CRM or spreadsheet for a solo consultant?
Start with one question: can you reliably tell who needs a response, what you promised and when you should act?
A CRM is useful when it makes that answer easier to maintain. It is not a prerequisite for running a consulting business. A well-kept spreadsheet can be a reasonable starting point if one person owns the process and the volume is manageable.
First, define a workable spreadsheet
Give every enquiry one row with these fields: contact identifier, organisation, source, current stage, next action, next-action date and owner. Keep sensitive notes to the minimum you actually need and restrict access appropriately.
Use a short list of stages: new enquiry, discovery booked, proposal sent, won and closed. The most important column is the next action. A record without an action or an explicit closed status is easy to forget.
Look for workflow failures
| If this is happening | What to investigate |
|---|---|
| One person updates every record and nothing is missed | Improve the existing sheet before adding a subscription. |
| Two people contact the same prospect | Shared ownership, activity history and permissions. |
| Follow-ups are regularly late | Reminders and a daily task view. |
| Reporting means rebuilding the same table each week | Pipeline reporting and export quality. |
| Client context is scattered across inboxes | Email integration, access controls and data retention. |
Run a small trial before migrating
- Create ten fictional contacts and three representative opportunities. Do not upload a real client database just to explore a product.
- Import the records and check how duplicates, dates and required fields behave.
- Assign a follow-up, move a deal through its stages and find its activity history.
- Export the records. Check whether the information you would need to leave the product is included.
- Confirm that the features you used belong to the plan you would actually buy.
Write down the time spent and any awkward steps. A trial that works only with premium features does not validate the cheaper plan.
Decide using a real month of work
Estimate the monthly subscription, setup effort and time saved. If the subscription is $30 and setup takes four hours, the first month costs more than $30. Use your own value for an hour of work; do not treat every minute saved as cash earned.
Stay with a spreadsheet if your workflow is reliable and the trial adds more maintenance than value. Consider a CRM when ownership, reminders or reporting solve a problem you can describe and measure.