If your business is being held prisoner to spreadsheets, it’s time to break free and unlock your growth potential. Here are five reasons why you should be moving off of spreadsheets and onto a customer relationship management solution:

1. See all your customer information, all in one place

Right now, you’re probably using several spreadsheets to keep track of information. While you may think that makes you more organized, your team is actually at a huge disadvantage: they lack a single view of every customer’s contact info, orders, and interactions. With the right CRM solution, you can automatically capture or log information so that the whole team—sales, service, and marketing—has a full (and same!) view of the customer.

2. Get a complete view (and understanding!) of your customer

Spreadsheets make it difficult to keep track of the most vital part of your business—your customers.  With spreadsheets, you might be getting updates on your customers, but their history record can easily be misplaced, or even deleted and replaced with a new update. A CRM solution will capture all your notes and conversations for the lifetime of a customer, so that you have full view of the customer relationship and history with the company.  When 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, it’s imperative that you know the context of every customer relationship.

3. Save time with automation

Have you ever timed how long it takes you and your team to create reports manually? What about assigning leads or support cases to your team?  A CRM can run automation rules for various business processes to assign hot leads to your sales reps or escalate service cases to the right support agent depending on your business needs.  And because it’s all automated and tracked via a CRM, reporting is a lot easier!  Say goodbye to manual reports, and hello to instant insights!

4. Improve and scale business efficiency

When you’re tracking customer sales in one spreadsheet, but referencing other spreadsheets or programs for service, and yet another for your marketing campaigns, you’re no longer managing parts of the business, but systems. Not only does this waste precious time, but it’s inefficient as you scale for growth. A CRM solution enables you to manage all your different business processes—marketing, sales, service, billing, recruiting, etc—all in one platform.When you move away from multiple systems, you’ll be able to deep dive into more important priorities that are necessary for your business’s growth.

5. Secure your most precious business resource: your customers

With spreadsheets, your data—and your customers’ data—is always at risk. Customer information can easily be deleted, copied, and shared with anyone at any time, by anyone. Nobody should be able to walk out with all your business and customer data so easily. When you use a CRM solution to grow your business, all your information is stored in a secure database system. We know you work hard to win customers and earn their trust; don’t lose it because you’re not securing data in a CRM solution.

Now’s the time for your business to break free from the bars of the spreadsheet vortex. Move beyond outdated processes, and let your business grow on a platform that can scale with it. Check out the rest of our videos and learn how you can ditch the stickies and spreadsheets to drive faster growth.

Salesforce can help you find customers, win their businesses, and keep them happy so you can grow your business faster than ever. Learn more about our small business CRM solutions or follow us on twitter @SalesforceSMB and join the conversation with #SalesforceGROW.