Lead tracking fails in the gap between an enquiry arriving and someone owning it. Six fields and one daily habit close that gap.
Lead tracking is where most small businesses lose money without noticing. Enquiries arrive through a form, an inbox, a phone call and a conversation at an event, and each channel has a different unofficial owner. Nothing is lost dramatically — it just sits for four days, and by then the person has bought elsewhere.
The fix is not a bigger CRM. It is one list, six fields, and a rule about who touches it first.
Speed beats everything else in lead handling. A reply within the hour lands while the person is still comparing options; a reply the next day arrives after they have chosen. If you fix only one thing, fix time-to-first-reply.
Lead scoring, multi-touch attribution and elaborate stage models assume volume that most small businesses do not have. With a few dozen leads a month, a score is a guess with decimals — and every extra required field is a tax on the person entering data at the exact moment they should be replying.
Track the six fields properly instead. Complete data on six beats sparse data on twenty, and the difference shows up the first time you try to answer where your customers actually came from.
Ettex CRM holds this without ceremony: contact profiles with custom fields for source and request, groups and tags to separate new enquiries from active conversations, a visual pipeline once your statuses are real, notes and activity logging so calls sit on one screen, change history showing who edited what and when, shared address books so a colleague can pick up a lead you cannot answer, inline editing straight in the list, duplicate merging for when the same person enquires twice, instant search by name, email, phone or note, and import and export as vCard or CSV. Deals link to the documents and invoices that follow, so the enquiry and the eventual contract stay connected.
Recording every enquiry in one place with its source, owner, status and next action, so nothing waits unanswered and you can see which channels actually produce customers.
Not at the very start — a shared list works for one person. It becomes necessary when several people handle enquiries or when history matters more than the current state.
Within the hour during working days if you can. Response time affects conversion more than almost anything else you control.
Start with new, in conversation, closed. Add stages only when the same intermediate step has repeated across many leads.
Because it is the only way to know which channels pay for themselves. Recorded per lead, it answers the question in a minute; reconstructed later, it never gets answered.
Good lead tracking is unremarkable: one list, an owner on every line, a next action with a date, and a reply that arrives while the question is still fresh.
A CRM for startups solves a different problem than a CRM for sales teams. Early on you are learning who the customer is — and the tool should record that, not force a pipeline you have not earned yet.
Customer success management is often a job title with no defined work. Here is what it actually consists of — and the signals that tell you a customer is leaving months before they say so.
Client management software for small business is usually bought too late and configured too heavily. Here is the shortlist of what actually has to work when you have twenty clients, not two thousand.