What is a CRM? And why does every business need a customer relationship management tool?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of managing interactions with customers and prospects. A well-implemented CRM system centralizes customer data, helps track sales opportunities, manage marketing to sales pipeline, and enables better communication with clients/prospects. Along with these tracking sales is also an important part of a CRM.
A typical CRM includes a sales pipeline with stages that your leads are in. These stages are based on the steps of your sales process that you lead customers through. A CRM is a tool that organizes the way you manage your leads, sales pipeline, and customers.
When most people hear “CRM”, they think of the platforms people use to manage their customer data. However, it is actually a process that salespeople use to handle their interactions with customers.
A CRM platform helps you manage communication and nurture relationships by centralizing large amounts of customer data. It can help segment your audience, automate key tasks and forecast sales in the future (among other things).
Before dedicated CRM software was around, companies would use written notes or simple spreadsheets to track their customer interactions – and many still do. When businesses start getting more and more clients it is a starting point for any business looking for spreadsheet based CRM.
What is a spreadsheet CRM?
Spreadsheet CRMs are customer relationship management spreadsheets that small businesses use. As business grows businesses have customer databases that they manage in Excel or Google Sheets or other spreadsheet applications.
Small businesses don’t have funds to buy expensive CRM systems and sometimes they do not require complex CRM software to run their business. A basic CRM template in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheet can work as a full-fledged CRM software. Most of these templates are free, freemium and some are paid. In this blog post we have curated a few of them…
Here is a list of spreadsheet CRMs for small and medium enterprises.
Google Sheets are quite effective. It is highly customizable and integrates with many web-based apps, making it a versatile yet accessible tool.
1. OnePageCRM’s template
This Free CRM in Google Sheets and Excel offers contacts with follow-up reminders so you can track leads, contact prospects based on urgency. It is easily customizable and easy to visualize your progress. You can download it without signing up.
Here is the video you can watch to learn more about this OnePage CRM sheet.
2. Close CRM’s template
This CRM is organized on top of your pipeline. You can see open, closed, won opportunities, track leads list, and sell more.
It has a simple visual dashboard that displays, number of deals in each stage and tracks key dates.
With this CRM you can assign leads to the sales rep, so you know which sales rep is contributing to the company’s growth.
It also has a sales team structure and process that would help you manage your sales team effectively. With this CRM you can forecast your revenue.
Here is an overview of the CRM template
3. Salesflare’s template
A free CRM template for Google Sheets that improves the sales process without spending money.
You can track leads, analyse sales metrics and progress. It helps you manage sales reps, conversion rates, and closing % automatically.
Feel free to add/remove columns from the ‘Sales Funnel’ sheet to take control of your sales. Add/remove custom stages and team members ace your pipeline stages and team management.
It also reminds you to follow up with a lead so you don’t miss on opportunities.
GET CRM TEMPLATE
4. Pipedrive’s template
To get this Excel CRM which is compatible with Google Sheets as well you need to sign up.
It’s affordable, easy to use, and fully customizable.
It shows us how to build a CRM in Excel with contacts, companies, and pipelines.
It works well for small-scale companies.
5. HubSpot’s template
HubSpot’s Excel and Google Sheets CRM template eases your sales process. It has worksheets, organizations, contacts, opportunities, and Interactions.
It shows your sales pipeline, the value of your open opportunities, number of contacts, and other essential information. Track your sales data in the Dashboard sheet where you can have a complete overview of your leads and customers.
It offers Hubspot for Sheets add-on that helps you sync your information across Google Sheets you have as a CRM.
6. Zapier’s template
Zapier has an article on How to create a spreadsheet CRM. In the article they have given a step by step guide on how to create and use it. When you need to connect your CRM with different applications Zapier is one of automation platforms you can use.
You can download their template by clicking on the link.
7. NetHunt’s template
Key advantages of having NetHunt’s template are easy to manage, no need to be a coding whizz or to reinvent the wheel. It’s a diverse template that has different pages to maintain different data.
You also need not to worry about adding users. It’s free and no need to worry about upgrading subscription plans.
8. Knack’s template
A free template that offers unique features apart from the other templates. Knack’s template helps you to centralize your customer and leads data. It automates critical workflows and you can customize it according to your business needs.
It comes with advanced security and powerful reporting capabilities. You gain full control over your leads, marketing, and sales process.
9. Teamopipe CRM template
Contacts Database: It stores customer details in a sheet (dataset) that can be used to contact your leads and customers. These details could be name, phone number, email address, and notes.
Pipeline Tracker: It’s a phase where every entrepreneur can manage their leads and sales. It helps you stay in touch with your customers at various points of their journey. You can track your deals across different stages like “follow-up”, “Negotiation”, “closed/won/lost”
Pivot Tables: It’s essential for real-time updates based on your data entries, providing dynamic insights. With pivot tables you can easily analyse large datasets and aggregate it to easily understand numbers.
Insights Dashboard: It provides a dashboard that helps you get insights from your data. It visualises your data in charts and graphs so anyone can easily understand what’s going on in your business.
You get automatically updated with totals, conversion rates, and revenue forecasts.
Customizable Settings: This template is highly customizable so you can add or modify dropdown options for deal stages, lead sources, and assignees.
10. ActiveCampaign’s CRM template
11. Onesheet CRM template
It’s a 100% free easy-to-learn and simple CRM created in Google Sheets for customer relationship management. This CRM helps you focus on three aspects of customer relationship management, contact management, custom marketing and sales pipeline, and dashboard.
Contact management where you manage your lead details like their email and phone number. Custom sales pipeline can help you track your leads across various channels and phases of their journey. You manage your opportunities in the pipeline. And, finally dashboard where you can see summarized insights beautifully aligned on a single dashboard.
12. Vertex42 CRM template
The Microsoft Excel version consists of formulas and no VBA code (Macros).
With Excel features like conditional formatting you can highlight important dates like last call and next call. Sorting helps you order data based on estimated value. Filtering helps filter out clients based on status like loss or win. You can also filter out contact based on urgency.
With all these detailed oriented CRM it’s easy to manage sales and contacts in an Excel or Google Sheet file.
13. Softr
Here is link to download the Softr Template
Here is a video on how to build no-code in Soft with Google Sheets.
14. Smartsheet
Smartsheet offers a flexible CRM for small businesses that can easily manage your leads, contacts, customers, sales pipeline, and so much more. It is an intelligent work management platform.
15. MailParser
It also enables you to track your leads and organize them in one place.
16. Our Own
We have been working on our CRM Template. Check out our templates
17. Sheetify
Sheetify CRM is one time purchase, no subscription toolkit to manage your contacts, marketing, and sales in a Google Sheet. You will have lifetime upgrades and lifetime access. You can track your customers, manage inventory, send bulk emails, instant messages, calls, and task management. It’s the most affordable and functional spreadsheet CRM in the market.
Visit SheetifyCRM.com
Benefits of Using a CRM in Google Sheets or Excel
Affordability: Often businesses don’t have funds to afford a full fledged CRM software. Most of them do not require them in their initial stage.
Customizability: Spreadsheets are easy to customize. That’s one of the reasons businesses start managing their customer information in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet.
Ease of Use: Spreadsheets don’t have steep learning curves that’s why it’s very easy to use. Anyone with some basic knowledge can manage a business on a spreadsheet.
Collaboration: With online Excel and Google Sheets any business can collaborate with virtual assistance or freelancers from any country.
Limitations of Using Google Sheets as a CRM
Spreadsheet applications have limited automation that’s the reason people need to do some manual work. In many cases you have to do manual data entry. It’s quite time consuming and error-prone although with Google or Excel form you can minimize. Excel and Google form minimizes the chance of mistakes and saves time. As business grows business owners face scalability challenges and security risks.
Spreadsheets do not have native integrations that’s why we need to rely on third party applications.
CONCLUSION
Using a CRM template in a business is a must for entrepreneurs. Spreadsheets software like Excel and Google Sheets offers simplicity to handle complex customer relationship management, a simple task for every business owner.
A customer journey that starts from contacting you for your products and services, from this point you need to take your customer to various stages and convert this opportunity into a sale and across this journey Google Sheets/Excel helps you grow your business.
Every business owner uses a spreadsheet for various small and big tasks.
Free CRM templates are a good starting point for any new business but eventually they need to move on to paid spreadsheet templates and then a full-fledged software because of spreadsheets’ limitations.
