A lead sheet for a firm with ten enquiries a month

With ten enquiries a month, you need one sheet with eight columns, one row per enquiry, and a rule that every open row has a next date. A partner should be able to sort by that date and know in two minutes who is waiting for a reply. Software can wait. What cannot wait is the habit of writing down where each enquiry came from and what happens next.

Why a sheet is enough at this size

Ten enquiries a month is a number a person can hold in their head, and that is the problem. Memory works until one partner is travelling or the one who took the call is in a hearing. Then an enquiry from a dentist's brother-in-law sits for three weeks.

A sheet makes the pipeline visible to everyone at once. It also shows you, after a quarter, which source sends the clients you want. No CRM can show that if the data was never recorded.

The eight columns

Date in | Name & phone | Source | What they need | Stage | Owner | Next step | Next date

A sample, with invented entries for a quality-systems consultancy:

03/09 | Meera, 98xxx  | Referral: existing client | Documents for a customer audit, forging unit | Talked        | Anil  | Visit to her plant         | 06/09
05/09 | Mr Rao, 99xxx | Website form              | Training for 20 operators                    | Proposal sent | Anil  | Call to ask about doubts   | 10/09
07/09 | Satish, 97xxx | Walk-in                   | Gap check before a certification audit       | New           | Priya | Return the call            | 07/09

Date, source and need are written once and never changed. Stage, owner, next step and next date are rewritten every time something happens.

What goes in each column, and what does not

Source is a short list you choose in advance: referral, website form, WhatsApp, walk-in, directory, event. Ban free text, or you will find "Google", "google search" and "Gooogle" in three different rows. Where the source is a referral, add the name of who sent them in the need column.

What they need is one line in the prospect's words, not yours.

Stage has five values: New, Talked, Proposal sent, Won, Lost. Add a sixth, "Declined", for work you turned away. Do not add more. Every new stage is a place for an enquiry to hide.

Next date is mandatory on any row that is not Won, Lost or Declined. A row without a date is easy to forget.

How a partner reads it in two minutes

Sort by next date, oldest first. Read down the first column of overdue dates. For each, ask one question: "Who owns this, and will they act today?" Then filter by Proposal sent and look at how old each is.

That is the whole meeting. If it takes ten minutes, you are discussing enquiries that should already have been settled.

Colour one rule only: red when next date is before today. More colours are decoration, and a sheet that looks busy gets opened less. If the sheet is shared with a junior, show them the red rule on day one so nobody has to ask what it means.

An invented case: a quality-systems consultancy in Rajkot

Take an invented four-person consultancy in Rajkot that helps small engineering units prepare for customer audits. Enquiries reached it by phone, by WhatsApp to whichever partner was nearest, and through an old website form that went to one inbox. The partners kept the details in their heads and talked about them on Fridays.

The first Friday with the sheet showed three of the last ten enquiries with no owner. It also showed a forging-unit owner who had written twice and heard nothing. Everyone had assumed a colleague was replying. So they added the Owner column, with a house rule: whoever first sees a message puts their own name in the row before they reply.

After a quarter the Source column settled an argument a year old. Of the six engagements won, four came through two referrers. The website form sent twenty-two enquiries and only one reached a proposal. They stopped spending hours on small form enquiries and put the time into thanking referrers properly. The change was not free: the sheet showed that two of the six wins had waited over a month for a first call, which nobody enjoyed reading aloud.

The Friday script

Use the same words every week, so the meeting stays short.

1. Sort by next date. Read every red row aloud: name, owner, what is stuck.
2. For each, the owner says one of three things: "calling today", "waiting on the client until this date", or "closing it as lost".
3. Filter to Proposal sent. Anything older than the gap between proposal and decision on your last few Won rows gets a call, not another email.
4. Last, read the Declined rows. If the same source keeps sending work you decline, say so and decide what to do about that source.

Nothing else is discussed. If a partner wants to talk about how to win a particular client, that is a separate conversation.

When the sheet stops being enough

Move to a CRM when two people edit the same row at once. Move too when you want reminders sent automatically, or when fifty enquiries a month make the list too long to read in one sitting. Until then, a tool with many features will cost more attention than it returns.

Do not use the sheet to hold confidential details about a client's matter. Keep the need to one line and put the substance in your normal case or project files. Rules on client confidentiality differ by profession and change, so check with your own body.

For the manufacturing version of the same idea, see the enquiry register for a manufacturer.

Set it up today

Open a shared spreadsheet, type the eight headings, and enter every enquiry you can remember from the last two months with a source for each. Give each open one a next date and an owner. If you later want the sheet replaced by a system, CRM consulting and selection is the service, the professional services hub has more for firms like yours, and you can tell us what you need.