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There’s a myth in modern offices that innovation must sparkle. That every system worth its salt comes with dashboards, licences, and a monthly subscription fee that makes your finance team wince. I believed that myth once—until I didn’t.
Our sales team was drowning in spreadsheets. We had leads coming in from five different sources, tracked on individual Excel files, logged manually in notebooks, and followed up through scattered Outlook tasks. It was chaotic. Leads went cold. Clients were forgotten. And morale was slipping fast.
One morning, while reconciling yet another mismatched sales report, I realised something both depressing and liberating: we didn’t need another expensive CRM. We already *had* the tools. Microsoft 365 was sitting there quietly—unassuming, powerful, and criminally underused. All it needed was a little imagination.
That week, I began sketching what would later become our custom-built CRM. I mapped every stage of the sales journey—enquiry, quotation, follow-up, booking confirmation—and asked myself: how do we make this repeatable, measurable, and idiot-proof? Access became the database backbone. Outlook managed the communication. OneNote held client histories. Power Automate tied everything together like invisible thread. Suddenly, the chaos started to make sense.
At first, nobody took it seriously. One colleague joked, “So, we’re trusting our pipeline to a glorified address book?” I smiled. They weren’t wrong. But I also knew that if I could centralize just three things—client data, follow-up reminders, and quotation tracking—we’d reclaim hours every day. And we did.
Within three months, the results were undeniable. Our response time to client inquiries dropped by 40%. Missed follow-ups went down to nearly zero. Sales forecasting became data-driven, not gut-driven. The team that once dreaded end-of-month reporting now looked forward to the numbers. Because for the first time, those numbers made sense.
The best part? We spent exactly zero dollars in software costs. Every component lived within Microsoft 365—Access databases stored on LAN, automated notifications through Outlook, and task syncing via To Do. It was the definition of “unsexy tech.” But it worked. Reliably. Efficiently. Every single day.
“Real innovation isn’t about buying new tools. It’s about using what you already have—smarter.”
That experience changed how I view technology in business. The obsession with shiny new platforms blinds many companies to the simple truth: the magic is in the method, not the medium. I didn’t build a CRM because I loved databases. I built it because my team was bleeding time. Because I was tired of seeing effort wasted on inefficiency. Because leadership means solving problems with the tools at hand, not waiting for the perfect ones to appear.
There’s beauty in unglamorous innovation. It doesn’t photograph well. It won’t trend on LinkedIn. But when your sales team stops chasing lost leads and starts hitting their stride, you’ll understand what true digital transformation feels like—not a revolution, just a quiet recalibration.
Today, that homegrown CRM remains the backbone of our operations. It doesn’t need hype. It delivers. Every lead tracked. Every quote followed up. Every sale accounted for. Simple. Functional. Ours.
So, if your systems are leaking oil, don’t rush to buy a new car. Open the hood. See what you already have. You might just discover that the fix—and the future—sit right inside your Office 365 license.
Sometimes, the best tech isn’t sexy—it’s steady.