Why

Fewer than 10 inquiries a month across a 3-person team means each of you is touching maybe 2-3 active opportunities. The risk in Belgian local-government work isn't losing track of who came in — it's letting a warm contact from a VVSG event go cold for 7 months because nobody set a reminder. Phone calls and referrals don't generate the kind of structured inbound that CRMs are built to triage; they generate relationships you have to nurture on a calendar.

What you actually need

1. Notion database with kanban view (free for small teams, €8/user/mo paid) — one board with stages: Contact made → Discovery → RFP/Bestek → Proposal → Awarded/Lost. One card per gemeente/contact, with a "Next touch date" property.
2. Google Calendar recurring reminders — for every warm contact, set a "check in with [name, gemeente]" event 6-8 weeks out. This is the actual CRM for long-cycle public sector work.
3. A habit — the Monday 20-minute walk-through — three of you, open the Notion board, anything with no "next touch" in the next 60 days gets one assigned or gets archived.

Do this today

Open Notion → New page → /database → full page → rename it "Pipeline 2026", add properties: Contact, Gemeente, Source (Event/Referral/Previous project), Stage (select), Next touch (date), Owner (person). Switch to Board view grouped by Stage. Then add every conversation from the last 6 months — even the ones that went quiet — and assign each one an owner and a next-touch date. By tonight you'll see how many warm contacts you've silently dropped.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub, Pipedrive, and Salesforce entirely — at <10 leads/month they're empty dashboards you'll log into twice and abandon. Anyone pitching you Apollo, Lemlist, or outbound automation for "GovTech leadgen" is selling you a tool for a market (cold B2B SaaS) that doesn't match how Belgian municipalities buy. Public procurement runs on relationships and bestekken, not sequenced cold emails.

What doing nothing costs you

With deal cycles this long and contracts this large, a single forgotten follow-up with a schepen or IT-verantwoordelijke can mean a missed multi-year contract — and you'd never know it slipped because the silence looks the same as a normal gap. The compounding cost is reputational: referrals dry up when previous contacts feel forgotten.

When to revisit this

When you cross 20 active opportunities in the pipeline at once, or when you hire a fourth person who needs to know what the other three are working on.