The pipeline that lived in a spreadsheet

The problem

OMAK Technologies sells the OMAK POS system to restaurants and retailers. The established sales approach centred on in-person demonstrations, and each new business development hire built their own pipeline from scratch rather than inheriting one. I joined in 2024 with a product to sell and an empty list.

What I found when I did the work manually

I started with demos and widened out: personal outreach, social media campaigns with paid boosting, cold calls, in-person visits and, when it made sense, door to door. Over nearly two years a pattern settled.

My best channel was my existing customers. Their recommendations, of OMAK and sometimes of me personally, produced my easiest sales. Social media built a base level of awareness, which meant cold calls started from recognition rather than zero. Cold calls reliably produced meetings. Meetings were not the same thing as customers.

The friction I didn’t expect was tracking. I started on the free versions of popular CRM tools, but they were too restrictive and didn’t keep my data long term, so I moved everything to Excel: client, status, notes, contact person, numbers.

That held up while the list was short. But most of my time went into building the funnel, and every new prospect was another row. Once the sheet ran past what fit on a screen, keeping track of each client became a job in itself, and the spreadsheet gave me no help doing it.

What I built

A pipeline, not a system.

By the end it covered 50 locations across more than 30 clients. It worked because I carried it. The spreadsheet recorded what I typed and reminded me of nothing: no next-action dates, no record of who had referred whom, no way to ask “who haven’t I spoken to in a month?” without scrolling.

When I moved on, I handed over to my teammates. I briefed them on the active accounts and introduced them to those clients in person. The rest of the sheet was shared as a file. The knowledge that mattered travelled in the briefings, not the spreadsheet, which is the clearest test I know of whether something is a system or a record.

What changed

The other change was mine. Months inside a spreadsheet that got harder to use every week, and time working alongside OMAK’s CEO, pushed me back towards my technical background. I stopped assuming the fix for a broken workflow was a product someone else sells, and started building the tools myself.

What I would do differently

Build the follow-up layer before the volume arrives, not after it hurts. Every contact gets a next action and a date. Every referral is logged against the client who made it, so the channel that actually works is visible and can be repeated deliberately instead of by luck. And a handover becomes a query (“everything open, by status, with the last conversation”) rather than a file someone has to read.

None of that needs an enterprise CRM. It needs a clear definition of what “good follow-up” looks like, written down before any tooling is chosen. That is the idea I later built my recruitment operating system around.

Next step

If your pipeline lives in one person's head or one growing spreadsheet, I've been that person. Let's talk about turning it into a system.

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