Why

200–500 inquiries/month across 6 estimators (your prose says 6, even though you ticked "2–3" — at that volume the 6 is what matters) is well past the "shared inbox plus memory" threshold. You're already piping every proposal through one bid email — that's a free firehose of structured data nobody's harvesting. The automation you want isn't AI magic; it's email-to-deal capture, which has been a solved feature for a decade.

What you actually need

1. Pipedrive ($24/user/mo Advanced tier) with Smart BCC / email forwarding — every proposal CC'd to your bid address auto-creates or updates a deal. One pipeline: New RFP → Estimating → Proposal Sent → Awarded → Lost. This is the exact use case the feature was built for.
2. A required "Bid Due Date" and "Estimator" field on every deal — so anyone can filter "my bids due this week" and nothing sits unassigned.
3. A habit — Monday 20-minute bid board review — all estimators, walk every deal in Proposal Sent for >14 days. Call the client or mark Lost. No deal rots in limbo.

Do this today

Sign up at pipedrive.com (14-day trial, no card), then in Settings → Personal preferences → Email sync grab your unique Smart BCC address. Forward the last 30 days from your company bid inbox to that address, or set an inbox rule that auto-forwards every new message there. By tomorrow morning every proposal your 6 estimators have sent in the last month exists as a deal with the client's email already attached.

What to ignore

Skip Salesforce Sales Cloud ($165/user/mo) and HubSpot Sales Hub Professional ($100/user/mo) — both are over-spec'd and their "AI lead scoring" upsells are meaningless for RFP-driven bid work where the customer already told you what they want. Ignore anyone pitching Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Outreach; you don't have an outbound prospecting problem, you have a bid-tracking problem.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 8% slippage on 350 bids/month (midpoint of 200–500) = ~28 forgotten follow-ups monthly. For utility contracting where even a small bid clears five figures, that's a seven-figure annual pipeline leaking through a CC'd inbox nobody owns.

When to revisit this

When you start bidding on multi-phase utility projects that need their own sub-pipelines, or when a seventh estimator joins and the single pipeline gets noisy.