Keep track of leads and deals

The problem

The first sign is a question you cannot answer: how many deals are open right now, and what is the next step on each. The information exists, spread across an inbox, a notebook, a spreadsheet somebody started, and the memory of whoever spoke to the customer last.

The cost is not administrative, it is revenue. Interested people go quiet because nobody followed up on day four. A quote gets sent and never chased. A customer who said "call me in March" is remembered in June. None of that is laziness, it is what happens when the record of a conversation lives in the head of the person who had it.

The second cost arrives later. When someone leaves, or is ill, their relationships leave with them, because nothing was written down anywhere the rest of the team could see.

What AI can actually do here

A CRM is mostly structure, and the structure is what fixes this. Every lead becomes a record with a stage and a next action, so the pipeline is a picture rather than a recollection. That alone answers the question you could not answer.

The automation layer is what removes the typing. Email and calendar sync log conversations and meetings without anyone remembering to, some tools enrich records from public data so you are not copying company details by hand, and workflows fire the reminder you would otherwise forget.

The AI layer sits on top: assistants that draft the follow-up, summarize a long thread, or answer "which deals have gone quiet" in plain language. Useful, and secondary to the discipline underneath. A CRM nobody updates produces confident summaries of a fiction, and the most common failure here is not choosing the wrong tool, it is choosing a tool and then keeping the real pipeline in your head anyway.

How the tools differ

HubSpot Sales Hub is the default on-ramp: free for up to 2 users with a real pipeline and email tracking, then Starter at $7 per seat per month billed annually. It suits businesses that expect to want marketing and support on the same database later. Watch the tier jumps, since Professional is $90 per seat per month plus a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee.

Attio suits teams whose process is not a standard sales funnel. It is built on custom objects, so you decide what a record is, and it syncs and enriches from email and calendar automatically. Free covers up to 3 seats and 50,000 records, with Plus at EUR 39 per user per month.

Close is for teams that sell by phone. Calling, SMS, email sequences and an AI sales agent are built in on every plan, from Solo at $9 per user per month billed annually for a single operator up to Scale at $139. There is no free tier, only a 14-day trial.

When you don't need a tool

If you have five open deals and you personally handle all of them, a written list with a next action and a date beats a CRM, because you will actually maintain it. Adopt a CRM when you can name what you lost by not having one.

If your problem is that you have no leads, a CRM will organize the emptiness. That is a demand problem, and it is solved by outreach, referrals or marketing, not by better record-keeping.

And if two people share the work, a shared document with one row per deal is often enough for months. The real trigger for a CRM is a third person, a longer sales cycle, or the first time a deal is lost purely because nobody followed up.