Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but the real leak is that leads live in five different apps and nobody owns them.
What's really going on
200–500 inquiries a month for a 2–3 person crew building custom aluminium pergolas is a lot of talking for very few closers. Each lead is high-value and slow — site visits, measurements, quotes, permits. When an Instagram DM lands while you're driving and the email lands while your partner is quoting, one of them goes cold. The problem isn't "no CRM." It's that WhatsApp, Instagram, email, phone and web form never meet in one inbox with one owner per lead.
What to do instead
- Respond.io (paid monthly — check current pricing) — one shared inbox for WhatsApp, Instagram DM and email, so no channel is anyone's private silo.
- Airtable (free tier, paid ~$20/user/mo) — a light pipeline behind the inbox: Lead → Site visit booked → Quote sent → Won/Lost, with the address, measurements and quote PDF on each card.
- Habit: end-of-day 10-minute stand-up — the two of you read every "Quote sent" older than 5 days out loud and decide who chases tomorrow.
First action, today, 30 minutes: open Respond.io, connect your WhatsApp Business number and your Instagram account, and set an auto-reply that says "Danke für Ihre Anfrage — wir melden uns innerhalb von 24 Stunden mit einem Termin für das Aufmaß." That one message buys you the day.
What you're being oversold
Someone will pitch you HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive with "custom quote workflows" and "AI lead scoring." At 2–3 people quoting bespoke pergolas, that's a €300+/month bill for features you'll never open, plus a month of setup you don't have. Twilio is the other trap — powerful, but you'd need a developer to make it useful. Every week you stay on five separate apps, one premium pergola inquiry — the kind worth thousands of euros installed — slips through unanswered.
When to revisit this
When you hire a third salesperson or a dedicated project manager, or when quotes-sent-per-week passes 30 — that's when a shared inbox stops being enough and per-rep pipeline ownership starts to matter.
The part worth getting right
The real fork is where the pipeline lives. If most of your buyers stay on WhatsApp from first "Hallo" to signed contract, your CRM has to BE the WhatsApp inbox — anything else and you'll paste messages between apps until you quit. If half your buyers switch to email once the quote goes out (which is common for German homeowners wanting something in writing), you need the pipeline in Airtable with the inbox feeding it, or the email thread becomes the source of truth and Airtable rots. Pick the wrong one and you rebuild this in six months.