Compare · Spreadsheets
The spreadsheet is the real incumbent. Treat it with respect.
Most firms that talk to us do not run BD on a CRM. They run it on a pipeline spreadsheet per team, a contacts tab, and a partner's memory. That system is free, flexible and familiar, and it has a failure mode that only shows up at year end.
- Zero learning curve: every partner can open it, filter it and argue with it.
- Total flexibility: a new column costs nothing and needs nobody's approval.
- No procurement, no per-seat licence, no vendor to security-review.
- Perfectly adequate for a handful of live pursuits owned by one person.
- It cannot tell you who in the firm knows the decision-maker, because relationships never fit in cells.
- Nothing arrives: tenders, planning activity and market signals must be found by a person and pasted in.
- The weighted pipeline is whatever the last editor believed, with no history and no challenge.
- Bid decisions and win/loss reasons live in a corridor conversation, not a record anyone can learn from.
- Pursuits drift silently: a spreadsheet has no idea that nothing has happened for three weeks.
- One BD manager becomes the human integration layer between five versions of the truth.
| Dimension | Pipeline spreadsheet | New Dynamics |
|---|---|---|
| Relationships | A contacts tab: names and emails, no owner, no strength, no routes. | Coverage: who owns each relationship, how strong it is, and which decision-makers nobody has a route to. |
| Market signals | Manual scanning of portals, when someone has time. | Live Find a Tender and Contracts Finder feeds, scored against your sectors and client base. |
| The pipeline number | Optimism, weighted by the person who typed it. | Weighted values with stages, honest probability and an audit trail behind the number the board hears. |
| Drift | Invisible until a deadline is missed. | Pursuits with no next action rise to the top of the priority feed. |
| Institutional memory | Leaves with the person who maintained the file. | Decisions, evidence and win/loss reasons stay on the record, per pursuit. |
| Cost | Free, plus the pursuits it loses. | From £49 per user per month, with Excel import so the spreadsheet's history comes with you. |
If your firm has one team, a dozen live pursuits and a single person who owns the number, keep the spreadsheet. It is the right tool, and moving would be ceremony.
The moment two teams share clients, or the board starts planning against the weighted number, the spreadsheet starts charging rent: missed signals, uncovered decision-makers, and pursuits that die of drift rather than decision. That rent does not appear on any invoice, which is exactly why it gets paid for years.
The migration is not a project. Excel import is on every plan, and the demonstration can run on your own exported pipeline if you bring it.
The rest of the argument is on the product tour and in plain pricing.
Bring the spreadsheet to the demo.
Twenty minutes, your real pipeline imported, and you can judge whether the difference pays for itself.