Yes.
You need a simple CRM — not a sales tool, a follow-up system.
What's really going on
You're getting 10-50 enquiries a month from six different channels, and 4-10 staff are touching them. A single spreadsheet can't tell you who called whom, or who hasn't been called in five days. Parents go cold because nobody owns the next step. The tour isn't the close — the three days after the tour is.
What to do instead
- HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — one shared pipeline with stages: New enquiry → Tour booked → Toured → Enrolled → Cold. Every staff member sees who's theirs.
- Google Sheets (free) — keep your current sheet as the import. Export it to CSV, import to HubSpot in 20 minutes, done.
- Habit: a 9am Monday huddle — open the "Toured, not enrolled" view together. Anyone older than 5 days, someone calls that morning.
Do this today: open HubSpot Free, build the five stages above, and drag in every parent from the last 30 days. One hour, one person.
What you're being oversold
If anyone's pitched you Salesforce, Pipedrive paid tiers, or a "childcare CRM" with enrolment workflows at $200+/month — not yet. You don't have the volume. Respond.io and outbound tools solve problems you don't have. The real cost of waiting: at 30 enquiries a month, losing even four cold ones a month at Geelong childcare fees is tens of thousands a year in foregone enrolments — but only you know your true conversion gap.
When to revisit this
When you cross ~60 enquiries a month, or you open a second centre, or HubSpot starts nagging you to upgrade for features you actually need (SMS, automated reminders).
The part worth getting right
The one call is this: where does a lead actually go cold — before the tour, or after? If it's before (people enquire on Instagram at 9pm and you reply Tuesday), you need fast multi-channel reply, and your fix is a shared inbox plus a 4-hour response rule. If it's after the tour (they came, they liked it, then nothing), you need a 3-touch follow-up sequence — day 1, day 3, day 7 — and the CRM stages above. Pick the wrong one and you'll spend three months fixing the part that wasn't broken. Look at your last 20 lost parents: where did the thread die?