Moving off the spreadsheet without losing what's in it
A spreadsheet that's run your business for years is a better starting point for a CRM than it looks. The trick is keeping what it knows.
2 min readCRM
Most businesses we talk to run on a spreadsheet, or a few of them, plus a shared inbox and somebody's memory. It's common to apologise for that. There's no need. A spreadsheet that has been used every day for years is an accurate record of how the business really works: which columns get filled in, which get ignored, and the notes people add in the margins because there was nowhere else to put them.
That's exactly why moving to a CRM so often goes wrong. A new system arrives with someone else's idea of how sales should work, the old spreadsheet gets archived, and the team spends the next few months working around fields that don't fit. Before long the real information is back in a spreadsheet, now alongside a CRM nobody trusts.
So we start from the spreadsheet, not from the CRM's defaults. The columns people actually use become fields. The informal stages, like enquiry, quoted, waiting on the customer and won, become the pipeline. The notes in the margins usually point at something the business needs to track and has never had a place for, like whether a customer wants a call or a text, or which deals need a second conversation.
Then the data comes across rather than being left behind.
Then the data comes across rather than being left behind. Old customers, past deals and open quotes are migrated, cleaned up along the way, so the history is still there on day one. A CRM that starts empty asks the team to rebuild years of knowledge from scratch, and they won't. One that already knows every customer they've worked with is something they'll open on the first morning.
It also helps to change one habit at a time. The first version should do what the spreadsheet did, only more reliably, and be live while the old sheet is still open in another tab. Once the team trusts it, it can take on the things a spreadsheet can't: reminders on quotes that have gone quiet, enquiries arriving straight from the website, and a view of the pipeline without anyone asking around.
Done that way, a migration is usually a modest project rather than a reinvention. As with everything we take on, you get a written scope and a timeline within 48 hours, walked through by the people who'll do the work.