Why

10+ people receiving 10–50 email inquiries/month means each person handles 1–5 leads a month at most. That's not a pipeline volume — that's an "whose turn is it to reply?" problem. A CRM would sit unused because there's nothing to manage between stages; the friction is entirely at the point of "this email arrived, who owns it, did anyone reply." Insurance inquiries also need an audit trail of who quoted what, which a shared inbox handles natively.

What you actually need

1. Hiver (starts around $19/user/mo) or Help Scout (starts around $25/user/mo) — sits on top of Gmail/Outlook, lets you assign each incoming email to one person, see status (Open / Pending / Closed), and prevents two agents replying to the same inquiry.
2. Email templates for the top 5 inquiry types — auto / home / life / commercial / "I want to switch from X". Saves your team typing the same quote-request reply 30 times a month.
3. A habit — the 10am assignment sweep — one person (team lead) opens the shared inbox at 10am daily, assigns every unassigned overnight email to a named agent with an SLA tag. Five minutes.

Do this today

Sign up for a Hiver free trial at hiver.com, connect your shared inquiries@ inbox, and create three statuses: "Unassigned", "Quoted", "Awaiting customer". Then assign every email from the last 7 days to one of your 10+ agents by name. By tomorrow morning nobody can claim "I didn't know it was mine."

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub ($20–100/seat/mo), Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, and Zoho CRM — all are pipeline tools for outbound sales motions, not inbound email triage for a service team. Any rep pitching you "insurance CRM" like AgencyBloc or Applied Epic is selling policy-management software, which is a separate problem from the one you described (answering email leads).

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 20% slippage on 10–50 email inquiries = 2–10 lost prospects/month who never got replied to because no one owned the email. In insurance, where lifetime commission on a single retained household runs into thousands, that compounds fast.

Where this leaves you

You've got Hiver, five templates, and a 10am sweep. The plan would give you the assignment rules per inquiry type (auto goes to auto desk, commercial to commercial desk), the rollout schedule across your 10+ agents, and the signal in week two that proves the sweep is actually happening — usually the day someone double-replies to a lead and you catch it in the audit log.

When to revisit this

When inbound volume crosses 200/month or you start doing outbound prospecting on commercial lines.