What's really going on

You get fewer than 10 leads a month across web form, phone, and referrals. One person answers all of them — you. The risk isn't forgetting a lead. It's slow follow-up on the phone ones and no record of what referral sent whom. A CRM won't fix either. A single sheet and a habit will.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets (free) — one tab: date, name, channel, what they need, next step, next-step date. Every inquiry goes in before you close the tab or hang up.
2. Airtable (free tier) — only if you want the web form to drop straight into the list without you retyping. Use the form block; skip everything else.
3. Habit — every Monday morning, sort by "next-step date" and clear anything overdue before you touch client work.

First action, 30 minutes: open Sheets, make those six columns, pin the tab. Then open your web form settings and forward submissions to the same inbox you actually read.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho for "professional IT services." At 10 leads a month solo, those are a tax — hours of setup, monthly fees, and fields you'll never fill. Jobber and Housecall Pro are built for field trades with crews and dispatch, not solo IT consulting. Doing nothing costs you the odd referral that goes cold because you meant to call back Thursday and it's now Tuesday — real, but not a software problem.

When to revisit this

When you hire a second person, or when inquiries pass ~25 a month and you're losing track of who's where.

The part worth getting right

The one call is what kind of work you actually sell. If it's mostly project work — network setups, migrations, one-off fixes — a sheet is enough forever at this volume. If it's mostly managed services with recurring contracts, renewals, and SLAs, you don't need a sales CRM at all — you need a way to track contract dates and ticket history, which is a different tool entirely (something like HaloPSA or Atera down the track). Pick the wrong path now and in a year you're migrating data twice. So which one pays your rent this month?