Why

At 200–500 inquiries/month across six estimators, you're well past spreadsheet territory — that's 30–80 active bids per estimator at any moment, with follow-up windows that decide whether you win the job. The good news: because every proposal already CC's a company bid email, you've got a single ingestion point an email-native CRM can sync from automatically. Between your two candidates, Salesflare was literally built for this — auto-logging email threads from a shared address into deal records — whereas Pipedrive needs more manual hand-holding to do the same job.

What you actually need

1. Salesflare ($35/user/mo Growth tier) — connect the shared bid email and each estimator's inbox; it auto-creates accounts, contacts, and deal timelines from sent proposals. This is the "reduce data entry" piece you asked about.
2. One pipeline with five stages — Inquiry → Estimating → Bid Sent → Follow-up → Won/Lost. Every bid auto-advances to "Bid Sent" the day the proposal email goes out, with a follow-up task auto-created for +3 days and +10 days.
3. A habit — Friday bid review — 30 minutes, all six estimators, walk every deal sitting in "Bid Sent" for >14 days. Decision: chase, requote, or kill.

Do this today

Go to salesflare.com, start the free trial, and on the email integration step connect both your personal estimator inbox AND the shared company bid CC address. Within an hour Salesflare will have backfilled the last 90 days of bids as deal records with contacts attached — you'll see immediately which clients you bid and never followed up with.

What to ignore

Skip Pipedrive at this stage — it's a fine tool but its email sync is shallower than Salesflare's, and you'd spend the first month complaining about manual data entry, which is the exact problem you're trying to solve. Ignore anyone pitching HubSpot Sales Hub Professional ($100/seat/mo), Salesforce, or "AI sales engagement" tools like Outreach or Apollo — wildly over-spec'd for a six-estimator utility contractor.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 10% follow-up slippage on the midpoint of your range (~350 bids/month) = ~35 bids/month going un-chased after submission. Even at a modest 15% close rate on properly-followed-up utility bids, that's ~5 jobs/month you're handing to whoever bothered to call the client back.

When to revisit this

When you start needing per-estimator win-rate reporting or want to forecast revenue by month — then Salesflare's Pro tier or Pipedrive Advanced becomes worth pricing.