Why

At the low end that's two inquiries a week; at the high end, two a day. With 2–3 people and three channels (phone, web form, referrals) all funneling into the same small team, the failure mode is almost always "the web form went to one inbox nobody owns" and "the phone message lived on a Post-it". No CRM fixes that — a shared inbox and a single sheet do.

What you actually need

1. Google Sheets (free) — one tab "Inquiries 2026" with columns Date / Name / Channel (Phone/Web/Referral) / Location (Store 1/Store 2/Online) / What they want / Follow-up Date / Owner / Status. One row per inquiry, no exceptions.
2. Google Workspace shared inbox (~$6/user/mo) or a free Gmail group — point the web form and a single "hello@" address here so all three of you see every inbound and can assign with a label.
3. A habit — the end-of-day handoff — last 10 minutes of each day, whoever closed the store opens the sheet, confirms every row from today has an owner and a follow-up date. Anything older than 48h without a reply gets actioned before lights-off.

Do this today

Open Google Sheets, create a file called "Inquiries 2026" with the eight columns above, and share it with edit access to the other 2 people on your team. Then go to your website's contact form settings and change the notification email to a single address all three of you can see (or set up a Gmail filter that forwards to all three). By tomorrow morning every web inquiry hits three sets of eyes and lands in one sheet.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub, Pipedrive, Zoho Bigin, and especially monday CRM — they're all built for multi-week B2B sales pipelines, not retail inquiries that close in a day or get lost in an hour. Anyone quoting you $20+/seat/mo at this volume is selling you software to solve a sticky-note problem.

What doing nothing costs you

With three channels feeding 2–3 people and no shared system, you're losing inquiries to "I thought you replied" — and for a retail business that compounds into negative reviews from referrals you ghosted. Worse than the lost sale: a referral that didn't get called back tells five people.

When to revisit this

When you cross 50 inquiries/month consistently, or hire a fourth person and two of you start replying to the same lead.