I was at a coaching conference in Denver last fall, standing at one of those too-tall cocktail tables during a networking break, when a colleague I respect said something that stuck with me. She'd just come from a session on practice management, and she looked a little deflated. "Apparently I need a CRM now," she said. "I have fourteen clients."
She'd already tried. Signed up for HubSpot's free tier that same afternoon, spent a couple hours configuring "deal stages" and "pipeline views," and then never logged back in. When she told me this three months later, she still felt vaguely guilty about it, like she'd failed some business fundamentals test.
She hadn't failed anything. The tool failed her. It was built for a problem she doesn't have.
Here's what I've figured out about CRM software and small coaching practices, and it's simpler than most people make it. Most of us don't need one. What we need is something else entirely, and the difference matters.
What CRM software actually solves
CRM stands for customer relationship management, and the word "customer" is the first clue that this wasn't designed for us. The second clue is everything else about it.
CRM software exists to manage volume. It was built for sales teams tracking hundreds or thousands of leads through a pipeline. Contact comes in, gets qualified, moves through stages, gets handed off, closes or doesn't. The whole architecture assumes you have more relationships than any one person can hold in their head, and that many of those relationships are transactional by nature.
If you're running a coaching practice with 12 to 15 active clients, you don't have a pipeline. You have a practice. You know your clients' names, their kids' names, what they're wrestling with at work, what happened in your last session. You don't need software to tell you where they are in a "deal stage" because they're not a deal. They're a person you work with on Tuesdays at 10.
The features that make CRM software powerful for sales teams (lead scoring, pipeline automation, drip sequences, forecasting dashboards) are not just unnecessary for most coaches. They're actively disorienting. You log in, see a bunch of empty fields designed for a workflow you don't have, and feel like you're doing something wrong.
You're not doing something wrong. You're using a wrench to eat soup.
What you actually need instead
When coaches tell me they think they need a CRM, I ask them what problem they're actually trying to solve. It's almost never "I have too many leads to track." It's usually one of three things:
I keep losing touch with people I want to stay connected to. Past clients I genuinely liked, people who've referred work to me, colleagues in adjacent spaces. I think about reaching out and then Thursday becomes Friday becomes three months later.
I don't have a single place where all my professional contacts live with context. Notes from our last conversation, what they do, how we met, when I last heard from them. It's scattered across email threads and my memory.
I feel disorganized and I think a tool will fix that feeling.
The first two are real problems with real solutions. The third is a feeling, and no software fixes feelings. (Trust me. I've tried.)
What these problems actually describe isn't customer relationship management. It's relationship maintenance. It's the practice of staying connected to a relatively small number of people you genuinely care about, with enough context to make those connections feel personal rather than automated.
That's a different problem. And it has a much simpler solution.
My actual setup (no CRM involved)
I'll tell you exactly what I use because I think specificity is more helpful than principles here.
I have a Notion database I call my warm list. Forty people, give or take. That's it. It includes my active clients (currently thirteen), about a dozen past clients I want to stay in touch with, eight or nine people who regularly refer work to me, and a handful of people in adjacent professions (a therapist, two organizational psychologists, an HR director I met years ago) who I just want to keep in my orbit.
Each entry has their name, how we're connected, what they do, a "last contact" date, and a free-text field I call "context." That context field is the whole point. It's where I note things like: promoted to SVP in March, daughter starting college, mentioned wanting to write a book, dealing with a difficult board member. The things that make a relationship a relationship instead of a contact record.
No pipeline. No stages. No tags. No automation. Just people, context, and dates.
I built the whole thing in about forty-five minutes on a Saturday morning. I've been using it for over two years. It works better than any CRM I've tried, and I've tried three.
The thirty-minute monthly routine that replaces a CRM
The database is just a container. The routine is what makes it work.
Once a month, usually the first Monday, I sit down with my green tea (the large mug, because this is a two-cup task) and review the warm list. I sort by "last contact" date and look for anyone I haven't been in touch with in sixty days or more.
Then I pick four or five of them. Not all of them. Just four or five. And I use Margaret to draft a short, personal note for each one.
Here's the prompt I use. I've refined this over about six months and it works well enough that I usually only edit a line or two before sending:
Prompt: Personal reconnection note
I'm writing a brief email to reconnect with someone in my professional network. This is not a sales email. This is a genuine personal note from one professional to another. It should sound like me — warm, direct, a little informal. Three to four sentences maximum. No subject line needed (I'll write that myself). Here's the context: Name: [name] How we're connected: [relationship context] Last time we were in touch: [approximate date and what we discussed] Something relevant to them right now: [anything I know — a promotion, a challenge they mentioned, something happening in their industry, or even just the time of year and what that usually means for their role] Write a short note that references something specific, feels human, and doesn't ask for anything. If there's a natural reason to offer something (an article they'd find useful, an introduction that would make sense), include it lightly. Otherwise, just make it a genuine "thinking of you" note. Do NOT use the phrase "I hope this finds you well." Do NOT use the phrase "just checking in." Do NOT include any call to action or meeting request.
The whole review takes about thirty minutes. I draft the notes, edit them (Margaret gets the tone about 80% right on the first pass, which means I'm mostly adjusting specifics), and send them. Five personal emails a month, each one grounded in real context about a real person.
I've gotten more referrals from this simple routine than I ever got from any system with a dashboard.
When a CRM actually makes sense
I'm not anti-CRM. I'm anti-wrong-tool. There are situations where a coach genuinely needs one.
If you're running a group practice with multiple coaches and shared clients, you need a way to manage handoffs and shared information. That's a CRM problem.
If you're doing significant outbound business development, regularly meeting potential clients at events, running workshops as a lead generation strategy, actively managing thirty or more prospects at various stages of conversation, you probably need something more structured than a Notion database.
If you have more than forty active relationships to maintain (which usually means you've been doing this for a while and your network has grown beyond what monthly reviews can handle), a purpose-built tool starts earning its place.
For everyone else, which is most solo coaches I know, a simple contact database with context and a regular review habit does the job.
If you do want a tool, here's what I'd look at
I've tried HubSpot (overkill, disorienting, but free), Notion with a CRM template (what I actually use, right-sized, flexible), and Folk.app (the one I'd recommend if you want something purpose-built).
Folk is worth mentioning specifically because it's the only tool I've seen in this space that actually thinks about relationship management rather than lead management. The orientation is different. It's designed for people who have a network they want to nurture, not a funnel they want to optimize. It auto-summarizes your interactions, suggests when it's time to follow up with someone, and imports context from email so you're not manually updating fields.
I played with it for a month last year and liked it. I went back to my Notion setup mostly because I'm stubborn and my system was already working, not because Folk wasn't good. If I were starting from scratch today, or if my warm list grows past fifty or sixty people, I'd probably switch.
For most coaches reading this, though, I'd start with the simple version. A Notion database, forty-five minutes of setup, and a monthly calendar reminder. You can always add complexity later. You can rarely remove it.
The real thing this is about
There's a version of this question, "do I need a CRM?" that's really about something else. It's about the anxiety of not having systems. Of feeling like your practice should be more professionalized, more structured, more like a real business. Someone at a conference or in a Facebook group said you need one, and now you feel behind.
I felt that way in year two. I bought software I didn't need, set up workflows that didn't match my work, and spent time maintaining systems instead of maintaining relationships. It took me a while to realize that the most important business system in a solo coaching practice is your attention. Where you put it, how often, and with how much care.
A forty-person list in a simple database, reviewed once a month with real thought. Just paying attention, on purpose, to the people who matter to your practice.
I was on my walk between sessions last week, doing my usual loop through the park, and I realized I'd been carrying around guilt about not using a "real" CRM for almost two years. And in those two years, my practice has been full, my referrals have been steady, and I've stayed genuinely connected to people I care about.
Sometimes the most sophisticated system is the one that actually fits your life.
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I use Notion for my warm list and have a referral link if you want to try it: Notion referral link]. I'd also recommend looking at [Folk.app if you want something built specifically for relationship management. Both are tools I've actually used, not ones someone paid me to mention. Though Folk does have an affiliate program, so if you sign up through [this link], I get a small credit. Full transparency, always.