Why this startup chose a simple CRM over spreadsheets

Glen Allyn Tea Estates began in Australia back in the 1980s. For decades, the company produced black tea for drinking. However, a couple of years ago, everything changed.

Russell Ingredients is now targeting new markets with new customers, and their sales team needed a tool that could help them build and scale from scratch.

Piers Leach, International Sales Lead at Russell Ingredients, knew that starting with the right CRM would make all the difference.

A startup needs a CRM from day one

Russell Ingredients has a small team responsible for selling its products globally.

Piers began in his role in early 2025. Prior to this, he worked for a large multinational company using Salesforce.

When he joined Russell Ingredients, one of his first priorities was finding a CRM system.

As a new company, Piers believed it was important to implement a CRM early, rather than relying on Excel and migrating data later.

“With a CRM, it’s easy to track leads and opportunities,” he explains.

Finding the right CRM for a small team

Salesforce worked well at Piers’ previous company, which had hundreds of salespeople. But with a small team, Russell Ingredients needed something different.

The team started researching CRM options, including Salesforce, Freshsales, Vtiger CRM, Zoho, and a handful of others—each with its own merits.

However, there were three important criteria.

First, the company already used Xero for accounting and needed a CRM with a native integration. Many CRMs claimed they could integrate, but in reality, you had to purchase another application or pay for custom development.

“After having worked with Salesforce for many years, I know that customization or development can be expensive,” Piers says.

Second, simplicity mattered. For many team members, a CRM was a new tool, so Piers wanted to find a simple-to-use and straight-out-of-the-box solution, with no customization required.

The third fact was cost-effectiveness.

After evaluating all the options, OnePageCRM came out as the best fit. It offered a native Xero integration, was easy to use, and the pricing made sense for a small team.

Getting started in minutes, not weeks

Each week, OnePageCRM offers live demos, and Piers attended one of the trainings. However, the system was so intuitive that training almost felt unnecessary.

“OnePageCRM is very simple to use,” Piers says.

The email integration was particularly useful. The team linked the CRM with their email accounts, so all correspondence with contacts is now automatically saved in OnePageCRM.

The Xero integration proved just as simple. Piers was chatting with the company founder during their free trial, who asked how to link OnePageCRM to Xero.

“I had no idea,” Piers says. “Then the founder said, ‘Oh, hold on—I’ve just linked it.’ And it was that simple.”

Perfect CRM for trade shows

OnePageCRM’s mobile app was especially useful at trade shows.

When the team attended trade shows recently, they used the AI Business Card Scanner to capture contacts. By simply taking a photo of a business card, the CRM automatically creates a contact, allowing the user to assign an action and save it instantly.

“We all found this feature a real lifesaver because otherwise you’re just collecting loads of name cards, and writing an action on them,” Piers says.

Instead of walking away from a trade show with a stack of business cards to manually enter later, the team captured every contact on the spot and added follow-up actions.

Staying organized as a remote team

With team members spread across multiple continents, staying organized is critical.

That’s why all contacts in their CRM get assigned to one of the team members. The team also sends emails through OnePageCRM, which helps them understand how many times these emails are opened—another useful feature for understanding customer engagement.

The team holds regular catch-ups to review the Action Stream and discuss next steps.

“At the moment, OnePageCRM has all of the features we need,” Piers says.

Building the foundation for growth

For a new company like Russell Ingredients, getting the fundamentals right early makes a huge difference.

By implementing a CRM from day one, they’ve set themselves up to track every lead and follow up consistently.

The team didn’t need a complex CRM system with hundreds of features, just a simple solution that worked out of the box, integrated with their existing tools, and could grow with them as they scale.

OnePageCRM gave them exactly that—and at an affordable price for their team.