Pricing in 15 minutes, reporting at a glance
A new sales director inherited two headaches: every quote hand-assembled from scattered files, every report hand-built for the CEO. One Google Sheets layer now prices any request in about 15 minutes — and turns the week's numbers CEO-ready in another 15.
“Thank you for this — it literally gave me back almost a day every week. I spend it on one-on-ones with the agents and on analysis that needs actual thinking, not on copying numbers between files and fixing formulas.”
The company
A telecom provider selling phone numbers, SIP trunks, and calling capacity across countries. Deals are quote-driven: every client means a specific mix of countries, features, and volumes — and a price that has to arrive before the client cools.
The problem
A new sales director walked into two problems at once.
Pricing was a hunt. Provider costs lived in some files, markups in others, custom discounts in people's heads. To quote a client, a rep collected numbers source by source, then sat down with the director to work out what discount this volume justified. Price is the first thing a buyer needs to keep moving — and here it was the slowest thing the company produced. Some clients pushed decisions back; some went to competitors; some dropped the idea entirely.
Reporting didn't exist as a system. The weekly team call ran up to four hours — pipeline collected verbally, numbers typed into a table mid-call. Projections and targets meant hand-built dashboards and pivots, rebuilt for every question. After the call, the director spent about four more hours consolidating everything into the format the CEO needed.
The CRM couldn't carry either job — a legacy system with a license long bought and features nobody used, barely customizable, and the company wanted off it, not deeper in. And the team weren't spreadsheet engineers — which is normal: their job is deals. What was missing was an operations layer in the tools they actually used.
What we did
We consolidated provider costs, markups, and discount rules into a single maintained file. Product-side price changes land there the same day and flow through everything built on top. Costs stay out of reps' sight — they work with sellable prices, not the cost structure.
A rep picks the countries the client cares about, selects numbers, trunks, and features, enters the volumes — and the final price calculates itself, volume discount included. Under the hood it's native spreadsheet machinery: lookups pull live rates from the price source, formulas apply the markups and volume tiers, and the result lands on a linked output sheet that exports as a client-ready PDF or Excel. Fifteen minutes: pick, check, send.
For reporting, reps enter three things per deal — company, recurring or one-off, amount — broken out by month, in clearly marked places. The sheets are wired together from there: SUMIF-family formulas roll every entry up by month, by rep, by revenue type. Data goes in once and flows through the file on its own — nobody needed new analytics skills.
One view the sales director opens: per-rep revenue against targets and forecasts, months and quarters, team plan tracking. It's pivot tables and charts configured inside the spreadsheet itself — no BI tool bolted on. A rep enters a deal, the rollups recalculate, every graph redraws — readable at C-level without an hour of preparation first.
What changed
None of this needed new software. The most serious finance teams in the world still run reporting and forecasting in spreadsheets — the tool was never the problem. What was missing was the layer inside it: one price source, one revenue structure, lookups and rollups instead of copy-paste, pivots and charts instead of preparation. It's normal that a head of sales isn't a spreadsheet engineer — their job is the deals. That's the layer we built.
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