Spreadsheet CRMs get dismissed by everyone selling software, which makes the advice around them worse than it needs to be. For a single person selling, a sheet is often the correct tool, and the failure mode is not that it is a spreadsheet. It is that most people build the wrong one.
Building one that holds up
Three tabs. Companies: name, domain, industry, size, owner, source. People: name, company, role, email, phone, LinkedIn. Deals: company, value, stage, opened date, close date, and the two columns everything depends on.
Next step and next step date. Every open row must have both. A next step is a specific action (“send pricing to Anna”), not a status. Sorted by next step date, that column is your working day, and it is the difference between a CRM and a list of people you once spoke to.
Add last contact so you can see what has gone quiet, and source so you eventually learn where deals come from. Then stop. Every formula and dashboard you add is something to maintain, and the sheet still in use in three months is the plain one.
What it costs you
Nothing, until one of three things happens.
A second editor. Shared spreadsheets get overwritten, and the version that wins is whoever saved last. Cloud files reduce this and do not remove it.
No history. A cell shows its current value, not what it was last month or who changed it. You cannot answer what moved this week, which is the question a pipeline review is made of.
No memory of its own. The sheet is exactly as current as the last time someone chose to update it, and updating it is a task that competes with selling.
When to move, and where
| Move | Best when | Cost |
|---|---|---|
 Stalar |
The sheet is stale because updating it is a chore | Pay per contact found |
 HubSpot |
You want free, with room to grow | Free, tiers rise fast |
 Pipedrive |
You want a pipeline and nothing else | From ~€15/user/mo |
 folk |
You track relationships more than deals | From ~$25/user/mo |
 Attio |
You liked the spreadsheet’s flexibility | From ~$34/user/mo |
HubSpot’s free tier is the honest next step from a spreadsheet for most teams: no cost, real contact records, and email sync that removes the typing the sheet demanded.
Attio suits people who liked how malleable the spreadsheet was and want that with sync and history underneath.
Stalar matters for the third failure specifically. The first two problems, editors and history, are what a CRM is for, and any tool above solves them. The third one follows you: every CRM in that table is also exactly as current as the last person who typed into it, which is the habit that made the spreadsheet stale. Stalar is the agentic workspace for sales and revenue teams. A sales brain records every prospect, conversation and touchpoint and learns from each one, and agents keep the record current from what was actually said, draft the follow-ups in your voice, brief you before meetings, and build lists with verified contacts, priced per contact found. You approve instead of typing.
Deciding
- Fix the columns before you switch tools. If your sheet has no next step column, you have not outgrown the spreadsheet yet.
- Count the editors. More than one is the clearest signal to move.
- Ask why it is out of date. If the answer is that updating it is a separate job from selling, changing tools without changing that gets you a stale CRM instead of a stale sheet. The measured version of that is what most connected pipelines look like.
