What's really going on

You get 10–50 inquiries a month, all email, all you. That's low volume. But CDMO deals live for 6–24 months, and one account can carry three service lines and multiple programs inside each. That's not a volume problem — it's a memory problem. Trade show conversations from March turn into an RFP in October, and if the thread isn't tied to the account, the program, and the next-touch date, it goes cold quietly.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited contacts) — use Companies as accounts and associate multiple Deals per company, one Deal per opportunity per service. It logs your Gmail/Outlook threads to the right account automatically. As of 2026, Pipedrive's pricing starts at $14 per user per month (billed annually) for the Essential plan — skip it for now; per-seat pricing on a solo shop with a free alternative isn't worth it.
2. A "next touch date" habit — every deal card gets a date. No date = it's dead. Review every Monday, 20 minutes.
3. Today, 30 minutes: sign up at hubspot.com/products/crm, create Companies for every account you've talked to since your last trade show, and add one Deal per active opportunity with a close-date guess and a next-touch date. Do it from your sent-mail folder — that's your source of truth right now.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce or Veeva because it's pharma. Pipedrive CRM pricing starts at $24 per user/month for the Lite Plan and goes up to $99 per user/month for the Ultimate Plan — and Salesforce is many times that, before an admin. Both are built for teams of 20+ with a dedicated CRM admin; you are one person. Doing nothing costs you a warm trade-show lead that turns into someone else's manufacturing contract because you didn't follow up in month four.

When to revisit this

When you hire a second business-development person, or when one account has more than three active opportunities across service lines.

The part worth getting right

Here's the call only you can make. In your CRM, is "the account" the pharma company, or the specific drug program? If you treat Pfizer as one account, you'll drown when three programs run in parallel with different stages, different chemists, different timelines. If you treat each program as an account, you'll lose the relationship view — who's the exec sponsor across programs, who owes you a renewal. Most CDMOs land on: Company = account, Program = deal, Service = deal pipeline. But if your customers usually bring you one molecule and stay narrow, the simpler company-as-account model holds. Get this wrong and you're migrating your CRM in twelve months.