Problem A12
I track deals and follow-ups in a spreadsheet, and things fall through the cracks.
What you are doing now
Every deal gets its own row: name, stage, last contacted, next step. You update it when you remember to. Two people editing it at once overwrite each other. A deal that goes quiet for a month just sits there because nothing tells you to chase it.
How often: Continuous — this is the state of the pipeline at any moment, not a one-off task.
What you want instead
Every deal has one record, a defined stage, and something that actually surfaces it when it needs a next action — not a column you have to remember to scan.
The free option first
A permanently free CRM (Zoho CRM's free edition covers up to 3 users; HubSpot's free CRM is another option, already named on our lead-follow-up page) does this without a spreadsheet at all. For one person with a handful of deals, even a well-kept spreadsheet is a legitimate answer — the free tier only earns its keep once more than one person touches the pipeline.
Who should not do this
A single person with under about ten active deals who actually keeps the spreadsheet current. Moving that to a CRM is mostly change for its own sake until a second person needs to see the same pipeline.
Before you build anything for this, the Automation Decision Sheet works out whether it is worth automating at all. It is free, needs no email address, and often concludes that it is not.
Tools relevant to this
We have not built and run a workflow for this one yet. Below is the tool this problem relates to, reviewed from its own documentation rather than from hands-on testing — the tool page says exactly which.
See the full comparison: Free CRM vs. paid automation →