CRM for small companies under 10 people: what changes at this size
Most CRM advice is written for businesses bigger than they are. Articles assume sales teams, marketing departments, and dedicated CRM administrators. Small companies under ten people don't have any of those things, and what they need from a CRM is correspondingly different.
This piece is the version for the businesses I work with. Independent consultancies. Small recruitment agencies. Coaching practices. Architectural studios. The places where the founder is also the salesperson, the operations manager, and the CRM administrator, and where the CRM has to earn its place without becoming a job.
There's a broader CRM guide for UK small businesses for the wider picture. This piece is specific to the under-ten size.
What changes at this size
Three things are different at this scale, and they affect every CRM decision.
The first is that nobody on the team is a specialist administrator. Whoever sets up the CRM is also doing their normal job. There's no IT department to lean on, no operations team to configure the system, no admin to maintain it. The CRM has to be self-running.
The second is that everyone touches everything. In a bigger business, sales runs sales, delivery runs delivery, marketing runs marketing. In a small business, the founder is doing all three, and so is everyone else to some degree. The CRM has to handle the overlap rather than carve up the work.
The third is that the cost-benefit calculation is tight. The per-user-per-month pricing of bigger CRMs gets justified by productivity gains across larger teams. At under ten users, the maths is different. A £600/month CRM has to save serious time and prevent serious losses to earn its place. A £90/month CRM has a lower bar.
What this means for your CRM choice
Four implications.
Choose for simplicity over depth. Features you don't use are not free. They're admin you avoid. They're configuration decisions you'll defer. They're a sense of overhead that makes the team less likely to open the system. A simpler CRM that does the basics well beats a deeper CRM with most of the depth unused.
Choose for breadth over specialism. Or rather, choose a CRM that handles your whole client lifecycle (sales, delivery, ongoing relationships) rather than a sales-only tool that leaves you needing other systems for delivery. At your size, multiple tools are harder to maintain than one well-configured one. The piece on using a CRM for project management covers this in detail.
Choose for lower setup burden. The "you'll see real value in three to six months" timelines that come with bigger CRMs aren't realistic for small teams. You need value in weeks. A CRM that can be set up properly in two to four weeks of part-time work is the right shape.
Choose for sensible pricing. £90 to £200 per month total for a five to ten-person team is the realistic budget. Going higher needs a clear case. Going significantly lower usually means you've chosen a CRM that won't earn its place.
The shortlist for small companies
For UK companies under ten people, the realistic options fall into a fairly narrow band.
Capsule is the most common right answer for the small UK service businesses I work with. Light setup, sensible pricing, handles both sales and delivery, contact-centric model that suits relationship-led work. The full guide to Capsule covers it in depth.
HubSpot's free CRM can work if your sales model is marketing-led and you'll grow into the paid tiers naturally. The risk is the upgrade cliff.
Pipedrive works if your business is essentially transactional with short sales cycles and no significant delivery work.
Zoho CRM Standard or One works if you want everything (CRM, email, accounting) from one vendor and you have someone willing to configure it properly.
There's a more detailed comparison piece on the realistic shortlist for the by-use-case breakdown.
What I'd usually rule out at this size: Salesforce (enterprise overkill), Monday.com as a CRM (project tool retrofitted), specialist enterprise tools of any kind. They make sense at bigger scale; at this size they're paying for capacity you can't use.
Where to start
The route I'd suggest for a company under ten people choosing a CRM for the first time.
Spend a couple of hours before you look at any product, writing down your sales process as it exists today, what you need to track about each client, and what happens after the sale. This is the strategy work that determines whether the CRM works for you.
Trial two CRMs simultaneously for two weeks each. Most have free trials. Set up the basics, import twenty contacts, run a couple of real deals through, see how the team takes to it.
Commit to one and do the setup properly. Either yourself, with a few weeks of part-time work, or with help. The piece on working with a CRM consultant covers what hiring help involves.
Don't try to set up everything on day one. Start with contacts and one pipeline. Add Tracks (or equivalent) after a month. Add integrations as you go. Build the system in layers.
What to do next
If you'd like a no-pressure conversation about which CRM might suit your specific company, a discovery call is the simplest place to start.
If you'd prefer a more structured first step, a CRM Audit is an hour with me plus a written summary of what I'd recommend.
The companies I see getting the most value from their CRMs aren't the ones who chose the biggest brand or the most features. They're the ones who chose the right fit for their size, set it up properly, and let it earn its place over time. That's the goal at any scale, but it's particularly true under ten people, where the choice has to land first time.