What's really going on

You get under 10 inquiries a month, so a spreadsheet could hold the data. But you have 3-4 sellers. The moment two people know the same contact, a sheet breaks — someone overwrites a note, someone forgets who's following up, a referral sits for three weeks. Referral-driven consulting lives or dies on follow-through, and follow-through needs one place everyone sees.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — one shared pipeline with contact ownership, so every seller sees who's on what. Free covers you at this volume.
2. Pipedrive (~$14-15/user/mo — check current pricing) — pick this instead if your sellers want a cleaner visual pipeline and will actually open the app on their phone between meetings.
3. A weekly 15-minute pipeline standup — the tool only works if the four of you look at it together once a week.

Today: sign up for HubSpot Free, create one pipeline with 4-5 stages (New Referral → Meeting Booked → Proposal → Won/Lost), and drop in every open opportunity from the last 60 days. One person, one hour.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Sales Hub, Salesforce, or a full sales-enablement stack with sequences and AI scoring. At under 10 warm referrals a month, that's a five-figure mistake — you don't have a volume problem, you have a coordination problem. Doing nothing costs you the referrals that quietly go silent because nobody remembered whose turn it was.

When to revisit this

When two sellers discover they've both been talking to the same referred contact — or when inquiries pass 30 a month.

The part worth getting right

Pick the tool your sellers will actually open. If your four sellers live in email and want something free that a partner can also log into, HubSpot Free is the right call and you'll never outgrow the free tier at this volume. If they're out of the office, running between client meetings, and need something fast on a phone, Pipedrive earns its $60/mo. Guess wrong and in three months the CRM is a graveyard — deals tracked in Slack DMs again, and you're back where you started.