What's really going on

Your business is relationships, not throughput. €500K on referrals and LinkedIn with sub-10 inquiries means each conversation is worth thousands — you don't have a lead-tracking problem, you have a follow-through problem. The deals you lose aren't lost in a pipeline stage. They're lost in a Slack thread, a LinkedIn DM you meant to reply to on Tuesday, or a proposal that sat in Drafts for nine days. A CRM won't fix that. A shared list and a calendar will.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets or Notion (free) — one shared tab: Company, Contact, Source, Last touch, Next step, Date. That's it. Every open conversation lives in one row.
2. Folk (~$24/seat/mo annual, check pricing) — only if the LinkedIn capture pain is real. Its Chrome extension pulls leads from LinkedIn, Gmail or Crunchbase in one click, which is the one thing a sheet can't do. 14-day trial, no credit card — try before you commit.
3. The habit — every Friday, 20 minutes, one person walks the list. Anyone gone silent >7 days gets a nudge that day.

First action, today: open a new Google Sheet, title it "Open Deals," and paste in every LinkedIn conversation and referral intro you've had in the last 30 days. One row each. Do it before you close this tab.

What you're being oversold

Someone will tell you a Shopify CRO agency needs HubSpot Sales Hub or Salesforce. Folk itself pitches against Salesforce/HubSpot complexity for small agencies, and for good reason: custom objects, workspace roles, dashboards, API access are answers to problems you don't have at 10 leads/month. You'd spend a month configuring, three seats paid, and still forget to reply to the referral that mattered. Doing nothing costs you the two or three deals a year that slipped because no one owned the follow-up — at your ticket size, that's real money, but no CRM prevents it. A named owner and a Friday review do.

When to revisit this

When inquiries cross 30/month, or when you hire a fourth person who needs their own "mine" view.

The part worth getting right

There's one call only your numbers can settle. Is your bottleneck volume or conversion? If leads are too few, no tool helps — you invest in outbound, content, partnerships. If leads come in but slip between the three of you, you don't need software either — you need one owner per deal and a weekly ritual. Pick the wrong story and you'll spend the next quarter fixing the wrong thing. Which one is actually costing you sleep?