// The situation

Okay, so I am a consultant for wholesale-based product businesses. We do not need a pipeline, but we do need a way to keep in touch with retailers and follow up in regards to reorder cadence and pitching new clients and keeping track of the pitch series they receive. I have worked in pipe drive, which has unnecessary features in regards to the deals and pipelines because there is no negotiation process. It's either they order or they don't. They might send you an email with one question, but there's no real stages that they need to be tracked through. HubSpot works well with the free version, minus the limitation of not seeing emails older than 30 days. The main thing that has been helpful in both pipe drive and HubSpot is setting tasks to remind, you know, three months out, six months out, that it's time to email that person again, but we do have to manually update the task due date if the customer does place a new order. Orders come through Fair and Shopify and need to sync with the CRM tool ideally. In pipe drive, I have used a make automation to have Shopify sync orders into pipe drive as deals, which works well most of the time. However, sometimes names don't match up perfectly, and so there is still a lot of manual fiddling that needs to be done, and previously when I asked you this question, you just recommended using an Airtable. However, using a CRM tool that allows us to send emails directly from the service is very helpful rather than having to paste emails into Gmail. I like being able to use templates that look a little nicer than Gmail and it just is cleaner to have everything live in one ecosystem where you can send the email, set the task, and move on to the next one and not be moving back and forth between a spreadsheet.

The verdict · Jun 21, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM — and you already found it. Stay on HubSpot Free and fix the two things actually hurting you.

What's really going on

You don't have a sales problem. You have a follow-up cadence problem dressed up as a CRM problem. HubSpot Free already does 90% of what you need — contacts, tasks, templates, send-from-CRM. The two real pains are the 30-day email history wall and the fact that a new Shopify/Faire order doesn't push your "nudge in 3 months" task forward automatically. Everything else is fine.

What to do instead

  1. HubSpot Sales Starter (~$20/user/mo — check current pricing) — one paid seat unlocks full email history and better templates. That kills the 30-day wall without moving ecosystems.
  2. Make (which you already run) — add one scenario: when a Shopify or Faire order comes in for a matched contact, complete the open "follow up" task and create a new one dated +90 days. That's the manual fiddling, gone.
  3. A name-matching habit — for any order where the email doesn't match a HubSpot contact, Make drops it in a "needs review" view. You clear that view once a week, ten minutes, done.

First action in 30 minutes: in Make, duplicate your Shopify→Pipedrive scenario, repoint it at HubSpot, and add a "create task, due in 90 days" step at the end. Run it on last week's orders to test name matching.

What you're being oversold

Pipedrive is wrong for you and you already know it — deal stages assume a negotiation that doesn't exist in wholesale reorders. Don't let anyone talk you into Sales Hub Professional or an "ops" tier either; you'd be paying for forecasting and multi-pipeline reporting you'll never open. Doing nothing costs you reorders that quietly slip a quarter because the task didn't roll forward — small per miss, ugly across a year of retailers.

When to revisit this

When you're managing more than ~300 active retailer relationships, or when a second person joins and you need shared inboxes.

The part worth getting right

The judgment call is whether your name-matching problem is a data problem or a process problem. If most mismatches are Shopify-vs-Faire using different emails for the same buyer, one paid HubSpot seat plus a tighter Make scenario solves it for good. If mismatches are because retailers reorder under new staff, new store names, new entities — then no automation saves you, and you need a human-readable "account" layer (parent retailer, child contacts) before you wire anything else. Pick the wrong one and you'll either overbuild Make or migrate CRMs again in a year.

Honest opinion · No affiliate links · public Get your own →

Did this actually help?

A binary signal so we know which verdicts are landing — and which ones aren't.