Template
Free CRM spreadsheet template
A client and contact tracker for Google Sheets or Excel, built around the column most CRM templates leave out: when you last had a real conversation. Download it, no email address required.
Download the template
A CSV file. Open it in Excel, or use File then Import in Google Sheets. No account and no email address.
crm-spreadsheet-template.csvThe columns, and why each one is there
| Column | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Company, website, industry, size | The account. Four columns is enough to segment a book of a few hundred clients. |
| Contact name, role, email, phone, LinkedIn | The person, with the role, because in B2B the role decides whether they can say yes. |
| Relationship owner | Who at your firm holds this. Blank means nobody, and nobody is how clients go quiet. |
| Status | Prospect, active client, past client. Past clients are the most valuable rows in the sheet and the ones usually deleted. |
| Source and introduced by | Where they came from and who introduced them. Group by this column once a year and you will be surprised. |
| First contact and last meaningful contact | The two dates that matter. Meaningful means a real exchange, not a newsletter send. |
| Next step and next step date | A commitment with a date. Everything without one is a name in a list. |
| Lifetime value | What they have paid you in total. The number that decides who gets your attention, and almost nobody tracks it. |
| Notes | One cell. Context that would not fit in a field, kept short on purpose. |
The one habit that makes this work
Sort by last meaningful contact, oldest first, and read the top twenty rows once a month. Pick three and get in touch. That is thirty minutes and it is more business development than most firms of any size actually do.
The rest of the columns exist to help you choose which three. Lifetime value and introduced-by are usually the two that decide it.
Why past clients are the point
Most templates in this category are prospect lists, which assumes the hard part is finding people. In a service business the hard part is remembering the people you already impressed, and a prospect list quietly deletes them the moment the project ends.
Keep past clients in the same sheet with a status, not in an archive. The archive is where relationships go to be forgotten.
What the sheet will not do
It will not update itself, which is the whole limitation, and every other one follows from it. The last-contact column decays the moment people stop maintaining it, and everything useful here reads that column.
It will not stop two people spelling a client name differently, tell you a contact changed jobs, or answer a question that needs joining rows together. Those are the three walls, and they arrive in that order.
When you outgrow it
The columns are named to map onto standard CRM fields, so this file imports cleanly. Portage reads the CSV, maps the columns and owners, shows a preview with record counts, then imports in the background with rollback if the mapping was wrong. Tidy the company names first: duplicate spellings become duplicate records, and that is true of every CRM, not just ours.