Why

At 50–200 phone inquiries/month across a 4–10 person team, the bottleneck isn't lead volume — it's that nothing is written down in a shared place. Materials testing and surface treatment quotes have long cycles, technical scoping, and repeat clients; if the person who took the call is on leave, the inquiry dies. You also can't see which industries or services drive revenue because no one is logging the call.

What you actually need

1. Pipedrive Essential (~€14/user/mo) — one pipeline: Inquiry → Scoped → Quoted → Won/Lost. Every phone call becomes a deal record within 5 minutes of hanging up. Pick this over Bigin because your sales cycle has real scoping/quoting steps worth tracking.
2. A required "Service type" field (Materials Testing / Surface Treatment / Other) and a "Next Action Date" field — so you can finally see which service line is actually paying the bills.
3. A habit — the post-call 2-minute log — nobody hangs up the phone without creating the Pipedrive deal. No exceptions. If it's not in Pipedrive, it didn't happen.

Do this today

Sign up at pipedrive.com (14-day free trial, no card), invite your 4–10 team members by email, and configure one pipeline with the four stages above. Add two custom fields: "Service type" (dropdown) and "Lead source" (since right now it's all phone, but you'll want to know when that changes). By tomorrow's morning standup, every active inquiry from this week is a deal record with an owner.

What to ignore

Skip Salesforce Starter and HubSpot Sales Hub Professional — both are massively overbuilt for a research institute selling technical services, and HubSpot's contact-tier pricing punishes you the moment you import any historical client list. Ignore anyone pitching call-recording AI, Gong, or Outreach — you don't have an outbound problem, you have a "write it down" problem.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 10% slippage on a midpoint of 125 inquiries/month = ~12 lost inquiries/month. For materials testing and surface treatment work, even a €2,000 average project means roughly €300,000/year in untracked work walking out the door.

When to revisit this

When you add a second lead channel (web form or email inbox) and need to route inquiries by service type automatically.