What's really going on

Instagram DMs don't belong to a team. They belong to whoever's phone is logged in. With 2-3 of you and up to 50 inquiries a month, leads are getting double-replied, missed, or answered a day late. That's the real leak — not a missing pipeline, a missing shared inbox.

What to do instead

1. Wati (paid monthly, mid tier — check current pricing) — shared inbox for WhatsApp, so all three of you see the same chats and who replied. Most IG leads will ask you to move to WhatsApp anyway.
2. Google Sheets (free) — one tab: name, IG handle, what they asked, status (new / replying / quoted / won / lost), who's on it. That's your CRM for now.
3. Habit — end of every day, whoever handled DMs updates the sheet. Five minutes. Non-negotiable.

Today, open Instagram → Settings → Business tools → connect the account to a shared Meta Business inbox so all three of you stop fighting over one phone.

What you're being oversold

Someone will try to sell you HubSpot, Zoho, or Salesforce. Wrong stage. At 10-50 inquiries from one channel with three people, those tools are a part-time job to maintain and you'll abandon them in two months. Respond.io is overkill until you're on three+ channels. Doing nothing means a slow leak — a few quoted leads a month going cold because no one knew it was their turn to reply. On Instagram, a 24-hour silence usually means lost.

When to revisit this

When a second channel (email, website form, WhatsApp ads) starts bringing in as many leads as Instagram does.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides this: do your leads actually convert inside the DM, or do they need days of back-and-forth, quotes, follow-ups? If it's quick DM → sale, Wati plus the sheet is your whole stack for a year. If it's a slow consideration cycle with quotes and reminders, the sheet alone will fail you by month two and you'll want a light pipeline tool from day one. Pick wrong and you either overpay now or migrate messy data later.