Yes.
You need a simple CRM — not a quoting suite, and not the enterprise stuff a rep will pitch you.
What's really going on
You already have the fields that matter: quote number, company, contact, customer reference, material, grade, salesperson. That's a pipeline in disguise. The pain isn't the sheet — it's that a steel enquiry turns into a bespoke email each time, and nobody chases the ones that go quiet. Lost quotes rarely die from bad pricing. They die from silence on day four.
What to do instead
- Pipedrive Lite — around €14 per seat per month on annual billing. Move your Excel columns in as deal fields, save two email templates (quote + follow-up), and set an automatic task 3 days after every quote goes out.
- Capsule CRM — free for up to 2 users and 250 contacts, Starter around $18/user/month on annual billing. EU-friendly, GDPR-clean, and runs on regional payment processing. Good if you're two salespeople and want to try before paying.
- First action, doable in 30 minutes: open your last 10 sent quote emails, pull out the sentences that never change, and paste them into one template with placeholders for company, material, grade, price, and validity. That single template is 80% of what a CRM will do for you — the CRM just makes it one click.
What you're being oversold
Anyone pitching you HubSpot Sales Hub or Salesforce for a steel-quote workflow is selling you a factory to bake one loaf. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional starts at $100 per user per month and HubSpot Professional carries a required $1,500 onboarding fee — none of that solves "write the quote email faster." The real cost of staying on Excel isn't the sheet; it's the quotes that sit unread while a competitor calls the buyer on Thursday morning.
When to revisit this
When you're juggling more than 40–50 open enquiries at once, or when you start needing to track the supplier side (which mill, which lead time) inside the same record.
The part worth getting right
One judgment call decides your tool. Is your quote a real PDF with line items, tonnage, incoterms, and validity — or is it a price and lead time inside an email body? If it's a PDF, plain Pipedrive Lite or Capsule Starter isn't enough; you'll want a document builder (Pipedrive's Smart Docs add-on, or a dedicated quoting tool) so line items and totals aren't retyped. If it's an email quote, either CRM's built-in templates cover you and any document add-on is money burned. Guess wrong here and you either pay for features you never open, or migrate everything again in six months.