ways.

At the same time, unlike Excel, MadeMarket facilitates collaboration and communication with a variety of tools that make it easier for people to reach out to their contacts and connect with their teams over different tasks and workspaces.

Altogether, by synchronizing data and workflows to help bankers, for example, send process emails up to twenty times faster, MadeMarket helps firms optimize their workflows to close more deals, faster.

With all of these benefits combined, the average firm upgrading to MadeMarket can expand their deal flow with one additional transaction for every five managing directors.

‍As we look ahead to the future of capital markets, tech-enabled firms are driving new standards around performance and security.

By centralizing data on a more reliable platform with advanced access controls, switching from spreadsheets to MadeMarket critically enhances the security of a firm’s information. Meanwhile, a centralized platform also decreases the likelihood that important information about clients and contacts will leave with the individual bankers that provided it. Looking ahead, as more firms leave their spreadsheets for a purpose-built CRM, these tools are setting new security and compliance expectations amongst regulators and clients alike.

In every case, purpose-built CRMs are becoming an essential component to remaining competitive in an increasingly fast-paced, tech-driven capital markets environment. Meanwhile, firms that remain over-reliant on Excel are falling behind their tech-enabled competitors.

Thankfully, upgrading from Excel to MadeMarket is a lot easier than you think. To learn more and explore what MadeMarket can do for you, connect with a member of our team to get started with a demo!