"I live in Excel, but it's not by choice. It's just out of necessity."
That one sentence perfectly captured what we're seeing across hundreds of conversations with small and medium businesses. There's this whole universe of capable, intelligent professionals who've become accidental Excel experts—not because they love spreadsheets, but because they have no other option.
The Multi-Hat Problem
This particular sales manager wasn't just doing sales. He was also the de facto data analyst, the renewal specialist, the revenue operations team, and the business intelligence department. Sound familiar?
He walked me through his typical week: manually cross-referencing deal data with project management spreadsheets using VLOOKUPs, investigating data anomalies (like why one person's travel expenses showed $19K), and spending hours building reports just to answer simple questions.
The kicker? His new sales manager doesn't even know how to do VLOOKUPs. So when she needs the same analysis, it takes her even longer.
"I Need Answers, Not Reports"
The most revealing moment came when he explained his real frustration:
"I'm doing analysis based on reports and spreadsheets to get answers, but really, I need the answer, not the report or the spreadsheet. That's just the steps I have to take to get where I need to go."
This hit me hard because it's so obvious once you hear it. He doesn't wake up excited to build pivot tables. He needs to know which renewal deals are at risk, or whether their top 20 clients represent 37% of revenue, or why conversion dropped last month.
The spreadsheet is just the unfortunate middleman.
The Time Sink Reality
He described knowing exactly what formulas to type, understanding how to format the data, being perfectly capable of getting the analysis done. The problem wasn't knowledge—it was time.
"It's going to take me 10 minutes to format it and type it up and all that. I really just need the information so I can put it in an email and say 'hey, the top 20 deals represent 37% of our revenue, we need to focus on those.'"
Ten minutes here, twenty minutes there. It adds up fast when you're wearing multiple hats.
"A Million Guys Like Me"
Toward the end of our call, he made what might be the most important observation for any business tool company:
"I'm sure there's like a million guys like me at every small to medium sized company—someone who wears multiple hats and lives in Excel but not by choice. That person would probably be a potential customer."
He's absolutely right. Behind every growing company is someone doing sophisticated analysis in spreadsheets, not because they chose that path, but because it's the only path available to them.
What This Taught Us
This conversation reinforced three things we're seeing consistently:
1. The deliverable people actually want is the insight, not the report. All those hours building charts and tables are just obstacles between a question and its answer.
2. Small business professionals are more sophisticated than tools give them credit for. This sales manager understood segmentation, renewal analysis, data quality issues, and revenue operations. He didn't need a simpler tool—he needed a more powerful one that didn't require a data science degree.
3. The "accidental analyst" market is huge. Every SMB has that one person who became the unofficial data expert. They're capable, they're overworked, and they're solving real business problems with whatever tools they can access.
The Excel Alternative They Actually Want
During our demo, something interesting happened. As soon as we connected his HubSpot data and he started asking natural language questions, his whole demeanor changed. Instead of explaining how he'd build a report, he started asking the business questions he actually cared about:
"What deals are missing from this renewal list?" "How many unique trips did our people actually take?" "Which companies should we categorize as growth opportunities?"
That's when I realized—people don't want an Excel alternative that works like Excel. They want something that eliminates the need for Excel entirely.
The Bigger Picture
This sales manager represents a massive shift happening in business. Companies are generating more data than ever, but they're not growing their analytics teams at the same pace. The result? Capable business professionals forced into accidental analyst roles, armed with tools built for a different era.
The opportunity isn't just to make spreadsheets better. It's to make them unnecessary.
If you're reading this and thinking "that sounds exactly like my situation," you're not alone. There really are a million people like you, stuck between having real analytical needs and only having consumer-grade tools to meet them.
The good news? You don't have to live in Excel forever. There are better ways to get from questions to answers—ways that don't require ten minutes of formatting just to send a bullet point in an email.
Want to see how this sales manager went from VLOOKUPs to insights in seconds? Try Scoop free and experience the Excel alternative that understands your actual needs.
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