What's really going on

You have five inbound channels feeding two or three people. Nothing's being sold cold — people are asking about membership, events, sponsorship, venues. The real risk isn't a leaky pipeline. It's that a LinkedIn DM, a walk-in note, and a web form all live in different heads, and one of them gets forgotten the week before an event. That's a reputation cost, not a revenue leak.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free) — one shared inbox and contact record for all three of you, so an email, a form fill, and a LinkedIn note about the same person stack in one place. Ignore every upsell prompt.
2. Airtable (free tier) — run your event pipeline here: one base per event with stages like Enquiry → Registered → Attended → Follow-up. Kanban view, a public form for enquiries, done.
3. The habit — every Monday, 15 minutes, the three of you clear anything with no next step. That single meeting will do more than any tool.

First action today: in HubSpot Free, connect your shared inbox and forward the last week of enquiry emails into it. One person, 30 minutes.

What you're being oversold

If anyone's pitched you HubSpot Sales Hub, Salesforce, or Apollo — walk away. Sales Hub is priced for teams closing deals worth thousands; Apollo and the outbound tools solve cold prospecting, which you don't do. At 10-50 warm enquiries a month, paid seats are money set on fire. Doing nothing costs you the occasional dropped enquiry and a member who felt ignored — quiet damage, but it compounds across event cycles.

When to revisit this

When you're running more than one event stream in parallel and enquiries start blurring between them.

The part worth getting right

The one call is whether members and event attendees belong in the same system or two. If most enquiries are existing members asking about events, you want one shared contact record — HubSpot Free handles it. If event attendees are mostly strangers who never become members, you want events kept separate in Airtable so your member list stays clean. Get this fork wrong and in a year you're either untangling duplicate contacts or migrating history between two tools. Which side are you actually on?