Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but a lightweight one, not what a sales rep will pitch you.
What's really going on
You're one person fielding email, web forms, referrals, and LinkedIn DMs. At 10-50 inquiries a month, the leak isn't volume — it's that each channel has its own inbox and a payroll enquiry needs three or four thoughtful touches before it closes. A referral you meant to reply to on Tuesday gets buried by a LinkedIn message on Thursday. You lose deals you already won on merit.
What to do instead
- Airtable (free tier, paid ~£16/user/mo — check current pricing) — one base with a web form that replaces your current form, a kanban view by stage, and a "next action + date" field you filter on daily.
- HubSpot Free CRM (free) — if you'd rather have real email tracking and a LinkedIn-to-CRM clipper built in. Ignore every prompt to upgrade to Sales Hub.
- Habit: every lead, from every channel, gets logged the same day. No exceptions.
First action, 30 minutes: open Airtable, create a base called "Pipeline", add columns for Name, Source, Stage, Next Action, Next Action Date, Notes. Import the last month of enquiries from your inbox by hand. That act alone will show you two deals you forgot about.
What you're being oversold
Someone will push you toward Salesforce or a paid HubSpot Sales Hub seat "so it scales". You're one person doing bespoke payroll — Salesforce is built for twenty-person sales teams with an admin, and paid HubSpot escalates fast once you rely on it. You do not need pipeline forecasting, lead scoring, or sequences. Doing nothing costs you the referrals — the highest-intent leads you get — because those are the ones you're most embarrassed to reply to late.
When to revisit this
When you hire a second person who also touches leads, or when you cross ~60 enquiries a month consistently.
The part worth getting right
The real fork is whether your payroll deals are mostly won on written proposals or on conversations. If it's proposals and documents, Airtable wins — you want structured fields, attachments, and a form that feeds it. If it's conversations across LinkedIn and email threads, HubSpot Free wins — because it quietly logs the emails and lets you see the whole thread history against a contact. Pick wrong and in six months you'll be exporting data and starting over. Which side of that line does your average deal actually live on?