// The situation

I attached here the list of requested features we think we would need for our new CRM system. Also, below you will find the screenshot of the current tracking files: Quotation tracking file: we have the quotation tracking file separately for each site, even all of the details are logged and enter in our documentation system in Mfiles. In this Excel file, we track how many products and tools that we are quoting for each project. It is separated tracked in each location (China, Finland, Poland). This is what I don’t want to have in the future. We should be able to have these datas in the CRM and be able to pull the data straight away from the CRM without making additional Excel list for the same purpose. Sales momentum meter (made with Microsoft Form and I created the Power BI report view based on this) – a lot of work with cleaning up the data field. Weekly report (also made with Microsoft Form and I created the Power BI report view based on this) Beside this we also have the Sales report which we are gathering data from our ERP system called IFS (I can’t share that view here) My goal is that we should have 1 single source of truth which is the CRM system, reduce as much as possible the manual work with entering data and reports. Lead channels: Email. Inquiry volume: 10–50. Team size: 4–10.

The verdict · May 14, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM.

Why

At 10–50 inquiries/month across 4–10 people in three countries (China, Finland, Poland), you don't have a volume problem — you have a fragmentation problem. The Power BI dashboards built on Microsoft Forms are a symptom: people built workarounds because the system of record didn't exist. A CRM will only become "the single source of truth" if you also retire the per-site Excels and the Forms on day one — otherwise you'll just have a fifth system.

What you actually need

  1. Pipedrive Professional (~€64/user/mo) or HubSpot Sales Hub Starter (~€/$20/seat/mo) — both handle multi-country pipelines, custom fields for "products quoted" and "tools quoted", and have native Power BI / IFS connectors via API. Pick one, not both. Pipedrive is lighter and faster to roll out for a 4–10 person team.
  2. One pipeline with country as a field, not three separate pipelines — Lead → Qualified → Quoted → Negotiation → Won/Lost. Custom fields: Country, Products Quoted (count), Tools Quoted (count), Quote Value, M-Files link. This replaces all three per-site Excels.
  3. A habit — Friday 15-minute pipeline hygiene per rep — every rep updates stage + next action date on their open deals before logging off Friday. Kills the need for the weekly Microsoft Form entirely; the Power BI report rebuilds off the CRM API instead.

Do this today

Sign up for a Pipedrive trial at pipedrive.com, then go to Settings → Data fields → Deal → add five custom fields: Country (dropdown: China/Finland/Poland), Products Quoted, Tools Quoted, Quote Value, M-Files Link. Import last 30 days of quotations from one site's Excel as a CSV. By tomorrow you'll see whether the field structure actually holds your real quotation data — before you roll it out to all three sites.

What to ignore

Skip Salesforce Sales Cloud (€165/user/mo) and HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise — both will be pitched to you because you mentioned "single source of truth" and IFS integration, and both are massively over-spec'd for 10–50 inquiries/month. Also ignore any vendor who promises a "turnkey IFS connector" without showing you a working customer reference — that integration is where projects like yours die.

What doing nothing costs you

You keep paying 4–10 people to re-enter the same quotation data into Excel, M-Files, Forms, and IFS — conservatively 2-3 hours/person/week of duplicate entry across the team. The bigger cost is invisible: you can't answer "what's our win rate on tooling quotes in Poland this quarter" without someone building another Excel.

When to revisit this

When the CRM is live and someone still opens the per-site quotation Excel — that's the moment to delete the Excel, not negotiate with it.

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