Which CRM did you settle on for a small sales team?

Before committing, run the trial with real deals, not demo data. Two weeks of actual use shows you more than any comparison table: who logs in, what they skip, what reports you end up wanting. And check how easy it is to export everything. You might switch again in two years, and some tools make getting your notes and activity history out much harder than getting contacts in.

we went through this with a team of five and ended up on Pipedrive. The reason was boring: it's built around the pipeline board, so reps open it, drag deals, done. HubSpot's free tier was tempting and the contact side is better, but the moment we wanted sequences and proper reporting the paid tiers got expensive fast. Whatever you pick, the thing that decides whether it sticks is connecting everyone's inbox on day one. If emails log themselves nobody has to remember to update anything, and that's what killed our spreadsheet in the first place. Also clean the 2,000 contacts before importing, not after. Dedupe and pick one owner per account or you'll just move the mess.