What's really going on

Your business runs on who-knows-who. One guy's Outlook is a single point of failure — when he's out, or leaves, your pipeline walks with him. At industry events you meet people who move between companies every few years, and right now you have no way to see that a contact you met in 2023 at Company A is now the decision-maker at Company B — the exact company running the RFP you're about to lose.

What to do instead

1. Capsule CRM (free tier, paid modest — check current pricing) — pull every contact from that Outlook and the Excel into one shared contact list with company history, so when someone moves jobs you update one record and everyone sees it.
2. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — if you want everyone logging event conversations and RFP touches against a company record without a per-seat bill; be ready to say no when they push Sales Hub.
3. Habit: before every RFP response, one person spends 20 minutes searching the CRM for anyone you already know at that company or its parent — past or present.

First action today: export the Outlook contacts to CSV (File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → CSV) and import into Capsule's free tier. One hour, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce or HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise because "aviation, long cycles, complex deals." At your size that's a six-figure mistake — you'd spend a year configuring it and still lose the same RFPs, because the tool doesn't magic contacts into big accounts. Doing nothing costs you the next RFP where your champion had already moved to the buyer and nobody noticed.

When to revisit this

When you're running more than one RFP at a time and can't remember without checking who owns which relationship.

The part worth getting right

The one call: is your problem tracking contacts, or mapping relationships? If it's tracking — names, emails, last-touch — Capsule or HubSpot free will do it, and you're done for two years. If it's relationship mapping — who worked with who, who moved where, who owes you a favour — a flat CRM won't save you, and you need to think about how you'll capture the softer signal (job changes, event conversations, mutual contacts) before you pick the tool. Pick wrong and in eighteen months you migrate everything again, mid-RFP season.