CRM for Businesses Outgrowing Spreadsheets
Updated: Oct 9
Spreadsheets are remarkably useful.
They are inexpensive, flexible, and familiar.
They are also where many small businesses begin managing their prospects.
There is nothing wrong with that.
Until it stops working.
Signs that you are outgrowing your spreadsheet
You may be ready for a CRM when:
You repeatedly forget follow-ups.
Several people edit the same prospect spreadsheet.
Important information lives in email instead of the spreadsheet.
You cannot quickly see the last conversation with someone.
Contacts move companies and records become confusing.
You have multiple contacts within the same prospective client.
You create separate columns for increasingly complicated statuses.
Nobody is completely sure whether the spreadsheet is current.
At that point, the problem is no longer spreadsheet design.
The problem is that you are trying to make a spreadsheet behave like a relationship database.
You do not necessarily need a sophisticated CRM
This is where small businesses sometimes overcorrect.
They go from a spreadsheet directly into a large CRM platform.
Suddenly the business has gone from too little structure to far too much.
There is a middle ground.
A CRM can simply provide the structure a spreadsheet lacks:
companies connected to people
conversations connected to contacts
tasks connected to follow-up and
opportunities connected to a pipeline
That is the problem Right Stage CRM was built to solve
Right Stage is intended for the business that says:
“Our spreadsheet isn't working anymore, but we don't need a giant CRM.”
That transition should not require redesigning how your entire company operates.
Sometimes you just need a better place to keep track of the relationships that drive your business.
Are you using more CRM than your business actually needs?
Take the free CRM Overkill Test and get a recommendation based on how your business actually operates.
