Do you need a CRM yet? A short, honest test
The question is not whether a CRM is any good. Used well, it is. The question is whether you need one yet, or whether the thing you actually need is simpler and faster to get. Here is a plain test, with no sales pitch attached, that should take about a minute.
First, what are you trying to fix?
Most teams reach for a CRM because leads are slipping: they arrive, nobody clearly owns them, and there is no single view of what is still open. Notice that the problem is discipline, not a database. A CRM is one way to get that discipline. It is not the only way, and it is the slowest to stand up. So before you scope a rollout, be honest about which problem you actually have.
Signs a board is enough for now
A board, where every lead has an owner and a stage and nothing sits unclaimed, is probably all you need if most of this is true: your leads arrive by email, in your shared inboxes and your salespeople's own; what you mainly want is for every one to be picked up, owned, and moved to a clear outcome; nobody on the team has spare time to keep a CRM tidy every day; and you would rather start this week than next quarter. If that sounds like you, a CRM would mostly add admin you cannot spare.
Signs it is time for a CRM
A CRM earns its project when you need more than discipline. The honest signals: you want to run the business off the numbers, with reporting and forecasting on top of the data; you have several distinct pipelines that work differently; you need a lot of custom fields, or automations that fire off them; your leads come from many places beyond email, web forms, events, paid ads, and have to be unified in one system; and, the one that really decides it, you have someone whose job includes keeping the CRM clean. If those are true, the project is worth it.
You do not have to decide today
Here is the part the test usually misses: it is not either-or, and it is not now-or-never. You can put every lead on a Leads board today, owned and staged, inside an hour, on the mailboxes you already have, read-only. If the signs later point to a CRM, you connect it and InboxAgent feeds it: leads keep landing on the board and flow into Zoho or HubSpot as well, so the board becomes a second view rather than something you throw away. You can export your leads to CSV at any point. Whatever you decide, nothing you do now is wasted.
The plain answer
For a lot of teams the honest answer is: not yet, and that is fine. If you mainly need every lead to have an owner and a next step, a board does that today. If you need to run the business off the numbers, that is the day a CRM earns its rollout. Either way, start by making sure no lead is arriving unowned, because that is the leak a CRM project will not fix while it waits.