CRM & sales

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. In practice it’s just software for keeping track of your sales conversations and clients: a structured contact book that also tracks where each deal is up to.

Instead of trying to remember that you need to follow up with one person on Thursday, another is waiting on a proposal, and a third went quiet three weeks ago. The CRM tracks all of that for you. Each contact has a record: who they are, what you’ve discussed, what the next step is, whether they became a customer.

For a new founder, it’s the difference between “I think I remember where that conversation was up to” and actually knowing.

Most people install a CRM too early. They spend two weeks setting up pipelines and custom fields for a business that has six prospects. This is not a good use of time.

Here’s the honest answer: you don’t need a CRM until you have more leads than you can hold in your head. That number is roughly 20–30 active conversations.

When to stay on a spreadsheet

If you’re just starting out and you have fewer than 20 people you’re actively in conversation with, a Google Sheet is a completely valid CRM. Column headers: Name, Company, Email, Stage, Last Contact, Notes, Next Action. That’s it.

The advantage of a spreadsheet at this stage is that you actually use it. Elaborate CRM systems get abandoned within weeks by solo founders who don’t have time to maintain them.

When to move to a real CRM

You need a CRM when: you have more prospects than you can track mentally, you’re missing follow-ups, you’re spending time trying to remember where conversations left off, or you’re starting to build a sales process that repeats.

For most B2B founders, this happens somewhere between 3–12 months in.

The tools worth knowing

HubSpot is the most compelling free CRM in existence. Genuinely free, not a trial. Contact management, deal pipelines, email integration, meeting scheduling, and a document library, all free. Paid plans add marketing automation and reporting features you don’t need at the start. Start on the free plan. You may never need to pay.

Pipedrive: a focused sales pipeline tool, excellent if your business is primarily outbound sales. Cleaner interface than HubSpot for pure deal tracking. From £14.90/user/month.

Notion or Airtable as a CRM is underrated for early-stage founders. If you’re already using Notion for everything else, a CRM database in Notion with relationship linking works surprisingly well up to 100+ contacts.

What I’d actually do

Start with the free HubSpot CRM and use it simply. Just contacts and deals. Turn off all the features you don’t need (and there are many).

When you find yourself saying “I wish I could automatically do X when a deal moves to this stage” is when to look at paid features or more specialised tools.