Choosing a CRM for a small B2B service business

A service business of roughly five to twenty-five people, where a few people sell, and enquiries arrive by website form and email. The question is not which CRM has the most features, but whether a CRM would stop enquiries from being lost, and what that costs for your team size.

• Enquiries arrive in more than one place (a form, a shared inbox, personal inboxes) and nobody can say which are still open.
• Follow-up depends on someone remembering. A lead goes quiet because the person who spoke to it was away.
• Two people contact the same lead, or nobody does, because ownership is not recorded.
• You cannot answer "how many proposals are out and what are they worth" without building a spreadsheet first.
• When a salesperson leaves, the history of their conversations leaves with them.

If two or three of these are true every week, the cost of a missed follow-up is probably higher than a small CRM subscription. That is a judgement for you to check against your own numbers, not a measured result.

• One person handles every enquiry and the volume is low enough to see it all in one inbox.
• Work arrives mostly from existing clients and referrals that you track in a project tool you already pay for.
• You have not yet written down your follow-up routine. A CRM will enforce a routine; it will not invent one. Write the routine on a page first.

A shared inbox plus a simple spreadsheet is a legitimate answer at that stage. Revisit the choice when ownership or duplicate contacts start to cause visible misses.

• Pipedrive charges per seat. Its help page says you are charged per seat whether or not it is assigned to a user, and that annual billing is paid up front for the whole year. The pricing page lists four plans (Lite, Growth, Premium, Ultimate) and a free trial of 14 days without a card; no free plan is listed.
• HubSpot charges per seat on its paid Sales Hub plans, and offers a free CRM for up to two users. Its catalog describes different seat types: a Core Seat for Starter and a Sales Seat for Professional and Enterprise; its pricing page says view-only seats are available at no additional cost. Professional and Enterprise carry a required one-time onboarding fee.
• ActiveCampaign prices by the number of contacts and its pricing page is headed "Choose your marketing plan". Each plan includes a number of user seats, and a deal pipeline is offered as an add-on on its upper plans. The page does not show the add-on or extra-seat prices.

Pipedrive and the paid Sales Hub plans are built around a sales pipeline: who owns which lead, what stage it is in, what happens next. ActiveCampaign is a marketing-automation platform with a CRM component: it is strongest where the job is segmented email and behaviour-based follow-up to a list, and weaker as the single place a salesperson manages deals, because the pipeline is an add-on. Many small teams need both jobs and then pay for both, or choose one tool and accept its weaker half. Decide which job is the bigger problem first: lost enquiries and unclear ownership point to a pipeline CRM; nurturing a large list points to marketing automation.

How to read this. Pipedrive's pages state that prices are per seat and exclude VAT; the annual figure is the per-month equivalent of one payment per year (for example Growth: $468 per seat per year). For HubSpot, the first price is what the pricing page showed with its annual option selected (Starter $7, shown struck against $20 and described as a limited-time offer, so it may not last; Professional $90, with $100 struck through); the second is the per-seat list price in HubSpot's catalog. The monthly USD price on HubSpot's own page could not be read for this guide, so the catalog list price is shown instead and is not stated to be the monthly option. HubSpot's European page lists Starter for up to 10 users. Enterprise shows a single starts-at price of $150 and is sold through sales. HubSpot's page does not say whether taxes are included. HubSpot's free CRM covers up to two users, so it cannot cover five or ten.

The cost of ten ActiveCampaign users cannot be worked out from the published page: it shows seats included per plan but not the price of an extra seat, and it shows only yearly billing, with no monthly price. Its tiers rise with the number of contacts, so the same plan costs more as your list grows.

So for Pipedrive, follow-up automation starts at Growth, the second plan, not Lite. For HubSpot, the plan page read for this guide did not list record or automation limits in text; check the plan details on the page, and HubSpot's catalog, before you rely on a plan for automation. For ActiveCampaign, sales automation is not included in Starter according to the pricing page's comparison table.

• Two or fewer people selling: HubSpot's pricing page offers a free CRM for up to two users with no credit card required. If your whole selling team is two people, start there and pay only when a limit stops you.
• Still deciding: Pipedrive and ActiveCampaign both advertise a 14-day free trial; the pages say no credit card is needed. A trial is the cheapest way to import twenty of your own past enquiries and see whether the pipeline fits how you work.
• No pipeline needed yet: if the job is a few automated follow-up emails, an email tool (or ActiveCampaign Starter, which has no pipeline) may be enough, and a CRM can wait.
• Low volume: a shared inbox and a spreadsheet, as above.

1. Count last month's enquiries and write down who touched each one and how long the first reply took. That is your baseline, and the only number that proves a CRM helped.
2. Write five must-haves from the criteria table above, not a feature wish-list.
3. Shortlist two products. Use the seat table for a seat-priced product, and the contact-tier table for ActiveCampaign. If your shortlist is Pipedrive and HubSpot, read HubSpot vs Pipedrive for a small sales team; if you pick Pipedrive, see which Pipedrive plan a small team needs.
4. Decide the billing basis before you compare: month to month, or a year paid up front at a lower monthly equivalent.
5. Run each trial with a real set of past enquiries and one written follow-up routine.
6. When the CRM is chosen, build the automatic part: website form → CRM → email follow-up.

• Testing. No product was used for this guide; it reads published pages.
• Other CRMs. Zoho, Close, monday CRM and others are not covered here.
• Your tax position. Pipedrive says its prices exclude VAT; the HubSpot and ActiveCampaign pages read did not state how tax is treated.
• Regional prices. The pages showed US dollars for the region they detected; other regions may show other currencies or amounts.
• Implementation cost. Setup, migration and training time are yours to estimate.