What's really going on

You have 10-50 email inquiries a month, one person to work them, and CDMO deals that live for 12-24 months before anyone signs. A spreadsheet loses that. The problem isn't volume — it's memory. You need every email thread with a sponsor to auto-attach to the right drug program, under the right service line, under the right account, so that when a Director of CMC replies eight months later, you don't scramble. Your data model (account → service → opportunities + drug programs) isn't exotic. It's a company record, a deal record, and two custom fields.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free forever, 1-2 users) — the core CRM is free forever with no time limit, capped at 2 users, 1 deal pipeline, 10 custom properties. Use Companies for accounts, Deals for opportunities, and two custom deal properties: Service Line (Analytical / Development / Manufacturing) and Drug Program.
2. Gmail or Outlook sync — every inbound email from a sponsor logs onto the deal automatically. This is the whole reason you're not using a sheet.
3. A weekly 20-minute pipeline review — every Friday, one pass through open deals, one next-step per deal. The habit is what makes the tool work.

First action, 30 minutes: sign up at hubspot.com/products/crm, connect your inbox, create the two custom properties above, then drag the last 10 trade-show contacts into Companies and open a Deal on each with the drug program named.

What you're being oversold

Salesforce Sales Cloud and Veeva. The gap between "free" and "useful for a growing team" keeps getting wider — Professional runs $100/seat/month plus a mandatory $1,500 onboarding fee, and Salesforce is worse. For one person at 10-50 inquiries a month, both are a tax on time you don't have. Skip Pipedrive too for now — Pipedrive's pricing starts at $14 per user per month billed annually, which is fine, but you don't need to pay yet. Doing nothing costs you the one sponsor whose RFQ email slips past month six — and in this business, one lost program pays for a decade of any CRM.

When to revisit this

When you hire a second business-development person, or when you're juggling more than ~30 live opportunities at once.

The part worth getting right

Here's the judgment call. HubSpot Free gives you one pipeline. Your three service pillars have very different stage flows — analytical is quote-to-report in weeks, development is phase-gated over quarters, manufacturing is tech-transfer-to-GMP-batch over a year-plus. If you can run all three off one set of stages with Service Line as a filter, free works forever. If the stages genuinely differ, you'll want three pipelines — which means Starter (~$20/seat) or Pipedrive from day one. Get this fork wrong and you'll migrate CRMs inside a year.