What's really going on

You get fewer than 10 inquiries a month across LinkedIn, a web form, and referrals. That's not a pipeline problem — that's a follow-up problem. B2B SaaS deals in HR tech drag on for months, and what kills you isn't losing leads in a system, it's forgetting to nudge a warm buyer in week six. A CRM won't fix that. A shared list and a calendar reminder will.

What to do instead

1. Airtable (free tier) — one base with a kanban view: New → Demo booked → Proposal → Follow-up → Won/Lost. Web form feeds it directly.
2. Google Sheets (free) — if even Airtable feels heavy, one tab, one owner, one weekly review. Under 10/mo, this is enough.
3. Habit — every Monday, 15 minutes, walk the list. Every lead older than 14 days gets a message that day.

First action: open Airtable, click "Start with a template", pick "Sales CRM", delete every field you don't need, connect your web form. 30 minutes.

What you're being oversold

Someone has probably pitched you HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive with "you'll scale into it". At 10 leads a month and 3 people, you'll spend more time configuring stages and custom fields than closing deals. Folk and Freshsales are cleaner but still overkill for this volume. The real cost of doing nothing isn't a CRM licence — it's the warm demo from March you never followed up on in May.

When to revisit this

When you're consistently past 30 qualified inquiries a month, or you hire a dedicated salesperson who needs their own "mine" view.

The part worth getting right

The one call that decides this: are your deals mostly inbound-and-close, or are they long consultative cycles with 5+ touches over months? If it's the first, a shared sheet is fine forever at your volume. If it's the second, you don't need a CRM — you need a follow-up cadence built into your calendar, because the leak is time, not tracking. Pick the wrong fix and in six months you're either drowning in Airtable fields you never fill, or still losing the same warm leads to silence.