Spreadsheet or CRM: when a small business really needs a system

When a spreadsheet is enough

One person sells. There are a few dozen active customers and deals, not a few hundred. The process has no stages that need tracking: a conversation, a quote, an order. Nobody asks for a report, because the owner has it all in their head and that works. Website enquiries are rare and the same person picks them up. In a business like that, a CRM adds clicking, not information. Stay with the spreadsheet, but add the three columns from the last section of this article.

Signs that it is time for a CRM

• Two people edit the same spreadsheet and every so often somebody overwrites someone else’s row.
• The question “who was dealing with this?” comes up more than once a week.
• A lead went missing. An enquiry from the website or an email was never followed up, because it was not clear whose it was.
• The report for the boss is assembled by hand once a month and takes someone half a day.
• The spreadsheet has a tab per rep, or versions called “customers_2025_final_v3”.
• Somebody retypes data from the website, the shop or email into the spreadsheet.
• The contact history lives in employees’ inboxes, not in one place. When someone leaves, it leaves with them.

Two of these signs mean it is time for a conversation. Four mean it is time for a decision.

Which CRM

Do not start by choosing a tool. Start by writing down the process: where customers come from, what the stages are, who is responsible for what, what you want to see in a report. With that sheet of paper, most systems can be assessed in an hour. Without it, every demo looks good.

Salesforce is what I know best, and for companies that sell as a team, have stages and want the CRM to talk to the website, email and invoicing, it is a good choice for years to come. For a business with one rep and a simple process it is often too much system, and I will say so. A simpler CRM with a good import and connected email will do the job. The tool matters less than whether the team is still using it three months later.

Migration step by step

1. Tidy the spreadsheet. One row is one company or one person, not both at once. Separate columns for company, person, email, phone, stage, owner, source, date of last contact. Comments in cells move to a separate “notes” column.
2. Agree the stages. Five to seven, with a clear definition of when a deal moves on. “In progress” is not a stage.
3. Remove duplicates. The same company spelt three ways is three records. It is easier to clean up in the spreadsheet than in the CRM.
4. A test import on a copy or on twenty rows. Check that fields landed where they should, that accented characters survived, that dates are dates.
5. The real import and a date from which the spreadsheet is read-only. Without that date you will be running both for six months.
6. Connect the inputs: the website form and email. If data still has to be retyped, the CRM does not save time, it adds it.
7. One report that somebody genuinely looks at every week. The pipeline by stage, or the list of deals with no next step.

What to set up on day one

Three fields without which a CRM is, a year on, just a more expensive spreadsheet. They work in a spreadsheet too.

Field	Why	Rule
Lead source	Six months on, you know what brings customers and what only costs money	Required on creation, a closed list, not free text
Owner	The end of “who was dealing with this?”	Always one person, never empty, never “the team”
Next step with a date	A deal with no next step is a deal that dies quietly	A “no next step” report once a week

If you would like somebody to look at your spreadsheet and tell you plainly whether it is time for a CRM, and if so to run the migration, that is what my work on CRM looks like.