Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but the real risk is quotes falling through the cracks, not contacts.
What's really going on
Ten people. Up to 500 inbound emails. No shared view of who's quoting whom. That means two people reply to the same lead, or worse, nobody does. Quotes go out, then sit unanswered because no one owns the follow-up. Billing chases the quote that was never logged. The symptom feels like "we need a CRM" — the cause is that email inboxes can't show a team who owes what to whom.
What to do instead
- HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — connect every team mailbox so inbound email becomes shared deals with an owner, a stage, and a next step. This alone fixes most of the leak.
- Make (free tier, paid cheap at volume) — one scenario: when a deal hits "Quote Sent," wait 3 days, then ping the owner in email or Slack if the stage hasn't moved. That is your anti-slippage net.
- Habit: a 10-minute Monday standup on every deal stuck in "Quote Sent" over 7 days. The tool surfaces it; a human has to chase it.
First action, today: in HubSpot, create a pipeline with four stages — New Inquiry, Quoting, Quote Sent, Won/Lost. Forward one shared inbox into it. One person, 30 minutes.
What you're being oversold
Someone has probably pitched you HubSpot Sales Hub, Pipedrive, or Salesforce at €40–€100 per seat per month. At 10+ seats that is €5,000–€12,000 a year for features you will not touch in year one. Capsule and Folk are fine tools but built for smaller or relationship-led teams — wrong shape for 500 transactional quotes a month. Doing nothing costs you the quotes nobody followed up on — at your volume, that is real money walking out monthly, even if we can't put a euro figure on it without your average ticket.
When to revisit this
When your free HubSpot pipeline has more than ~40 open deals per person and reps start losing track inside the tool itself.
The part worth getting right
One judgment call decides whether HubSpot Free holds you for two years or breaks in three months: how tightly quotes and billing must live in the same system. If your quotes are simple line items and billing is handled in a separate accounting tool your finance team already loves, HubSpot Free plus Make is the right answer and you stop here. If quotes are complex — variants, approvals, revisions — and billing must flow from the won deal automatically, you are actually shopping for a quote-to-cash setup, and starting with a plain CRM means a painful migration in a year. Which one is yours?