No.
You don't need a CRM.
Why
Under 10 inquiries/month means roughly two a week. With five channels (WhatsApp, Instagram DM, phone, walk-ins, referrals) and just you running the agency, the issue isn't tracking volume — it's that the same lead might ping you on Instagram, then WhatsApp, then walk in, and you have no single place where "Rohit from the café" lives. A CRM won't fix that; one notebook page per lead will.
What you actually need
- WhatsApp Business app (free) — port your number, set up three labels: "New", "Proposal sent", "Client". Every inquiry, including the ones that started on Instagram or as walk-ins, gets logged here too because it's the channel you check most.
- Google Sheets or Notion database (free) — one row per lead: Date / Name / Channel / Service wanted / Quote / Follow-up Date / Status. Ten rows a month. That's it.
- A habit — the end-of-day 10 minutes — before you close your laptop, open the sheet and WhatsApp labels, and action anything where "Follow-up Date" is today or earlier. Solo operators lose deals to silence, not to bad CRMs.
Do this today
Open Google Sheets, create a sheet called "Leads 2025" with columns Date / Name / Channel (WhatsApp/IG/Phone/Walk-in/Referral) / Service / Quote / Follow-up Date / Status. Then scroll back through your last 30 days of WhatsApp and Instagram DMs and paste in every inquiry you can find. By tonight you'll see exactly how many leads you've ghosted and which channel actually converts.
What to ignore
Skip HubSpot Free, Zoho Bigin, Pipedrive, and especially anyone DM'ing you on LinkedIn about "GoHighLevel for agencies" — at <10 inquiries/month solo, every one of those tools becomes a tab you stop opening by week three. Ignore Apollo, Instantly, and any "lead gen automation" pitch; you don't have a volume problem, you have a follow-up problem.
What doing nothing costs you
At <10 inquiries/month with five scattered channels and no single source of truth, you're almost certainly losing 1-2 leads/month to "I forgot to reply" — and as a digital marketing agency, every retainer you drop is recurring revenue you never see compounding.
Where this leaves you
You've got the sheet, the WhatsApp labels, and the end-of-day habit. The plan would give you a Notion or Sheets template pre-built for agency services (retainer vs project vs audit), a referral-tracking column so you know which past client is sending the most business, and a script for what to say when a lead has gone cold for 14 days — because that's the slip that quietly kills solo agencies.
When to revisit this
When you cross 30 inquiries a month or hire your first account manager — whichever comes first.