In short
In many SMEs, the CRM story repeats itself. The managing director picks a full-featured tool, the team fills it in diligently for three weeks, then data entry gets patchy, and after two months nobody opens it any more. Tracking goes back into inboxes and people's heads.
The problem is not the team's discipline. It is that the tool was designed for a different organisation from yours.
What a full CRM is designed to do
Quarterly forecasts, win probabilities by stage, automatic lead assignment, access rights by team, management dashboards. These features make sense in a sales department of twenty people, where a manager has to consolidate the activity of several teams.
In an SME where the managing director and one or two colleagues do the selling, that need for consolidation is minimal. The fields stay mandatory, the value disappears, and a file nobody fills in any more becomes misleading: it shows opportunities that have been dead for weeks.
The six columns
| Column | What it contains | Why | |---|---|---| | Person and company | Name, role, company | Identity, nothing more | | Source | Where the contact came from | Knowing which channel delivers | | Signal | What justified getting in touch | The context, six months later | | Next action and date | "Call back about the budget, 12 Nov" | The heart of the system | | Owner | Who is responsible for this action | Nobody assumes someone else is handling it | | Status | Where the relationship stands | Filtering in ten seconds |
The fourth column does all the work. The fifth only exists because there are several of you: without it, every follow-up belongs to everyone, and therefore to no one.
What is left out is deliberate: estimated value, probability of signing, detailed stage in the sales cycle. Those fields are useful when the volume justifies forecasts. Before that, they slow down data entry, and a row you hesitate to create because three pieces of information are missing is a row that will never exist.
Record the signal, not just the name. In six months, "has just opened a second site in Namur" will let you pick the conversation up where it left off. "LinkedIn contact" will tell you nothing.
The rule: a contact with no date is a lost contact
A single rule keeps the file alive. Any contact without a next action date is treated as out of the pipeline.
"Waiting", "follow up some time", "interested but not now": these three phrases describe the same state. Nobody will do anything. A contact stays in the pipeline if it carries an action, a date and an owner. Otherwise it comes out, even if it comes back later with a real reason and a real date.
It is the same standard as at the end of a first meeting: a dated next step, a clear no, or an explicit date for the next contact. What holds for a call holds for a row in a file.
The thirty-minute weekly review
Once a week, same day, same time, with everyone who sells:
- filter the actions whose date has passed;
- for each one, act that day or reschedule with a new date and an owner;
- remove whatever no longer has a reason to be there, noting the date and the reason;
- check that every remaining row carries a dated action.
Thirty minutes is enough as long as the pipeline stays readable, and it stays readable precisely because this review happens every week. It is also the only moment when the team can see at a glance who is waiting for what from whom.
Only store what is useful
A prospecting file contains personal data. The GDPR imposes a data minimisation principle (Article 5): you only keep what is necessary for the purpose, here tracking a business relationship. In practice, that means no personal remarks unrelated to the exchange, and a defined retention period for prospects who have never replied. The rules specific to each country are set out in the GDPR and prospecting in France, Belgium and Switzerland.
When the spreadsheet is no longer enough
A shared spreadsheet works very well at the start. Three signals show you have outgrown it:
- you are running follow-up sequences across several channels and no longer know who is at which contact, which the four-touchpoint model quickly makes unmanageable by hand;
- two people on the team have already contacted the same company without knowing it;
- the history of exchanges is scattered across several inboxes and everyone's LinkedIn messages.
As long as none of these applies to you, changing tools will not help. A richer tool never replaces the discipline of the "next action" column.
You do not recognise good sales tracking by its features. You recognise it by the fact that the team still opens it three months later, and that it tells you, in one minute, which follow-ups are due this week and who is handling them.