Your Biggest Competitor Might Be a Spreadsheet and a WhatsApp Group

At The Woods, every customer file had its own WhatsApp group. There were dozens of them.

The group was where proposals went, where updates accumulated, and where people kept track of payments, purchases, and the different versions of a proposal as a negotiation progressed. If you needed to understand what had happened, the history was in there.

Somewhere.

Before I built their CRM, this was part of how the business operated. The Woods sells wood flooring and materials, and putting together a proposal involved several tools. There was a spreadsheet for preparing it, another with prices and stock, and Canva for the document the customer would receive: text, a logo, terms and conditions, and images of renders.

The salesperson brought those pieces together. They looked up the products, matched the information, and calculated the totals manually. Local copies of the files weren’t always current, so there was also back-and-forth to confirm what was correct.

At times, assembling a proposal took a whole day. With several to prepare, three days could pass and a customer still wouldn’t have received theirs.

It’s easy to look at that and wonder why the salesperson was taking so long. But look at the work involved. They were selling while also reconciling information, doing calculations, preparing documents, and navigating the history of several negotiations.

That is a lot to hold in your head. Calling it “preparing a proposal” makes it sound like one task.

The arrangement had developed because it was the easiest way to do things at the time.

That explanation deserves more respect than it often gets from people who build software.

A spreadsheet gives you somewhere to put information immediately. You can add a column when you discover something else you need to track. Canva lets you assemble a presentable document with the material you have. WhatsApp is already where customers contact you, receive proposals, and respond to follow-ups.

Using the same app to coordinate internally is an understandable next step. Create a group for the expediente, put the relevant information there, and keep adding updates.

It doesn’t require choosing a new platform or designing the whole process in advance. An exception can be explained in a message. The additional cash cost can be small, especially when the tools are already in use.

There is value in that flexibility. There is also value in knowing how to get something done with the tools in front of you.

When I built the CRM, I was competing with that entire arrangement: the files, the conversations, and the people who knew how to connect them. A cleaner interface alone wouldn’t have been much of an answer.

At The Woods, the problem was visible in the work required to produce a proposal.

The information existed, but bringing it together required effort every time. A salesperson had to establish which prices and stock figures to use before they could finish the document. Meanwhile, the customer was waiting.

The WhatsApp groups presented another version of the same problem. Keeping all the messages preserved the history, but navigating that history was difficult. Payments, purchases, and successive proposals were all in the conversation.

A negotiation produces versions for a reason. Being able to find the relevant one matters more than being able to demonstrate that somebody sent it at some point.

These are the details I find useful when considering what to build. A spreadsheet’s appearance tells me very little about whether it needs replacing. Repeatedly confirming data, recalculating totals, or searching for the state of a customer’s file tells me much more.

The same goes for missed follow-ups or unclear ownership: the useful question is where the work becomes unreliable, and who has to compensate for it.

In this case, the opportunity was concrete. Someone had already asked for a proposal. We needed to make it easier to get one into their hands.

I brought the product catalog, prices, and inventory into the system, automated the calculations, and made it possible to generate proposals in a standard format.

The team can now put a proposal together in minutes.

Payments, purchases, proposals, and the history of proposal versions are also kept in the system. It became much easier to keep track of what was happening.

WhatsApp still has a job. Prospects and customers use it to communicate, and the team uses it to send proposals and follow up. The internal records now have a home of their own.

That division matters. The conversation with the customer was useful. The difficult part was asking those conversations to carry the internal record of the work as well.

But getting there took more than building the application.

We set aside time to load the catalog and prices. I had to add support for bringing existing proposals and expedientes into the system. The work already in progress needed to come with us.

There was some resistance from sales agents. With management’s help, everyone started using it.

It would be convenient, as the person who built the software, to skip that part and jump straight to the proposals taking minutes. But the migration and adoption were part of the work required to get that result.

From the customer’s side, switching includes moving information, learning where things go, changing habits, and keeping another system current. Those demands exist even when the product is useful. They belong in the comparison with the old way of working.

This project gives me a more practical starting point for the next workflow I encounter: follow one piece of work all the way through.

Where does the information come from? Which parts get entered again? Who confirms that it is current? Where does someone have to stop and ask another person? What happens while they wait?

Then I can consider the size of the change. Sometimes one calculation or document-generation step is the problem. Sometimes several tasks depend on the same scattered information, and bringing that information together is worth a broader change. Sometimes the existing tool is doing a useful job and should remain part of the process.

At The Woods, we moved the internal records and proposal preparation into the CRM and kept WhatsApp for customer communication. That was a choice about where the work belonged.

Your product may have more features than a spreadsheet. It may be easier to maintain than a collection of files. It may even have a dashboard you’re particularly proud of.

The people using it still need a reason to move.

For this team, that reason was tangible: current information, a proposal they could prepare in minutes, and a customer’s history they could navigate without digging through a WhatsApp group.

Before you replace someone’s spreadsheet, ask them to show you how they get one real task done. What would your product make easier, and what would they have to take on to get that improvement?