Comparison

MarketIQ vs. Excel for IB recruiting

Excel is free and familiar, which is exactly why almost every student starts there. Here's where it holds up, and where it quietly starts costing more time than it saves.

A spreadsheet is a fine place to store a list of names. It's not built to find those names, draft outreach to them, or remind you when a follow-up is overdue — every one of those steps has to happen somewhere else, by hand, which is where most recruiting trackers quietly fall apart.

MarketIQExcel / Google Sheets
Find banker contacts
Resolve email format automatically
Draft personalized outreach
Store contact status (drafted/sent/replied)
Automatic follow-up reminders
Coffee chat notes tied to contact
Send email directly (Gmail/Outlook)
Works from any device without setup
Free to start

Comparison based on out-of-the-box functionality as of August 2026.

Where Excel actually wins

Excel wins on flexibility and familiarity — you can structure it exactly how you want, everyone already knows how to use it, and there's zero learning curve. If you're tracking fewer than 15 contacts for a short recruiting cycle, a spreadsheet is genuinely enough, and there's no reason to add a tool on top of it. See what a minimal setup looks like in what a tracker actually needs.

Where it breaks down

  • Past ~20-30 contacts, manually updating rows and remembering to check follow-up dates becomes its own chore — the tracker starts competing with the recruiting itself for your time.
  • No built-in reminders — the entire system depends on you remembering to open the sheet and check dates, which is the exact failure mode that causes the 7-day follow-up rule to not happen in practice.
  • Contact discovery is a separate step — finding the person, resolving their email, and writing to them all happen outside the spreadsheet, then get copied in after the fact (or don't).
  • Version chaos — "the spreadsheet from September" vs. the one you've been updating since, especially across a laptop and a phone.

ChatGPT built the target list.

Manage the pipeline in MarketIQ — drafted, sent, replied, coffee chat scheduled — instead of a spreadsheet tab you'll lose by next week.

Build your pipeline

Frequently asked questions

Can I bring my existing spreadsheet into MarketIQ?

Yes — MarketIQ supports CSV import, so an existing contact list carries over instead of starting from zero.

Is MarketIQ actually free to start, like Excel?

Yes. The Student Free plan includes 25 leads and 15 AI drafts per month with no credit card required — enough to track a real early-stage list before deciding whether to upgrade.

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