Why

At 10–50 inquiries/month across five channels with two people, software isn't your bottleneck — channel sprawl is. A garden care quote, a retail CBD order, and a wholesale stockist conversation are three completely different sales motions, and right now they're all landing in the same inbox/DM scroll. Your new helper makes this worse before it gets better: without a shared place, you'll both reply to the same Instagram DM or both assume the other called back.

What you actually need

1. Google Sheets (free) — two tabs: "Garden 2026" and "Topicals 2026". Columns: Date / Name / Channel / Res-Com-Wholesale / What they want / Next action / Next action date / Owner (you or helper).
2. Instagram saved replies + a shared Gmail label set (free) — three labels: "Garden inquiry", "Topicals retail", "Topicals wholesale". Forward web form submissions in too. Your helper gets access to both.
3. A habit — the 8am 10-minute sync — you and your helper open the sheet together (in person or on a quick call), action anything where "Next action date" is today or earlier, and assign an owner to every new row from the last 24h.

Do this today

Open Google Sheets, create one file called "Inquiries 2026" with two tabs ("Garden" and "Topicals"), add the columns above, and share edit access with your helper's email. Then paste in every inquiry from the last 7 days across email, IG DMs, phone notes, web form, and referrals — assign each one an owner. By tomorrow morning nothing is hiding in a DM thread only you can see.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub, monday CRM, and anything Salesforce — at 10–50 inquiries with one helper, you'll spend more time configuring custom objects for "wholesale account vs. retail customer" than you'll save. Ignore anyone pitching you Shopify CRM integrations until your wholesale topicals program has 10+ recurring stockists.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 20% slippage on 30 inquiries/month across two business lines = ~6 lost leads/month. Wholesale CBD stockist relationships compound — one missed reply this spring is a year of orders you never see.

Where this leaves you

You've got two tabs, a shared label set, and an 8am sync. The plan gives you the saved-reply templates for each of the three inquiry types, customizes the morning sync to your and your helper's actual schedule, and names what to do the first week one of you forgets to log a phone call — because that's the slip that always kills the shared-sheet habit.

When to revisit this

When your wholesale topicals program hits 15+ active stockist accounts with reorder cycles to track — then Zoho Bigin with two pipelines becomes worth the $9/user/mo.