// The situation

We represent an investment holding company and manage business acquisition deals. For each deal, there are tasks to manage throughout the process, with deadlines. Deals come from emails and word of mouth. Lead channels: Email, Phone calls, Walk-ins. Inquiry volume: <10 / mo. Team size: 2–3.

The verdict · Aug 25, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM — but the "deal pipeline" kind, not the "sales lead" kind.

What's really going on

You have under 10 live deals a month, each one long, high-stakes, and full of dated tasks. The risk isn't losing a lead — it's a deadline slipping on a deal worth millions. Email and word-of-mouth mean context lives in inboxes and heads, not in one place two or three people can see. That's the real problem: shared visibility on deal stage and next action, not lead capture.

What to do instead

  1. Pipedrive (~€14/user/mo — check current pricing) — use it as a deal board, not a sales pipeline. Each acquisition is one deal card; stages are your process (sourced → NDA → LOI → DD → close); every card carries its task list and deadlines.
  2. HubSpot Free CRM (free) — the honest alternative if budget matters. Free for all three of you, deal pipeline included, email logs to the deal automatically.
  3. Today, open one of them and rebuild your current live deals as cards, with the next task and its due date on each. One hour, one person, done before lunch.

What you're being oversold

Salesforce is the classic wrong answer here — someone will pitch it because "acquisitions = serious" and it will cost you a five-figure year and an admin you don't have. You also don't need Zapier, WhatsApp tooling, or a call tracker at this volume. Doing nothing costs you the deal where a diligence deadline quietly slips because it lived in one person's inbox — you know which one that would be.

When to revisit this

When you're juggling more than fifteen active deals at once, or you bring in a fourth person who needs to see everything without asking.

The part worth getting right

The call is whether your deals are really a pipeline or really a project. If each acquisition moves through the same repeatable stages — sourced, NDA, LOI, DD, close — a deal CRM like Pipedrive fits and you'll live in it happily for years. If each deal is bespoke, with its own workstreams, legal threads, and dated deliverables that look nothing like the last one, a CRM will feel wrong within a month and you actually want a project tool with deadlines and shared docs. Pick the wrong shape and you'll migrate in six months, mid-deal. Which one describes the last three deals you closed?

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