What's really going on

You sell big-ticket gear — grabs, hoppers, stevedoring kit — with cycles measured in months. Ten to fifty inquiries a month is not high volume, but each one is worth chasing hard, and four to ten people are touching them across email, phone, walk-ins and referrals. Right now the memory of a deal lives in one person's head or one inbox. Add a distributor in Hamburg and a walk-in at your Auckland gate the same week, and something quiet slips — a follow-up two weeks late, a referral you never thanked, a spec sent to the wrong contact.

What to do instead

1. Pipedrive Lite (~USD $14/user/mo, annual — Essential $14/user/month, verify at pipedrive.com/pricing) — one visual pipeline with stages that match how you actually sell: Inquiry → Spec/Quote → Approval → Deposit → Build → Ship → Install. A visual pipeline with drag-and-drop deals, contact and organization management, activity tracking, basic reporting, email sync with Gmail/Outlook, and the mobile app is exactly the job you need done.
2. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — the cheaper starting point if budget is tight and you want everyone in the shared inbox first. Fair warning from the catalog: you will get pushed to paid Sales Hub fast.
3. Habit: one owner per deal, one next step, always dated. No deal sits without a next action.

Today, open a Pipedrive trial, connect the sales inbox, and drag in every live inquiry from the last 30 days. One hour, one person. That is your baseline.

What you're being oversold

Anyone pitching you Salesforce, HubSpot Sales Hub, or "Manufacturing Cloud" at your stage is selling forecasting and automation you cannot yet feed. You do not have the deal volume to justify seats at $49-$99 per user. Skip outbound stacks like Apollo or Outreach entirely — your leads come from referrals and reputation, not cold sequences. The cost of doing nothing is not a number I will invent for you; it is the one European distributor deal that goes cold in month four because nobody owned the follow-up.

When to revisit this

When you sign your first overseas distributor or agent — that is when a single pipeline stops being enough.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides whether this setup lasts two years or gets ripped out in eight months: do you sell direct into Europe and the Americas, or through distributors? If direct, you want one pipeline by product line, with region as a field. If through distributors, you need a separate pipeline per region with the distributor as the deal owner, and your team coaching them — a completely different shape. Get this wrong now and you will migrate a CRM full of half-clean data next year, right when you are also spinning up overseas manufacturing. Which model are you actually building toward?