Why

10-50 inquiries/month sounds light, but marine construction deals are high-ticket, permit-heavy, and slow — a referral in January can still be live in June, and the follow-up gaps are where deposits die. With 4-10 people touching phones, walk-ins, and email, there's no single record of "last contact" or "next action," which is exactly the problem CRMs were built to solve. You're not too small for a CRM; you're past the point a shared inbox can hold it.

What you actually need

1. Pipedrive Essential (~$24/user/mo) — one pipeline: New Inquiry → Site Visit Scheduled → Estimate Sent → Permit/Contract → Scheduled → Complete. Marine jobs sit in "Estimate Sent" and "Permit" for months; you need to see that visually.
2. CallRail or a Google Voice number per source (~$45/mo or free) — so referral calls and the number on your truck wraps get logged automatically into Pipedrive. Phone is your #1 channel and currently invisible.
3. A habit — Monday 8am pipeline huddle — you and the estimators walk every deal stuck >14 days in the same stage. Move it, kill it, or assign a call. 20 minutes.

Do this today

Go to pipedrive.com, start the 14-day trial, and in Settings → Pipelines rename the default stages to: New Inquiry / Site Visit / Estimate Sent / Permit & Contract / Scheduled / Complete. Then manually add every open lead and active job from the last 60 days — pull them from your email, your phone, and whoever takes walk-ins. By tomorrow morning you'll see, for the first time, how many estimates are sitting unanswered.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Professional ($100+/seat/mo) and Salesforce — both will try to sell you marketing automation and forecasting dashboards you don't need at 10-50 inquiries/month. Also ignore ServiceTitan and Jobber pitches; those are built for high-volume residential trades (HVAC, plumbing) with dispatch needs, not permit-driven marine construction with 3-6 month cycles.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 10% slippage on 30 inquiries/month = ~3 lost jobs/month. Marine construction tickets in Pinellas run $15K-$80K easily; even at a $25K average that's roughly $900K/year of seawall and dock work going to the next contractor who called back.

Where this leaves you

You've got Pipedrive and a six-stage pipeline shaped around permits, not generic "qualified/proposal." The plan configures custom fields for permit status and waterfront address, rolls out to your 4-10 person team with the estimators going first and admin second, and names the moment in week two when someone stops logging calls because "I'll do it later" — that's when adoption dies in field-heavy businesses.

When to revisit this

When you add a second crew or estimator and two people start quoting the same referral without knowing it.