It should answer one question: who owns this lead.
At minimum, a CRM should make it obvious who is responsible for following up on every enquiry, and when. If a platform can't answer that clearly, everything else it offers is secondary.
Enrichment and scoring are nice, not necessary at first.
Automatically enriching a lead with company data or scoring its likelihood to convert is genuinely useful once you have volume. For a small business just getting organised, a clean, reliable follow-up process matters more than sophisticated scoring.
Integration with your actual lead sources is non-negotiable.
A CRM that doesn't connect cleanly to your website forms, phone system, or booking tool creates a manual re-entry step that quietly erodes the whole point of having one.
Reporting should answer questions you actually ask.
Before comparing dashboards, write down the three questions you actually want answered about your pipeline each week. Buy based on whether a platform answers those clearly, not on how many charts it can generate.
Most small businesses need discipline before they need software.
A CRM makes a good follow-up process faster. It doesn't create one. Agree on your actual process, then pick the tool that fits it, not the other way around.
Bring your workflow, your constraints, and the outcome you want to achieve.