What the spreadsheet is genuinely better at
This gets skipped in most comparisons, usually because the person writing them sells a CRM. A spreadsheet is faster to change, free, already installed, and understood by everyone you will ever hire. For a list of forty deals owned by one person, it is the correct tool and a CRM is overhead.
It also has no opinions. Any CRM imposes a shape on your data, and if that shape is wrong for how you sell you will spend months working around it. A spreadsheet lets you invent the shape as you go, which is exactly what you want before you know what the shape is.
The four lines
1. More than one person edits it
Shared spreadsheets do not fail loudly. They fail as a slow accumulation of two people editing the same row, one person sorting the sheet while another has it open, and a column somebody added that only they understand. Nothing breaks; the sheet just stops being trusted, and once it is not trusted people keep their real numbers somewhere else.
2. History matters as much as current state
A spreadsheet stores what is true now. It does not store that this deal was at Proposal in March, went quiet, and came back in July because their new VP had used you before. That kind of thing is the actual asset in a sales team, and a cell overwrites it.
3. The conversation lives somewhere else
The sheet says *sent proposal 12 March*. The proposal, the reply, the objection and the answer are all in one person's inbox. Anyone else has to ask. This is the most common failure and the least visible, because the row looks complete.
4. Someone leaves
This is where the previous three become expensive at once. The rows survive. The reason behind each row does not.
None of these are about size. A three-person team can cross all four lines in a quarter; a solo consultant with 300 contacts may never cross any of them.
The honest cost of moving
Two or three days of real work, mostly on data. Exporting a spreadsheet is trivial; deciding what your columns actually mean is not, and that is the part people underestimate. A sheet that has been running for two years will have a Status column with fourteen distinct values, four of which are typos and three of which mean the same thing.
Clean that before importing, not after. A CRM full of inconsistent data is worse than the spreadsheet, because it looks authoritative.
What to check before you commit
- Can a column change type later? Your
Statustext field will need to become a real status field. If that means a migration ticket, you will never do it. - Can you export everything, easily, at any time? If the answer is unclear, you are renting your own data.
- Does email live inside it? If not, you have solved the spreadsheet problem and kept the inbox problem, which was the bigger of the two.
- How long until the first person stops updating it? The realistic answer is *as soon as updating it is extra work*.
The summary
Stay on the spreadsheet longer than a CRM vendor would like, and move when a second person needs the truth to be in one place. The trigger is shared knowledge, not headcount and not contact count.
If you are still working out what the tool is for, what is a CRM covers the three jobs any of them has to do.