What's really going on

You're not one business — you're three. Retail counter sales, solar EPC projects, and government tenders each have their own rhythm, deal size, and follow-up cycle. A single CRM bolted across all three will fail inside a quarter. Right now leads sit in inboxes and in your team's heads, which means the ₹5–50 lakh EPC enquiries get the same attention as a ₹5,000 retail walk-in. That's where money leaks.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets / Excel (free) — one sheet per line of business. Columns: date, source, contact, value, next action, owner. Nothing more. Run it for 30 days.
2. Airtable (free tier, paid ~₹1,700/user/mo — check current pricing) — once the sheet gets messy, move solar EPC to Airtable with a form your field team fills from their phone. Kanban view by stage.
3. A Monday morning 20-minute review — you, and one owner per business line, walking every open deal above ₹1 lakh.

Do this today: open one Google Sheet, name three tabs — Retail, Solar EPC, Govt Tenders — and dump every open enquiry from the last 30 days into the right tab. One hour, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Freshsales or HubSpot Sales Hub with per-user licences for your whole team. At your stage that's ₹8–15 lakh a year for software your team won't open, because there's no process to feed it. HubSpot Free looks tempting but the upsell to paid hits fast once you cross basic use. Doing nothing costs you the EPC and tender deals that slip because follow-up landed in the wrong inbox — and those are the ones with real margin.

When to revisit this

When the same sheet has more than 40 open deals in one tab, or two people are editing the same row and overwriting each other.

The part worth getting right

Decide whether your three businesses share a sales team or not. If the same people chase retail, solar, and tenders, you need ONE light system with clear tags — a shared Airtable base works, and Freshsales later. If each line has its own owner and team, you need three separate pipelines, possibly three different tools, because a govt tender CRM and a retail follow-up tool look nothing alike. Pick wrong here and you'll be migrating data and retraining staff in a year. The answer depends on how your team is actually structured on the ground in Ranchi — not on what any vendor tells you.