Why

Fewer than 10 inquiries/month is less than one every three days. Referrals and a web form are the two highest-intent channels that exist — these people already want to talk to you. With "Just me" on the team, the bottleneck is never "I lost track in the pipeline" — it's "I forgot to follow up on Thursday because I was on a client call." A CRM doesn't fix that. A calendar reminder does.

What you actually need

1. Google Sheets or Notion database (free) — one table: Date / Name / Source (Referral vs Web) / What they want / Last contact / Next action date / Status. That's it. Ten rows a month will never outgrow this.
2. Your web form piped to email + a 24-hour reply rule — whatever form tool you use (Tally, Typeform, Google Forms), make sure it emails you instantly and you reply within one business day. For referrals, reply same day — the referrer is watching.
3. A habit — the Friday 20-minute sweep — every Friday afternoon, open the sheet, look at every row where "Next action date" is this week or overdue, and send the follow-up. Solo consultancy lives or dies on this one ritual.

Do this today

Open Google Sheets, create a file called "Inquiries 2025", and add these seven column headers in row 1: Date / Name / Source / What they want / Last contact / Next action / Status. Then paste in every inquiry from the last 60 days — referrals and web form submissions both. By tonight you'll see exactly who you owe a reply to and which referrals you've left hanging.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub, Pipedrive, Salesforce Starter, and especially anything called "Folk" or "Attio" being marketed to solo consultants on LinkedIn right now — at <10 inquiries/month you'd spend more time configuring the tool than working the leads. Anyone pitching you "AI lead scoring" or "deal forecasting" for a solo consultancy is wasting your money.

What doing nothing costs you

At <10 inquiries/month, even one dropped referral a quarter is catastrophic — referral leads close at multiples of cold leads, and a referrer who watches you ghost their intro stops sending more. The compounding loss isn't this year's revenue; it's the referral network quietly going dark.

When to revisit this

When you cross 25 inquiries/month, or the moment you bring on a second person who also needs to see who's been contacted.