By Brett Kaufman. 8 years using relationships to build sales pipelines, from political fundraising to a 7 figure business to running matchmaking for two communities. Over 1,000 introductions facilitated.

A broker tracking spreadsheet template needs one row per broker and the columns that make your next message specific: territory, deal size, last real touch, listings sent, pass reasons, and the reason for the next touch. A spreadsheet holds up while you can scan it in one sitting. Past that, the next touch column goes stale.

Here is the scene. Tuesday, 6 a.m. You open the sheet, sort by Next Touch, and 47 rows are in the past. You text three brokers, mean to update the dates, and a seller call starts. The sheet still says those three are overdue. By Friday you trust it less. By next month you sort by firm instead, because the dates stopped meaning anything.

The sheet is not the problem. Spreadsheets are a fine record. The gap is the daily decision.

What goes in a broker tracking spreadsheet template?

Use these 14 columns. This is the template. Copy the column names into row one of Google Sheets or Excel.

Column	What goes in it	Example (illustrative)
Broker	First and last name	Broker name
Firm	Brokerage and office	Example Business Advisors, Dallas
Territory	Where they sell	North Texas
Deal size	Typical revenue or EBITDA they list	$1M to $3M EBITDA
Industries	What they sell most	HVAC, home services
Tier	A (talk often), B (quarterly), C (watch listings)	A
How we met	Event, intro, cold, listing inquiry	Intro from a CPA
Last real touch	Date and what was said	Oct 2, call about a plumbing listing
Listings sent	Deals they sent you, with dates	3 since June
Pass reasons	Why you passed, and whether you told them	Customer concentration, told him
Promised them	Open loops you created	Send my lender’s name
Next touch	Date and the reason	Oct 20, send the lender intro
Source of reason	Where the reason came from	Their new listing post
Status	Warm, due, or cold	Due

Two columns do most of the work. Pass reasons makes your next message to that broker specific instead of generic. Source of reason forces every next touch to have a real trigger, not a calendar date. If you need names to fill the sheet, the IBBA Find a Business Broker directory searches member brokers by city or zip, radius, specialty and industry.

How do I use the template each week?

Run it in this order, and keep it to minutes, not hours.

1. Monday, sort by Tier then Next Touch. Text the A tier brokers who are due, each with the reason from the sheet.
2. After every call, update two cells. Last real touch and Next touch. Nothing else is required.
3. When a listing arrives, log it and the pass reason. Then tell the broker why you passed, in two lines.
4. Friday, clear the Promised them column. Every open loop is either done or rescheduled with a date.
5. Monthly, move brokers between tiers. Whoever sent you a fit moves up. Whoever went silent for a quarter moves down.

For running a couple hundred brokers this way, how searchers keep 200 brokers warm without a VA goes deeper on the tiers.

What does a spreadsheet do well?

It does more than people give it credit for. Be fair to it.

• Free, and yours. No vendor, no seat price, no export problem.
• Shareable. A search partner, an analyst or an investor can read it with no login to a new tool.
• Flexible. Add a column the day you need one.
• Fast to filter. Every broker in Ohio who lists manufacturing, in two clicks.
• No learning curve. You already know how to use it.

When is a spreadsheet enough, and when do you need a personal CRM?

A spreadsheet is enough while it stays true. Use this decision table, which is the part most template pages leave out.

Your situation	Spreadsheet	Add a personal CRM
Under a few dozen active brokers, plenty of admin time	Enough	Optional
Next touch dates mostly accurate	Enough	Optional
You text brokers from your phone and forget to log it	Strains	Yes
A live deal is eating your week	Breaks	Yes
You meet 20 or more people at each event	Breaks at capture	Yes
You need to know who posted or changed firms	Cannot see it	Yes
You need a record to share with investors	Best tool	Keep the sheet

The last row matters. Most people who add a personal CRM keep the spreadsheet as the record. The same split works with a full CRM, which is the idea in I already have a CRM, why would I need this.

Where does a broker spreadsheet break?

It breaks because it never taps you on the shoulder.

• It does not know you texted someone from your phone.
• It cannot see that a broker posted a listing or moved firms this morning.
• The Next touch date is only as good as the last time you typed it.
• Capturing 30 people at a conference means 30 rows typed later, if at all.

I know the manual version well. In political fundraising I raised $3M on a hand kept tracking system, and it cost me hours a week. It works. It just charges you in time.

Here is how I would run it

Keep the spreadsheet as the record of brokers, listings and pass reasons. Put the daily question somewhere that answers it for you: which broker to text today, and why.

That is what FRONT OF MIND does. You open it to your 10 minutes for today. Each person has one line on why today: they posted, a follow up is due, a pipeline deal has been quiet 7 days, you met at an event and never followed up, they are going cold. Each one has a draft, 40 words max, written like a text. Nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits. At an event, say a name and a sentence out loud, snap a card or badge, or take a selfie together, and it is filed under the event.

Your contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them. Export or delete anytime. There is no native iPhone app yet. It runs in your phone browser and you can save it to your home screen.

Tempted to paste the sheet into ChatGPT instead? Read can I use ChatGPT as a personal CRM first. Comparing tools? Every personal CRM comparison in one place has them side by side.

Keep the sheet. Start free with your first 25 contacts and see which broker comes up first. See how it works

See how it works