Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but the real risk is that you're solo and 200 inquiries a month will bury you before any tool helps.
What's really going on
You're pre-revenue, alone, chasing regulated buyers — hospitals, insurers, banks. Those sales cycles are long and paperwork-heavy. Your bottleneck isn't tracking leads; it's responding fast and looking legitimate to a compliance officer. At 50–200 inquiries from cold outreach, most won't convert — you need a way to see which 5 are real, not a system to nurture all 200.
What to do instead
- HubSpot Free CRM (free) — log every call and email against a contact, one pipeline, five stages: new / qualified / quoted / negotiating / won. Free forever for one user.
- Zapier (free tier) — one Zap: new email to your inbox → create a HubSpot contact. So nothing slips while you're on a call.
- Habit — end every day by moving each active deal one stage or killing it. Ten minutes, non-negotiable.
First action, next 30 minutes: sign up at hubspot.com, create the pipeline above, and paste in the last ten inquiries by hand. You'll see your real funnel by tonight.
What you're being oversold
Someone will pitch you Sales Hub, Salesforce Starter, or a HIPAA-ready vertical CRM because you said "hospitals" and "insurance." Ignore them. You have no customers yet — paying $50-150/user/month for compliance features you can't yet use is lighting money on fire. The cost of doing nothing here isn't lost revenue (you have none yet); it's you burning three months chasing 200 cold leads with no memory of who said what, and quitting before the real deals close.
When to revisit this
When you close your third paying client, or when a hospital or bank asks where you store their data — that's when compliance and a paid tier start to matter.
The part worth getting right
The one call is whether this is really a transcription business or a compliance business. If your buyers are hospitals and insurers in the US, they will ask about HIPAA and BAAs before they sign anything — and free HubSpot won't sign a BAA. If most of your real pipeline is banks and general admin, you can stay on free tools for a year. Pick wrong and you either overspend now on compliance you don't need, or you win a hospital deal you legally can't fulfill. Which side of that fork you're actually on depends on who's answering your emails — and you haven't been open long enough to know yet.