What's really going on

A 170-person family office with 10+ people fielding 500+ inquiries a month is past spreadsheets. The real job isn't tracking 100 inquiries to 20 wins — that math is healthy. The real job is remembering every touch with the existing book: last call, last review, kid's college, the trust that matures in March. Miss those and you don't lose a lead, you lose a household worth millions. Most CRMs are built for the 100 inquiries. You need one that's just as good at the 2,000 relationships behind them.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free core, paid tiers escalate — check current pricing) — shared contact timeline so every email, call, and note on a client lives in one record ten people can see.
2. A written engagement cadence — define what "active client contact" means at your firm (quarterly call, annual review, birthday, life event). The CRM is worthless without the rule it enforces.
3. Today: pick your top 20 client households. Put them in HubSpot. Log the last real conversation with each. You'll find three you haven't spoken to in over a year. Call those three this week.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce Financial Services Cloud or a Redtail/Wealthbox setup with a six-figure implementation. At 10+ users and your volume you don't need that yet — you need the habit first, the platform second. Buy the Ferrari before you can drive and you'll spend a year in configuration meetings while clients drift. The cost of doing nothing isn't the lost inquiry — it's the long-tenured client who quietly moves assets because no one called for eighteen months.

When to revisit this

When a partner asks "when did we last talk to the Henderson family?" and nobody can answer in 30 seconds — or when you cross 15 client-facing staff.

The part worth getting right

The fork is this: are you a sales shop that also services clients, or a service shop that also takes inquiries? If it's the first, a standard CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive) wrapped around your inbound funnel is fine — pipeline is the spine. If it's the second — and at 170 people with referral-led growth, it almost certainly is — you need a wealth-vertical tool (Wealthbox, Redtail, or Salesforce FSC) where the client record is the spine and pipeline hangs off the side. Pick wrong and you'll migrate in eighteen months, dragging years of client notes across systems and losing some of them in the move. Which one you are isn't obvious from inquiry volume — it's decided by how your senior people actually spend their week.