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Case study · Leads · Automation · Ways of working

Keep the sheet.
Lose the copying.

The team had always tracked leads in a Google Sheet. It worked, they knew it, and no shiny new tool would have made their day faster. The problem wasn't the sheet. It was getting the leads into it.

Problem

Every lead arrived by email and had to be copied into the team’s Google Sheet by hand.

Solution

The website now writes each lead into the sheet, the inbox and the team chat at once, with one shared ID.

1
sheet the team already knew
3
places every lead lands at once
1
ID to follow a lead the whole way

Context

Every enquiry from the website arrived by email. Someone on the team then copied it by hand into the Google Sheet where they followed up each lead.

The problem

Copying by hand is slow, easy to forget and easy to get wrong. And the same lead lived in three places that didn't know about each other: the email, the team chat, the sheet.

What I found

  • The team liked the sheet: everyone knew how to use it, and it was where decisions happened.
  • A new CRM would have meant new habits, new logins and a migration, for a team that already had a working system.
  • What was missing wasn't a tool. It was the connection between the website and the sheet.

What I did

  • Website → sheet: every form now writes its lead straight into the sheet, with a default status ready to update.
  • Website → inbox and chat: the same lead arrives as an email to the shared inbox and as a message in the team chat.
  • One ID everywhere: the sheet, the email and the chat message share the same lead ID, so anyone can follow a lead through the whole journey.
Why not move them to a proper CRM?

The team already had one: the sheet. Forcing a new tool would have cost weeks of habits for no faster result. Connecting the one they use was enough.

Outcome

No more copying. The team closes and comments leads in the sheet, gets them instantly in the inbox and the chat, and has a single place to see what's happening.

What I'd do differently

Add the shared ID from day one. It's the small detail that makes three separate places feel like one system.

“Sometimes the best new tool is the old spreadsheet, finally connected.”