Dear friend opening the shop,

You do not need a CRM yet. You need four fields you will update when a deal moves — not a cathedral of pipelines you will abandon after the free trial webinar.

Start here this week

Make a sheet or simple database with columns: Name, Next step, Next date, Amount (or size). That is the whole CRM for the first twenty active conversations. Color the row red when Next date is past. Open it every morning before email. If you skip that ritual, software will not save you.

Rules that beat features

  • One next step per row. “Follow up sometime” is not a next step.
  • Update the date when you touch the deal, not when you feel hopeful.
  • Archive closed-lost weekly so the list stays short enough to fear.
  • Keep notes in the row or a linked doc — not six chat threads.

When the sheet starts lying

You will feel the ceiling when two people must edit at once, when you need reminders that actually fire, or when reporting eats an afternoon. Those are buying signals. “It would look more professional” is not. I have seen teams buy a CRM to look grown-up and then live in the sheet anyway because the sheet was honest.

Field note

A retailer I advised migrated 400 half-empty CRM records into a cleaned sheet of 37 active leads. Close rate rose because attention stopped drowning in ghosts.

If you do buy later

Import only active deals. Map fields before kickoff. Ban custom fields for the first 60 days. Name one admin. Turn off vanity dashboards until the pipeline stages match how you actually talk about work.

Ship the four fields Monday. Argue about software after you trust the ritual.

What a good next step looks like

Bad: “Follow up.” Good: “Send the two-page scope by Thursday 16:00; if no reply, call Friday 10:00.” The next step must name an action you control or a date when you will chase. If the next move belongs to the client, your step is the reminder, not hope.

Amount can be a range. A $0 row that has been “hot” for six weeks is a ghost. Archive it. Optimism is not a pipeline.

The morning ritual (eight minutes)

  1. Sort by Next date.
  2. Turn red rows into today’s work or push the date with a reason in the notes.
  3. Add anything new from yesterday’s inbox — one row each, not a paragraph.
  4. Close the sheet before you open chat. If you live in chat first, the sheet dies.

When two people share the list

Use a tool that shows who edited last. Agree that only the named owner of a row changes Next step. Comments can live in a second column. Concurrent editing without ownership recreates the CRM mess you were avoiding, just in a cheaper wrapper.

If a salesperson lives in their head and the owner lives in the sheet, you do not have a CRM problem. You have an agreement problem. Pick one list and a daily eight-minute ritual, or the software you buy later will be ignored the same way.

— Jose