What's really going on

You get up to 50 inquiries a month across WhatsApp, Instagram, phone, web form, and referrals. Two or three of you juggle them between events. A bride messages Instagram on Tuesday, WhatsApps on Thursday, and you don't remember she's the same person. That's the leak. It's not a pipeline problem — it's a "no single inbox and no single list" problem.

What to do instead

1. WhatsApp Business app (free) — set up labels: New, Quoted, Visit booked, Reserved, Lost. That's your pipeline for your busiest channel, today.
2. Airtable (free tier, paid ~$20/user/mo — check current pricing) — one table: name, phone, event date, event type, source, stage, next action, quote sent. Every inquiry from every channel lands here within 10 minutes of arriving. Use the web form to auto-fill it.
3. Habit: one person owns the inbox each day. At 6pm they check every row with no "next action" and set one.

First action, next 30 minutes: open Airtable, use the "Event planning" template, delete the columns you don't need, add "Source" with your five channels, and paste in every open inquiry from the last two weeks. One table. One truth.

What you're being oversold

Someone will push you toward Respond.io or a full multi-channel inbox because you have five channels. At 10–50 inquiries with 2–3 people, that's monthly cost and setup time you don't need yet — you can label WhatsApp by hand and check Instagram twice a day. A Freshsales-style CRM is built for repeatable sales reps, not a venue where each event is a one-off with a site visit and a deposit. Doing nothing costs you the inquiries that ghost between channels — and for an event venue, one lost booking is a lot of missed revenue.

When to revisit this

When two people are answering the same lead on different channels more than once a week, or when inquiries cross 60 a month.

The part worth getting right

Decide what a "lead" is for you. If most inquiries are people casually asking prices and dates, you need a fast qualifier — event date, headcount, budget — before anything hits your table, or you'll drown in tire-kickers. If most inquiries are serious and the drop-off is after the site visit, the fix is different: a deposit-and-follow-up rhythm, not a bigger inbox. Same venue, same numbers, two different builds. Get this wrong and you'll spend three months organizing the wrong end of the funnel.