What's really going on

Fifty to two hundred inquiries a month across web, walk-ins, referrals, WhatsApp, phone, Instagram DM and email is a lot for a team of ten — and most of it is landing on personal phones. When a parent asks about the animation course on WhatsApp Monday and emails Wednesday, two counsellors answer differently, or nobody answers at all. The real problem is one shared pipeline and one shared WhatsApp number, not a bigger tool. Walk-ins and referrals are your warmest leads and almost certainly the ones falling through — nobody logs them.

What to do instead

1. Zoho Bigin Express — ₹400 per user per month, billed yearly, plus GST — one admissions pipeline: Inquiry → Counselling booked → Demo attended → Fee paid. The free plan gives one user, one pipeline, 500 records and three workflow automations, enough to test for a week before you pay.
2. AiSensy — Free Forever, or Basic ₹1,500/month — one shared WhatsApp Business number so every counsellor sees every chat, with templates for "Thanks for your inquiry, here's a demo slot."
3. Habit — every evening, each counsellor moves their leads one stage forward in Bigin. Five minutes. No excuses.

First action, today: open the Bigin free plan, create one pipeline called "Admissions 2026", and type in every inquiry from the last seven days — WhatsApp, DM, walk-in, all of it. One hour, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you LeadSquared or Zoho CRM Enterprise because "that's what institutes use." Zoho CRM Enterprise runs ₹2,400 per user per month plus GST — days to weeks of setup, module and layout planning needed. For 4-10 people with 200 inquiries, that's a six-figure yearly bill to solve a problem a ₹400 tool solves. Doing nothing costs you the referrals and walk-ins — your highest-converting leads — because they never get a follow-up when the counsellor who met them is off that day.

When to revisit this

When a single counsellor is handling more than 150 inquiries a month alone, or you add a second branch.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides the next year: do you run one admissions funnel, or three? If animation, game design and VFX share one counselling flow with the same demo and the same fee cycle, Bigin Express and its three pipelines fit you cleanly. If each course has its own counsellor, its own demo day and its own batch-start calendar — and students pick a track before the first call — you need Premier's five pipelines or you'll jam everything into one and lose the signal. Pick wrong and in six months you're migrating data and retraining the team. Pick right and you set this up once.