20 leads a day, 95% from WhatsApp, and the wrong CRM advice

Someone on Reddit asked which CRM to buy. Half my network has this exact problem.

Family business. Around 20 leads a day. All of it in Excel. It worked fine until it didn't, and now leads go missing between the rows. They were leaning toward Kommo for the sales bots but kept finding complaints about duplicate leads.

Then they mentioned the one detail that changes the whole answer.

95% of their leads come from Meta. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook.

Barely anyone factors that in. Most CRM advice assumes your leads show up by email or a web form. If yours arrive as chat messages, the question isn't which CRM has the nicest pipeline. It's which one connects to WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook natively, without a paid add on and another monthly fee stacked on top.

Start with Bitrix24's free plan. Unlimited users, a real pipeline, and WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook built in rather than sold separately. For a family business that's the difference between everyone using the CRM and arguing over who gets the paid seat.

Careful with the obvious pick though. HubSpot's free CRM is genuinely good and I recommend it often, but its native WhatsApp channel sits on a Professional plan. If WhatsApp is 95% of your pipeline, the free tier is solving the wrong 5%.

Then check what WhatsApp actually costs before you panic. Meta prices conversations by type, and the cheapest kind is when the customer messages you first. That's exactly how inbound leads arrive, and there's a free monthly allowance on top. The scary per message pricing you read about mostly hits businesses blasting templates outbound, not ones replying to people who already raised their hand. Rates change by country so check yours.

On duplicates, it's rarely the software being broken. It's usually one person reaching you on two channels, or an old customer messaging again after their lead was closed. Two settings fix most of it. One record per person instead of per channel, and a cooldown after a lead closes so a callback doesn't spawn a fresh one.

On bots, start smaller than you want to. At 20 leads a day you don't need one that qualifies people. You need one that replies in 30 seconds with a hello and one question, then hands to a human. Reply speed moves your conversion rate more than any clever qualification logic.

The bigger lesson underneath all this. Before you pick software, write down where your leads genuinely come from. Two tools that look identical on a comparison page behave completely differently depending on whether your pipeline starts with an email or a WhatsApp message.