Why

Referrals-only at 10–50 inquiries/month with a 4–10 person team means every lead is high-context, high-trust, and probably worth a lot. You don't have a velocity problem (you're not chasing 200 cold leads), you have a memory problem — multiple people on the team need to see the last conversation, the referrer, and what was promised. A sales-pipeline CRM designed for outbound SDR teams will feel like wearing a suit to a lab bench.

What you actually need

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free for unlimited users) — use it purely as a shared contact + company database with notes and a "last contacted" field. Ignore the deal pipeline, sequences, and marketing modules entirely.
2. A "Referred by" custom field on every contact — so you can see which scientist/customer/distributor is sending you the most business. This is the single most valuable data point for a referrals-only biotech.
3. A habit — the Friday referral check-in — once a week the team spends 20 minutes reviewing any contact with no activity in 30+ days and decides: nudge, nurture, or drop.

Do this today

Go to hubspot.com/products/crm, sign up with your work email, invite the other 3–9 teammates from Settings → Users & Teams → Create user. Then in Contacts → Actions → Edit properties, create a single-line text field called "Referred by". By end of day every teammate has a login and you can start logging the next inquiry against a referrer.

What to ignore

Skip Salesforce (anyone pitching you "Salesforce for Life Sciences" at this volume is fishing for a $150/seat/mo contract you don't need), HubSpot Sales Hub Professional, and any "biotech CRM" like Veeva — those are built for pharma reps managing hundreds of HCP accounts, not a niche product team running on referrals. Also ignore Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Outreach; you don't do cold outbound.

What doing nothing costs you

At 10–50 referral inquiries/month, even one forgotten warm intro is expensive — biotech deal sizes are typically five to six figures, and a referrer who sees their intro ignored usually doesn't send a second one. The compounding loss is the referrer relationship, not just the deal.

When to revisit this

When you start doing any outbound (conferences, cold email to PIs) or when two teammates discover they've both been emailing the same lab independently.