Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but not a sales one.
What's really going on
You have four channels feeding one studio: email, IG DMs, LinkedIn, referrals. With 10–50 inquiries a month and 4–10 people, the leak isn't volume — it's that nobody knows who replied to the IG DM, who sent the deck, or which referral went cold after the first call. Project work has long, quiet gaps between "interested" and "signed," and that's exactly where good leads die. The problem is shared visibility, not software horsepower.
What to do instead
- Folk (per-seat paid — check current pricing) — use it as a relationship pipeline, not a sales funnel. Stages like Inquiry → Brief → Quote → Booked. One card per brand, every touch logged.
- HubSpot Free CRM (free) — pick this instead if budget is tight. Unlimited users on the free tier, shared inbox, fine for 10–50/month. Ignore the upsells to Sales Hub.
- Zapier (free tier) — push Instagram lead DMs and a Typeform "start a project" form straight into the CRM so nothing lives only in someone's phone.
Do this in the next 30 minutes: open Folk or HubSpot, create five stages, and drop in every live conversation from the last 30 days — IG, email, LinkedIn, all of it. One list. One owner per card.
What you're being oversold
You're the exact profile someone tries to sell Salesforce or HubSpot Sales Hub Pro to — "scale your pipeline." You don't have a pipeline problem; you have a memory problem across four inboxes. HoneyBook gets pitched to US creatives like you, but it's built for solo photographers doing contracts and payments, not a 4–10 person VFX studio with art directors and producers. Doing nothing means one or two warm referrals a quarter quietly going dark — and at agency deal sizes, one of those is the difference between a good month and a bad one.
When to revisit this
When two people on the team can't answer "what's the status of [Brand X]?" the same way without checking with each other.
The part worth getting right
The real fork: are your deals won by the producer's follow-through or by the creative director's taste? If it's follow-through, you want Folk-style relationship cards with reminders, owned by producers. If it's taste, you want a lighter shared inbox (HubSpot Free) and the CD pulled into specific threads — not asked to live in a CRM they'll abandon by Friday. Pick wrong and you'll spend a quarter forcing the wrong person to update stages, then quit the tool and be back where you started.