What's really going on

50 to 200 inquiries a month across Referrals, LinkedIn, a web form, phone and email, split between 3 sales people, with no shared pipe. That is the exact setup where good leads sit in someone's inbox for a week. Referrals are your best-converting channel and the easiest to drop — a warm intro from a client goes to one person's phone, then nothing. The problem isn't that you lack software. It's that three people can't see each other's work.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (€0, unlimited users) — one shared inbox and pipeline for all 3 reps, so every web form, email and LinkedIn note lands in one place with an owner. Best for teams of 3-10+ on inbound email who need shared ownership for free, which is you.
2. Pipedrive Essential (~€13/user/mo billed annually, check current pricing) — a cleaner visual pipeline if your deals have clear stages (demo → quote → PO). Essential is $14/user/month annual; EU customers pay VAT on top unless a valid VAT number is given at checkout. For 3 seats that's roughly €45/mo.
3. A 10-minute daily stand-up — each rep names their 3 hottest deals and who owes what. No tool replaces this.

First action, today: in HubSpot Free, create one pipeline with 5 stages (New → Qualified → Quoted → Won → Lost), add a "Source" field with your 5 channels, and route the web form into it. One person, 30 minutes, done before lunch.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you HubSpot Sales Hub or Salesforce. Salesforce is for large orgs with dedicated admins — SMBs under 10 people or a few hundred leads/mo find it massively over-built and costly. HubSpot's paid Sales Hub escalates quickly and you don't need sequences or forecasting yet. Doing nothing costs you the referrals — the highest-margin leads you have — because they get lost in a single rep's inbox while the other two are blind to them.

When to revisit this

When a rep says "I didn't know we were already talking to that company" for the second time in a month — your free tool has hit its limit.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides which CRM shape fits: how long is a deal from first call to signed PO? If it's under 6 weeks and mostly standard quotes, Pipedrive's stage-based pipeline keeps reps honest. If it's 3 to 9 months with hardware specs, revisions and multiple stakeholders, you need contact history and shared threads more than stages — HubSpot Free wins and Pipedrive will frustrate you by month three. Pick wrong and you'll migrate in a year, re-entering every deal by hand.