The Occam’s razor of pipeline tools
How the Turtle Ventures Pipeline Tracker came to be
There are a lot of ways to track, manage, and advance your pipeline. There are also a lot of SaaS tools to help you in this process. Before you commit a lot of time and money to configuring a tool, I’d like to encourage you to steal mine instead.
Since managing my first P&L in 2006, I’ve been helping individuals and companies grow their income over the last 20 years. And throughout these two decades, there is one pre-CRM tool I use when I want the simplest answer to the deals I am working and relationships I am building: the Turtle Ventures Pipeline Tracker (TVPT).
When I think back to it’s true origins…
…it started as a few columns when I was the co-founder, President, and COO of JESS3 (and working with / learning from Joe Chernov when he was at Eloqua heading into their IPO and sale to Oracle)…
…then it grew into a 10 column scoring tool when I was the Managing Partner and COO of the Americas at Made by Many U.S. (in close partnership with then CEO and co-founder Stuart Eccles - if I remember correctly, he led the likelihood weighting and advanced column headers).
Finally, the TVPT has continued to evolve based on the startups and corporate ventures I’ve worked on, too. It’s even come in handle with a half dozen service businesses I’ve been involved with in the last 10 years.
Why I continue to use the Turtle Ventures Pipeline Tracker
I like using the TVPT because it…
…allows me to easily make entries, without the cumbersome layers of an opinionated software tool.
…is native to the Google Business Suite I am in all day - no need to login to another tool.
…is a less intimidating entry point for team members who don’t come from with a deep sales or marketing background.
…keeps me from automating too much too soon - the manual nature of it means I am closely connected to the story it is telling.
…helps me know when I’m ready to invest in a tool (and which data to bring over when I do).
Here’s what the Turtle Ventures Pipeline Tracker looks like
Embedded below for a quick glance, you can “make a copy” from Google Sheets here and adjust the columns and weighting as you see fit~
When should I move from a spreadsheet to a subscription?
I like the idea of “earning your right to the next level of investment” for most things in life. When you use something consistently, you’ll either wear it out (esp. clothing, shoes) or you’ll see what is coming up short for you in the current iteration (esp. devices, frameworks, tools).
They’ll come a point in your revenue journey where you will want to include more collaborators, more automation, more intelligence, and more decision-support. That’s when it’s time to evaluate opinionated SaaS tools. As starting point, I worked with ChatGPT5 to create this table to help you decide where you are in your revenue tool journey - what would you add or change??
Up to this point in the blog post, I’ve not used AI. From this point on, I have used AI.
How AI was used in this post:
Helping me refine my ideas for the above Jobs to Be Done table; generating embed code for the table, too (did I just vibe code??)
Helping me with embed code for my Turtle Ventures Pipeline Tracker GSheet (resizing for Squarespace - it did a great job!)
