Yes.
You need a simple CRM.
What's really going on
Twenty-five engineers, two lead channels, up to fifty inquiries a month. That's small volume but a big team. Leads land in a shared inbox and quietly slip because two people think the other replied — or nobody does. Engineering deals are slow and high-value, so one dropped inquiry hurts for a year.
What to do instead
- HubSpot Free CRM (free) — put the web form and a shared email inbox on it, assign every new lead to one named owner, and set a 48-hour follow-up task by default. Free for unlimited users, which fits ten of you.
- Make (free tier) — one scenario: web form submission → HubSpot contact + deal + Slack ping to the owner. Cheaper per operation than Zapier and based in the EU.
- Habit: a ten-minute Monday standup on open deals older than two weeks. No tool replaces this.
First action today: in HubSpot, create one pipeline with four stages — New, Qualified, Proposal, Won/Lost — and connect your web form. Thirty minutes, one person.
What you're being oversold
Someone will pitch you Salesforce, HubSpot Sales Hub Pro, or Pipedrive with "engineering firm" packages. At your volume that's paying four figures a year for fields you'll never fill. Folk looks tempting for a consultancy but is built for agency-style relationship pipelines, not slow technical proposals. Doing nothing costs you the one big proposal that quietly goes cold in someone's inbox — and for an engineering consultancy that's a serious year-end hole.
When to revisit this
When two owners can't tell you, without checking, who's chasing the biggest open proposal.
The part worth getting right
The one call is how a lead becomes a deal. If most of your fifty are quick RFQs that live or die in two emails, HubSpot Free plus one Make scenario is the whole answer — you're done for two years. If most are long consultative pursuits with multiple engineers, several site visits, and proposals that evolve over months, you need proposal stages, engineer capacity, and revenue forecasting from day one — and setting HubSpot up as a light contact list now means rebuilding it in twelve months. Same team, same volume, two different builds. Which shape are your fifty?