Why

Your actual revenue leak is commissions paid 2–3 months late by factories that report inconsistently — and no amount of HubSpot seats fixes that. The CRM needs (centralized contacts, deal logging, territory notes) are real but secondary. With 50 independent reps who have zero current CRM culture, adoption will kill any implementation that isn't dead simple on day one. HubSpot's full Sales Hub at scale for 50 users will run $5,000–$10,000/month before you've solved the commission problem at all.

What you actually need

1. Pipedrive, ~$24/user/month (Essentials) — handles your centralized contact database, deal logging, activity notes, and territory visibility without the bloat; 50 reps on Essentials is roughly $1,200/month, a fraction of HubSpot Sales Hub.
2. Airtable, free–$20/user/month — build your commission reconciliation tracker here: one row per factory invoice, columns for expected vs. paid amount, payment date, variance flag; this is the audit layer no CRM will give you out of the box.
3. A habit — weekly factory statement reconciliation — every Monday, one person pulls statements from all 40 factories and logs them against your Airtable tracker before anything else gets done.

Do this today

Open a new Airtable base right now and create five columns: Factory Name, Invoice #, Invoice Amount, Commission Expected, Commission Received — populate it with just the last 60 days of statements from your three highest-volume factories and you will see discrepancies before the end of the week.

What to ignore

HubSpot Sales Hub at the scale you're describing is wrong for this stage — you'd be paying for marketing automation, sequences, and reporting dashboards that 50 independent reps won't use and that do nothing for commission auditing. Salesforce is even further off; the admin overhead alone contradicts your explicit statement that you have no internal IT. Freshsales has commission modules in name only — they don't map to the multi-factory, delayed-pay structure you described.

What doing nothing costs you

You said you "strongly suspect" factories are underreporting — if even 5 of 40 factories are shorting you 3% on a conservative volume, that's a compounding annual loss you cannot quantify because your current Excel process makes auditing impossible. That invisibility is the cost.

When to revisit this

When your Airtable commission tracker has confirmed the size of the leakage and you have a repeatable reconciliation process — then evaluate whether Pipedrive is worth rolling out to all 50 reps.