Why

Six estimators sending proposals into a shared CC inbox means nobody knows who's chasing what, which bids went cold, or which clients have three open proposals across three estimators. At 200–500 inquiries/month that's 30–80 proposals per estimator — well past the threshold where a shared inbox becomes a graveyard. The good news: since every proposal already flows through one email address, you have a clean ingestion point to automate against.

What you actually need

1. Pipedrive ($24/user/mo, ~$144/mo for 6 seats) — one pipeline: New Inquiry → Estimating → Proposal Sent → Follow-up → Won/Lost. Each estimator owns their deals with a required "Next Action Date".
2. Pipedrive's email BCC/forwarding dropbox + Smart Email BCC — point the bid CC address (or auto-forward from it) at Pipedrive's dropbox so every outbound proposal auto-creates or updates the deal. That's the data-entry killer you're asking for.
3. A habit — Friday 20-minute pipeline scrub — all 6 estimators filter "my deals, no activity in 10+ days" and either chase, requalify, or mark lost. Nothing rots silently.

Do this today

Sign up for Pipedrive at pipedrive.com (start the 14-day trial, 6 seats), then go to Settings → Personal → Email Sync → copy your Smart BCC dropbox address. Set up a forwarding rule on your company bid CC inbox to that dropbox address. By tomorrow morning every proposal your estimators send will auto-land as a deal in Pipedrive without anyone typing a thing.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Professional (~$100/seat/mo) and Salesforce Sales Cloud — both are massive overkill and will have you paying for marketing automation, forecasting AI, and "revenue intelligence" you won't touch for years. Skip ServiceTitan and FieldEdge too — those are field-service ops platforms, not bid-tracking CRMs, and they're priced for companies 5x your size. Anyone pitching you ZoomInfo or Apollo for "lead enrichment" is solving a problem you don't have — your leads come to you.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 10% slippage on 200–500 proposals/month = 20–50 bids/month nobody follows up on. For a utility contractor where even small jobs run $10K+, that's millions in unchased pipeline annually — and your competitor wins it on a phone call you didn't make.

When to revisit this

When you start running multi-stage bids (prequalification → RFP → BAFO) that need their own pipeline, or when you bring on a 7th+ estimator and want territory routing.