Am I the only agency still managing clients in a spreadsheet?
Finn A. MarstersAgency Owner · retainer consultingNew ZealandGrowing Team·6d ago54
I have six retainer clients, an ops person, and somehow I'm still the only one who knows what's happening across all of them. We tried a big CRM last year — my ops lead spent two weeks building it, I couldn't figure out how to log a call without creating a deal, and we quietly stopped opening it. So the spreadsheet came back.
The frustrating part is I don't think the problem is the tool. I think it's that I never clearly decided what belongs in there. So before I burn another month on onboarding a system that dies, I want to know what you actually track. Not the feature list, the decision.
I leave for a two-week break in January with a phone that will still ring. That's the real deadline.
CONTEXT AT PUBLICATION
What a useful answer should help achieve
A clear decision rule for what to track so a CRM survives contact with a real week, and the next tool choice follows from that.
Already tried
A full CRM onboarding that collapsed after two weeks, then a return to the spreadsheet.
Constraints and unknowns
One ops person who is part-time on this, and cannot be the only person who maintains the system.
Agency Owner · retainer consulting · Growing Team · This snapshot stays with the question when the author updates their profile.
Track only what triggers a decision: next action date, owner, last contact, and money. If a field doesn't change what someone does that week, cut it during setup. We went from 40 fields to 6.
Why the asker chose this: This is the one I am acting on — thank you.
I ran a two-month trial logging only the renewal date and the person responsible, nothing else. It held. When I added revenue forecasting too early, it fell over — so the ceiling may be about four fields, not the software's features.
Blunt version: your ops person shouldn't be the one keeping it alive. If the system needs her to function, it isn't a system yet. Pick whatever loads in ten seconds on your phone and enter the data yourself for the first month.
