Most small B2B teams are either paying for tools they don’t use or cobbling together free tools that don’t talk to each other. Neither works. This is the exact tech stack I recommend for teams under 10 people: lean, integrated, and built to scale without adding headcount.
Every tool in this list has been selected for three reasons: it does its job well, it connects to everything else, and it’s priced fairly for small teams.
Layer 1: Your Website — The Foundation
Tool: Hostinger
Your website is your 24/7 sales rep. For B2B teams under 10, you don’t need an expensive custom build. You need a fast, professional site that loads quickly, captures leads and looks credible to prospects.
Hostinger gives you: reliable hosting (99.9% uptime), a one-click WordPress installer, free domain and SSL, and plans starting under $5/month. Pair it with a clean WordPress theme or Elementor page builder and you have a professional site in a weekend.
What your site must do: clearly explain what you do, who you serve, and have a contact form or calendar booking link on every page. That’s it. Don’t overthink it.
Layer 2: Your CRM — The Command Centre
Tool: Pipedrive (pipeline-focused) or HubSpot (more features, free tier)
A CRM is where every lead, deal and customer lives. Without one, you’re managing sales from your inbox — which means dropped balls, forgotten follow-ups and no visibility into what’s actually working.
Pipedrive is built for sales pipelines. It’s visual, fast and opinionated about how deals should move. Perfect if you’re running an active outbound or inbound pipeline. ~$15/user/month.
HubSpot CRM has a genuinely useful free tier that covers contacts, deals, email tracking and basic reporting. The paid plans add marketing automation, sequences and reporting. Better if you want marketing and sales in one place.
Either way: every lead goes into the CRM the moment it comes in. Every call, email and meeting gets logged. Every deal has a next action. That’s the rule.
Layer 3: Lead Generation — Fill the Top of Your Funnel
Tool: Apollo.io
Apollo.io is a B2B prospecting database with 275+ million contacts. You can filter by industry, company size, job title, location, technology used, and more. The free plan gives you 50 email credits/month — enough to test whether outbound works for your business before paying.
Use Apollo to build targeted prospect lists, find verified email addresses, and run cold email sequences directly from the platform. It connects to your CRM so every prospect you reach out to automatically appears as a contact.
For teams under 10 doing outbound: Apollo replaces the LinkedIn manual search + email guessing + tracking spreadsheet workflow. It’s faster, more accurate and keeps everything in one place.
Layer 4: Forms — Capture Inbound Leads Properly
Tool: WPForms (on WordPress) or HubSpot Forms (if using HubSpot CRM)
Every contact form on your website should do three things: collect the right information, immediately send the lead to your CRM, and trigger a confirmation email to the prospect.
WPForms is the simplest professional form builder for WordPress — drag and drop, connects to most CRMs and email platforms via Zapier or native integrations. The free version handles basic contact forms. The paid version ($49/year) adds conditional logic, file uploads and payment fields.
If you’re using HubSpot: use HubSpot Forms instead. They connect directly to your CRM with zero setup and automatically create contact records.
Layer 5: Automation — Make Everything Talk to Everything
Tool: Make.com
This is the glue that holds the stack together. Make.com connects your website, CRM, email, calendar, Slack, Apollo and any other tool — and automates the handoffs between them.
Examples of what Make.com handles in this stack:
- New form submission → creates deal in Pipedrive → sends Slack notification → sends welcome email to prospect
- Deal marked “Won” in CRM → creates invoice in accounting tool → adds client to onboarding sequence
- New Apollo prospect replied → updates CRM contact status → notifies sales rep
- Weekly: pull all open deals → format as summary → email to founder
Make.com’s free plan gives you 1,000 operations/month — enough for a team under 10 to automate their core workflows. The Core plan (~$9/month) covers most growing teams with 10,000 ops/month.
The Full Stack at a Glance
| Layer | Tool | Cost | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | Hostinger + WordPress | ~$5/mo | Credibility + lead capture |
| CRM | Pipedrive or HubSpot | $0–15/user/mo | Pipeline + deal management |
| Lead gen | Apollo.io | $0–49/mo | Prospect lists + outreach |
| Forms | WPForms / HubSpot Forms | $0–4/mo | Inbound lead capture |
| Automation | Make.com | $0–9/mo | Connects everything |
Total: $5–82/month for a complete, integrated B2B sales and marketing system. Compare that to a VA or junior sales hire.
How to Implement This in 2 Weeks
Week 1: Set up hosting and website (Day 1–2). Install CRM and import existing contacts (Day 3–4). Set up forms connected to CRM (Day 5).
Week 2: Set up Apollo and build your first prospect list (Day 6–7). Build 2–3 Make.com automations for your most common manual tasks (Day 8–10). Test everything end-to-end (Day 11–14).
After that: run this stack for 90 days before adding anything new. Get good at what you have before layering on complexity.
Not sure where to start? We can set it up for you.
If you’d rather have someone build and connect the whole stack for your specific business, get in touch. We set up CRMs, automation workflows and lead gen systems for small B2B teams.
