CRM software for a lean consulting or advisory business

A CRM chosen for a five-person advisory team has different requirements than one chosen for a sales floor: it needs to track a smaller number of higher-value deals, integrate with a form tool and an email platform, and stay usable without a dedicated administrator.

HubSpot's free tier covers contact records, deal pipelines, and email tracking, and the paid tiers add automation and reporting as the pipeline grows. Its integration with Tally-style form tools and most email platforms is direct rather than requiring a separate connector, which matters for a team stitching together lead capture, CRM, and email in one flow. Zoho CRM covers similar ground at a lower price point once past the free tier, with a steeper interface learning curve reported by several small-business reviewers. Salesforce Essentials brings more configuration depth than either, at a price and setup time that only pays off once a team is large enough to need custom fields and multiple pipelines running in parallel.

For a business running on the stack described elsewhere on this site, Tally forms, MailerLite email, Make for automation, HubSpot's CRM is the one that connects to all three without a workaround, which is why it's what we use ourselves.