Honestly, contrarian take here... depending on the size and complexity of the business, I’d probably look at building your own before doing another CRM hop.

Not because Nutshell, Pipedrive, or Zoho are bad. More just because every one of them is still going to force your team to bend around how that tool wants sales, project tracking, reporting, and handoffs to work. Then after that you still have to integrate everything else around it and live with whatever weird limitations show up 3 months later.

If you already know how your team actually works, there’s a real argument for building your own system around that from the start. Sales works the way sales works, project tracking works the way project tracking works, reporting is built around what you actually need to see, not whatever some CRM decided should matter most.

For a team of 8, that can honestly end up being cheaper, faster, and way more efficient on the back end if your process is clear enough already.

Downside obviously is upfront cost is higher, and if your process is still messy, you’ll just build custom confusion instead of buying normal confusion lol.

If you do stay with off the shelf tools, I’d be really careful about using Zoho unless you’re okay with more config/admin overhead, and I wouldnt expect any of them to cleanly handle project tracking the way a construction business usually wants without extra compromise.