What's really going on

You're not selling to strangers. You're servicing a small book of engineering merchants who reorder. The job isn't "track deals through stages" — it's "make sure no inquiry from those 15 buyers gets buried under 200 WhatsApp threads this month." A CRM built for prospecting will feel like wearing a suit to weld. Your real risk is a repeat order missed because it came in on the wrong channel while you were on a call.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets (free) — one tab: date, customer, channel, what they asked for, status (open / quoted / shipped), next action. Every inquiry from every channel goes in within the hour it arrives.
2. WhatsApp Business app (free) — use labels (New inquiry / Quoted / Awaiting payment / Done) and the catalog feature for your common SKUs so you can fire a price+spec in two taps.
3. Habit: end each day by scanning the sheet for any row older than 48 hours with no next action. That's your follow-up list for tomorrow morning.

First action, 30 minutes: open a new Google Sheet, name those six columns, and back-fill the last 7 days of inquiries from your phone and inbox. You'll see the pattern by row 20.

What you're being oversold

Someone has probably pitched you HubSpot or a paid WhatsApp inbox like Wati or Respond.io. At 10-15 customers and solo, those are overkill — HubSpot will push you toward Sales Hub within months, and Wati/Respond.io are built for teams broadcasting to thousands. You'd pay monthly for features you can't use alone. Doing nothing, though, costs you the repeat order you forgot to quote — and with this few customers, losing even one hurts more than the software would.

When to revisit this

When a second person joins you, or when you stop recognising every customer's name on sight.

The part worth getting right

The real fork is whether your 150 orders are mostly the same 15 people reordering known SKUs, or a longer tail of one-off custom quotes from those accounts. If it's reorders, you need a customer-by-customer order history sheet and a reorder reminder — not a pipeline. If it's custom quotes, you need a quote tracker with revision numbers so you don't send v1 pricing on a v3 spec. Get this wrong and in six months you're either drowning in a CRM you don't need, or you've shipped the wrong spec to your best account.