Almost every small business we know runs on three or four spreadsheets. It's not laziness — it's the tool that was at hand when the company had two people. The problem is the sheet doesn't grow with the team.
How to know the moment has come
You don't need a consultant. If you recognise two of these, it has:
- There's a file called
clients_v3_final_FINAL.xlsx. - Someone asks "who spoke to this client?" and the answer is on someone else's phone.
- Proposals go out as PDFs and nobody knows if they were opened.
- Leave balances are calculated by hand in January.
The one-week plan
Day 1 — Export, don't clean. The temptation is to "clean the sheet before importing". Don't. Export it as it is to CSV: contacts, companies, leads. Cleaning happens afterwards, in the system, with duplicate detection helping.
Day 2 — Decide the pipeline stages. This is the step that takes time. Your "Status" column has 11 different values written 5 ways. Reduce it to 5 or 6 stages: New, Contacted, Negotiating, Proposal sent, Won, Lost. Each with an honest probability.
Day 3 — Import and merge duplicates. With the stages defined, import the contacts. The importer will find the same person with two emails. Decide what stays.
Day 4 — Connect email. From the moment email is connected, each client's story starts building itself. You don't need to migrate old emails — leave them in the archive.
Day 5 — One session with the team. Forty-five minutes, everyone, one real case each. They leave using it.
What not to migrate
- Old emails. They stay where they are. What matters is what happens from now on.
- Old proposals. Keep the PDFs in a folder. New ones are made in the system.
- Analysis formulas. If you do a quarterly analysis in Excel, keep doing it — with data exported from the system. Excel is great for analysing; it's bad for operating.
The most common mistake
Trying to migrate everything before starting to use it. Nobody finishes. Migrate the essentials (contacts, companies, leads in progress) and start. The rest follows — or isn't needed.
The sheet stores the state. The system stores the story. That's the difference the team feels in the first week.