What's really going on

Leads land in five places: inbox, phone, LinkedIn DMs, referrals in someone's head, and a web form. With 2-3 people, the same lead gets touched twice or not at all. At 10-50 inquiries a month you don't have a volume problem — you have an ownership problem. IT sales cycles are long, so one dropped follow-up in month one is a lost deal in month four.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — one shared pipeline where every lead has one owner and one next step, across all five channels.
2. Google Sheets (free) — a second tab: every referral, who sent it, when you last touched them. Referrals die in memory, not in CRMs.
3. Habit: a 10-minute Monday stand-up where each person reads out their top 5 open deals and the next action. No tool replaces this.

First action, next 30 minutes: in HubSpot, create a pipeline with 5 stages (New → Qualified → Demo → Proposal → Won). Forward your sales inbox to the HubSpot address it gives you. Done.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce or HubSpot Sales Hub Pro because you're "in IT sales." At three people and under 50 leads a month, both are wildly over-built — Salesforce needs an admin you don't have, and Sales Hub paid escalates fast once you're hooked. Skip them for at least a year. Every month you run this out of inboxes and heads, you lose deals you'll never know existed — in IT sales, one missed follow-up is often a five-figure contract.

When to revisit this

When one of you says "I thought you were handling that lead" for the second time in a month, or when monthly inquiries cross 75.

The part worth getting right

Decide now: are you three people selling the same thing to the same buyer, or three people selling different things to different buyers? If it's the same — one shared pipeline, round-robin ownership, HubSpot Free is enough for two years. If it's different — you need separate pipelines per line of business from day one, and the setup is a different animal. Get this wrong and in six months you're either migrating everything or watching deals fall between two pipelines that should have been one.