What is a CRM and do I need one?
A CRM is the single record of every customer, enquiry, conversation and deal. You need one once enquiries outgrow one person's memory — typically past roughly 30 active leads or the moment two people handle the same customer.
Off-the-shelf CRMs are the right starting point for standard sales processes. A custom CRM makes sense when your workflow is unusual, when per-seat pricing has outgrown the value, or when the CRM must sit inside your own product and data boundary.
The failure mode is always adoption. A CRM only works if it is where work happens, which means messaging, quotations and payments have to live in it too.