Why Are Marketers Still Doing Business Like It’s 1999?

By: Octerra Team        August 27th, 2024        8 minute reading

At Octerra, we might not be relationship gurus, but we can certainly spot a bad one when we see it: comfortable but stagnant, has plenty of downsides, and is always defended with the excuse that it’s “mostly good.”

Sound familiar? Hopefully not in your personal life—but in the business world, this describes the toxic relationship most marketers have with managing the RFP (Request for Proposal) process via email and spreadsheets.

Yes, Excel has its strengths, and we'll admit it even excels (pun intended) in certain areas. And email is a convenient method of communication, tried and true. But, at the end of the day, they are archaic technologies that businesses just can’t seem to leave behind, despite the risk of managing billions of dollars that flow as a direct result of using them. And much like a relationship that drags on too long, you can’t help but wonder why people stick with it.

Here, we’ll dive into the pros, the cons, and the reasons why it might be time to finally show email and Excel the exit.

A brief history of email and spreadsheets

So, how’d we get here? Well, email first became widely used in the 1990s, an era known for grunge, baggy pants, Beanie Babies and Friends. The development of the Internet and the introduction of user-friendly email services contributed to its widespread adoption.

• 1971: The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson, who used the "@" symbol to designate email addresses.
• 1980s: Email started gaining popularity in academic and research institutions.
• 1990s: The advent of the World Wide Web, along with the rise of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web-based email services like Hotmail (launched in 1996), made email accessible to the public.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, email had become ubiquitous, a communication tool for both personal and business use.

Spreadsheets on the other hand, first became widely used in the 1980s with the introduction of user-friendly software for personal computers - an even earlier era defined by MTV, ripped jeans, the Rubik’s Cube and Cheers.

• 1979: VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software, was released for the Apple II computer. Created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, VisiCalc revolutionized business computing by allowing users to perform complex calculations easily.
• 1983: Lotus 1-2-3 was released for the IBM PC, becoming immensely popular and further driving the adoption of spreadsheets in business and personal computing.
• 1985: Microsoft Excel was introduced, initially for the Apple Macintosh, and later for Windows in 1987. Excel eventually became the dominant spreadsheet software due to its powerful features and integration with the Microsoft Office suite.

By the mid-1980s, spreadsheets had become a standard tool in business environments, and their use continued to expand with advancements in software and personal computing.

By combining email and spreadsheets, two powerful tools (“you got your chocolate in my peanut butter…”), companies drastically sped up the process of doing business. Goodbye, Ms. Snail Mail. See ya later, Mr. Fax Machine!

Examples of SaaS replacing spreadsheets and email

Once the Internet came along it didn’t take long for the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS) to take hold and transform how businesses and individuals accomplish tasks, often replacing traditional tools like spreadsheets and email with more integrated, collaborative, and scalable solutions. Some areas where SaaS has made notable replacements include:

• Project Management: Trello, Asana, Monday.com: These platforms offer collaborative project management features, replacing the need for shared spreadsheets to track tasks and deadlines.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM: These SaaS solutions provide comprehensive CRM functionalities, moving beyond basic spreadsheets used for tracking customer interactions and sales pipelines.
• Communication and Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams: These tools have replaced traditional email for internal communication, offering real-time messaging, file sharing, and integrations with other software. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365: These suites combine email, document creation, spreadsheets, and collaboration tools, often replacing standalone email services and traditional spreadsheet software.
• Data Analysis and Business Intelligence: Tableau, Looker, Power BI: These platforms offer advanced data analysis and visualization capabilities, making them more powerful alternatives to traditional spreadsheets for data analysis.
• Accounting and Finance: QuickBooks Online, Xero: These SaaS accounting solutions provide more comprehensive and scalable accounting features compared to traditional spreadsheets.
• Marketing Automation: Marketo, Mailchimp, HubSpot: These platforms automate and integrate various marketing tasks, such as email campaigns and customer segmentation, which were previously managed using spreadsheets and email.
• Human Resources and Payroll: Workday, BambooHR, Gusto: SaaS solutions that manage HR processes, payroll, and benefits, reducing the reliance on spreadsheets for tracking employee information and payroll calculations.
• File Storage and Sharing: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive: These cloud storage solutions offer secure file storage and sharing capabilities, replacing traditional email attachments and locally stored spreadsheets.
• E-commerce: Shopify, BigCommerce: These platforms provide comprehensive e-commerce solutions, replacing the need for spreadsheets to manage inventory, sales, and customer information.
• E-signature: DocuSign and Adobe Acrobat Sign have made getting signatures for legal documents a breeze.

TL;DR: SaaS solutions became popular because they offered ease of access, real-time collaboration, scalability, and integration with other tools and services, which significantly enhanced productivity and efficiency compared to traditional spreadsheets and email.

Why companies continue to use this s***

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." — Warren Buffett

Old habits die hard, right? For some, they never die. And if we’re completely being honest with ourselves, no one likes their cheese moved either, especially when resources are tight, and workloads are not getting smaller.

But the main reason that email and spreadsheets continue to be the defacto go-to for running an RFP process is that marketers perceive the status quo as the best and most convenient alternative – despite glaring limitations.

The risks marketers face by continuing to use email and spreadsheets

There are four main risks associated with continuing to use email and spreadsheets to run your RFP process:

1. Lack of security: Most spreadsheets are not password protected. That means anyone could access you or your vendors’ data if it fell into the wrong hands. Plus, when a bid is submitted for a project via email, it gets sent to someone’s inbox and who knows where it goes or how it gets handled from there. Depending upon the confidentiality agreement in place between the parties, there could be a breach that would lead to legal entanglement or financial penalty. Or worse…

There is a game called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where you can essentially tie the actor Kevin Bacon to any other actor or director, from any era, in six steps or less. Now imagine that with an email containing a sensitive and competitive bid. Essentially, that email could reach anyone in the world in six steps or less. All it takes is one mistake in forwarding an email.

2. Loss of critical data: In a recent post we talked about the fact that data is the primary currency of effective marketing strategies. But data that is not centrally stored in an easily accessible and organized way poses a risk of data loss.

Using email and spreadsheets for the RFP process means that data is siloed inside the various email inboxes of individual producers and managers who may or may not still be employed with the brand or its agency. The result of all this disparate, siloed information is that it is essentially rendered inaccessible. And the time and effort required to extract it out of email and various drives leaves marketers -- and those in charge of ensuring compliance -- at a severe disadvantage.

3. Errors and oversights: Since most data in a spreadsheet is manually entered, the risk of human error is significant. A single mistyped formula can skew an entire dataset, and if unnoticed, could lead to business decisions based on inaccurate information. A study by University of Hawaii professor Raymond Panko showed that 88% of spreadsheets contain at least one error. This is why spreadsheets have been replaced by SaaS in so many areas.

4. Customer perception and attrition: In your efforts to retain customers, you most likely talk about benefits and risk: benefits such as ROI, efficiency, best practices, and systems to manage the relationship; risks such as loss of efficiency and IP, revenue leakage, and prevention of being out of compliance with regulations and internal policies. So, what happens when your clients see their relationship, data or communications being managed by spreadsheets and email? How does their perception of you change? As mentioned above, this is old technology. When your customers see this, they see laziness, lack of investment in a vendor business they are paying, and risk. Risk of data loss, errors, and security breaches.

Replacing spreadsheets and email may not seem like a business-critical decision and as a result can seem easier to kick down the road; that is until you lose critical data, have a security breach, or fail to renew a customer as a result.

So, now what?

Maybe you're not entirely ready to part ways with your spreadsheets and email for RFPs, but there’s no harm in considering other options that might better align with your business goals.

Even if you’re just contemplating a move away from running your current RFP process, we’d be thrilled for you to give our software a try (for free!) —and all it takes is sending one project out for bid.

It's alright to party like it’s 1999 but let’s not do business that way anymore.