What's really going on

An MSP at your stage wins on trust and follow-through, not pipeline velocity. Ninety-plus inquiries a year is a number one person can hold in their head — if the notes live somewhere all three of you can see. The real risk isn't losing a new lead. It's a quiet proposal that never got chased, or a renewal that slipped because nobody owned the date. A CRM won't fix that. A shared habit will.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets (free) — one tab, columns for source, contact, last touch, next action, owner. Every inquiry from any channel lands here within the hour.
2. HubSpot Free CRM — free for unlimited users, good when a small team needs shared ownership on inbound email — only if the sheet feels too loose after 60 days. Skip Sales Hub; you'll get pushed there fast.
3. Friday 20-minute ritual. All three of you, same call, walk the sheet top to bottom. Anything with no next action gets one or gets closed.

First action today: open a Sheet, paste in every open lead and proposal from your inbox and LinkedIn from the last 30 days. One row each. Assign an owner to every row before you close the tab.

What you're being oversold

Salesforce is built for large orgs with dedicated admins — for an SMB under 10 people, it's massively over-built and costly. Pipedrive is cleaner, but a sheet is enough when you're solo or near it with low lead volume. Paying €15–20 per seat per month to track eight leads is a tax on your own discipline. Doing nothing costs you the one proposal a quarter that goes cold — for an MSP with recurring contracts, that's the expensive kind of miss, not the new logo.

When to revisit this

When inquiries cross 25 a month, or when a fourth person joins and the Friday call stops fitting on one screen.

The part worth getting right

Decide where money actually leaks. If it's new inbound going unanswered across four channels, the fix is one shared inbox and the sheet — capture is the problem. If it's existing clients — stalled proposals, quiet renewals, scope creep — no CRM helps; you need a calendar of owned dates and a follow-up cadence. Same company, two different fixes. Pick the wrong one and you'll buy software next year for a problem software doesn't solve.