I Cried When I Thought About All The Time I Wasted…

Every effective sales warrior knows how to use Excel (or equivalent spreadsheet).

How many of us have access to state-of-the-art CRM’s only to keep our “real” forecast on a spreadsheet?

Yeah, you are not alone.

Recently, I was working on a proposal template that needed to retrieve a per/transaction price, that varied based on volume, from a pricing table. After an hour trying to use “if/then” statements, I gave up. That afternoon I visited Gilligan on Data, found the post on VLOOKUP, 2 minutes later I was up and running.

Up until I read Gilligan’s post, I assumed that VLOOKUP was one of those things that only accountants and guys who lived in their mom’s basement used and/or understood. However, if your pricing contains per/unit costs that vary based on volume or other parameters, and you have to manually calculate and build a proposal, then this is the function for you.

WordPress will not allow excel sheets to be uploaded, so I embedded a simple excel sheet in a word doc.

VLOOKUP Sample

Any questions, feel free to leave a comment. If you wanted to receive an intelligent answer, visit Gilligan’s Site.