Doing sales on a spreadsheet? You might as well be using a laugh & learn

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a time and a place for spreadsheets. I did a piece a few months ago but using them for initial BD list building. (I’m a Google fanboi btw but that’s a showdown for another day.)

But managing your sales pipeline is a different beast from building a list. Yes, a spreadsheet can get you going straight away with zero friction. And that’s great. It’s better than a bunch of handwritten notes. But very quickly, it stops being a tool fit for the task. Indulge me. I’ll explain..

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The problem with sales-by-spreadsheet

While you may set off with the best intentions, what you end up with is a great, big, long sheet packed with opportunities of all different ages and health. It could be many lines deep, requiring a scroll through perhaps two or even three hundred records. 

And then across the columns, you’ve probably got some internally standardized set of names like company, sector, highlights, followed by the death zone of most recent calls and intel. The Death Zone? Sounds a bit melodramatic. But it’s true. This is the place that good bits of intel go to die. What we see is a whole set of columns with a scattering of dates, where the most recent chat could be in the far left column or the far right, and squished in there somewhere are all the notes, the good stuff. And it’s genuinely hard to read quickly or use to judge the health of a deal. How can you get any sense of either the deal’s health or its priority? 

Okay, I’ve set the scene. What happens next? You have a regular pipeline meeting, if you’re lucky enough to have one at all, where everyone’s eyes glaze over. Nobody really looks at the sheet. In fact, everyone hates the sheet. Someone tries heroically to keep the colour coding and the updates current, and eventually, that falls down too.

Three tests the spreadsheet fails

The hit by a bus test. If someone on the team leaves, how easily can the rest of the business extract their intel? Especially at short notice, when you’ve suddenly been thrown into a pitch or a call. Yeah, that’s right, not easy at all.

How much cash is actually out there test. It’s nearly impossible to get a real feel for the size, shape, velocity, and accuracy of your pipeline. There is no sense of total value, nor of weighted value. It is impossible for either you or those around you to know what’s actually moving. Making decisions around hiring or downsizing? You don’t have the data to hand to be informed

Where you’re good and where you’re not test. The sheet won’t tell you what stage of your sales process you’re converting well at, and where you’re behind the average. For all you know, your demos could be brilliant and your follow-up documentation terrible. Or your initial pitch could be the weak link all along. You’ve simply no way of knowing.

So what is the alternative?

Yes, it’s a CRM. And yes, we all know everyone claims to hate CRMs. But if we’re going to stop playing with kids’ toys and do this properly, like professionals, we need to use proper tools. You wouldn’t use MS Paint to design your pitch decks. (Seriously, you don’t do that, right?)

There are plenty of CRMs out there that handle the basics of sales pipelining well, so take your pick. For what it’s worth, we tend to recommend Pipedrive if the budget is tight, and HubSpot for those who want to go all in. 

HubSpot does it all, and the sales function itself really isn’t expensive (yes, the marketing and email functions can get pricey, but Basic sales pipelining is a few licenses at typically $18 a month.  It’s got a slick UI and a genuinely excellent app you can use on the move.

What this actually gets you

It lets you run meetings with clarity. Swim lanes, deal stages, deal owners, deal values, all laid out. Close dates looming large on the screen where they belong. You can run a structured meeting that starts with the deals closest to booking, because those are the ones about to make you money, then works backward from there.

It passes the bus test. Every deal has an owner. A couple of clicks gets you the full deal history, email history, call notes, the lot. Anyone with a decent understanding of the business should be able to walk into a sales meeting, a site visit, or a pitch with minimal prep.

It gives visibility upward. If you’re reporting to the SLT, investors, or the board, this is a brilliant way to give real-time visual snapshots without the endless, tedious email-chasing that nobody enjoys.

It shows you who’s bluffing. As a sales leader, you can spot the reps who tend to overstate their pitch or their deals. There’s nowhere to hide when you can see the volume, the value, the products attached, the close date, what’s slipping, and how long someone’s been stuck in a stage. You’ll spot trends across your team quickly, and there’s plenty of useful business intelligence to pick up along the way, too.

The advanced stuff

Start loading in products to create the individual deal values, and over time, you build a rich picture of what’s actually selling across your business. Cross-reference that with the operations side, your time tracking through Toggl or Harvest, and you start to see what’s actually profitable, not just what’s closing. Proper pipeline management becomes a launch pad to business value that reaches well beyond the sales meeting itself.

But let’s get back to basics

If, as a business, you convert just one more deal a year, I’d wager the return on your sales software, whichever one you choose, is massively multiplied against the investment. Can you convert one more deal a quarter just because you had a grip on the pipeline? Then this is about the single most cost-effective upgrade you can make to your business, in terms of ROI.

So if you’re still sat there in cell F13, changing the background colour and trying to work out what all the three-letter codes mean and who said what and which member of the team wrote the last update… please stop. 

Get yourself onto a CRM. Start taking your business seriously.

It bloody deserves it.