// The situation

O&m service provider, have in house system but not connected with emails and calendars. Team of 15. 2 sales people. Small company turnover wise. Lead channels: Web form, Email. Inquiry volume: 10–50. Team size: 10+.

The verdict · Sep 24, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM — but a small one, sat in front of your in-house system, not a replacement for it.

What's really going on

Your in-house system likely runs jobs, not leads. Web-form and email inquiries land nowhere shared, so follow-ups depend on which salesperson remembers. With two reps and up to 50 inquiries a month, that's already 100 balls in the air — some get dropped, quietly, and you only notice when a maintenance contract you thought was warm goes to a competitor. The problem isn't your ops tool. It's that nothing between "enquiry arrives" and "job gets booked" has an owner and a next date.

What to do instead

  1. Capsule CRM (free for 2 users, 250 contacts; Starter around £14/user/mo billed annually) — UK-built, GBP pricing, and the free plan fits your two sales reps exactly. Turn on two-way email sync and calendar sync so every reply and meeting logs itself.
  2. Zapier (free tier fine at your volume) — one zap: web form → new Capsule opportunity, assigned round-robin to your two reps with a 24-hour follow-up task.
  3. A Monday 9am pipeline stand-up — 10 minutes, both reps, one screen. Any deal without a next step or next date gets one before you close the laptop.

Do the zap first. Open Zapier, pick your web form, pick Capsule, map name/email/message to a new opportunity. Thirty minutes, done today.

What you're being oversold

HubSpot Professional starts at $90 per seat monthly on an annual commitment and carries a required $1,500 onboarding fee — for two reps, that's madness at your stage. Salesforce is built for orgs with a dedicated admin; you don't have one. Even Pipedrive's Advanced tier at $34/user/month, which is where email sync and workflow automation actually kick in, is more than you need this quarter. Doing nothing costs you the two or three inquiries a month that slip past a busy inbox — on maintenance contracts, that compounds every renewal cycle.

When to revisit this

When you hire a third salesperson, or when Capsule's 250-contact free cap starts blocking you.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides this. Does your in-house system already have fields for leads, quotes, and follow-up dates — or is it purely for booked jobs and engineers? If it handles pre-sale, don't add a CRM; wire email and calendar into the tool you already own, and stop there. If it's ops-only, put Capsule in front and let it hand deals off once they're won. Pick wrong and you'll be running two half-used systems in six months, or paying to migrate out of the wrong one next year.

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