What's really going on

Fifty to two hundred inquiries a month across email, phone, and web form, split across five sellers and three marketers. That's the exact volume where leads get worked twice, or not at all, because everyone's inbox is their CRM. Phone inquiries are the quiet killer — if they aren't logged the second the call ends, they vanish. The symptom is "we need a CRM." The real problem is you have no shared record of who owns what.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — put all 10 people on it, pipe the web form straight in, and forward the sales inbox so every email becomes a contact with an owner.
2. Freshsales (free tier, paid per-user — check current pricing) — worth a side-by-side look because the built-in phone logs calls into the record without anyone remembering to.
3. Habit: a 10-minute Monday stand-up where every "no owner" lead gets one. The tool only works if ownership is forced.

First action today: in HubSpot, create one pipeline with five stages (New → Qualified → Quoted → Won → Lost), connect your web form, and assign your five sellers as owners. One hour, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce, or HubSpot Sales Hub at $90+/user, or an outbound stack like Outreach or Apollo. You are inbound — Apollo and ZoomInfo solve a prospecting problem you do not have. Sales Hub escalates fast once you're hooked on the free tier; know that going in. Doing nothing costs you the inquiries that fall between your five sellers every month — in niche manufacturing one lost quote can be a year's software budget.

When to revisit this

When a seller asks "did anyone follow up with [company]?" and nobody can answer in under a minute.

The part worth getting right

The call you have to make now: are your deals won on fast response, or on long nurture? If it's response speed, HubSpot free plus a shared inbox is enough for a year — don't pay. If it's nurture — months of quotes, revisions, specs, drawings — then the free tier runs out of room fast and you'll migrate inside a year, which is painful once ten people have habits. Picking wrong doesn't break you, but it costs a quarter of rework and a migration nobody wants to lead.