What's really going on

Under 10 inquiries a month across 4–10 people isn't a sales volume problem. It's a memory problem. The same counterparty might be a buyer in March, a seller in July, and a conference pint in November. What's slipping isn't deals — it's context. Who spoke to them last, what they hinted about their fleet, why you didn't bid last time. That lives in someone's inbox or WhatsApp and dies when they're on leave.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — use it as a contact record system. One page per counterparty: every email auto-logged, manual notes for calls and WhatsApp, custom fields for fleet type and relationship status (buyer / seller / both / social).
2. Zapier (free tier) — one zap: new email from an unknown domain creates a contact in HubSpot. That's it. No pipelines, no stages.
3. Habit: after every call or WhatsApp exchange, the person who had it pastes 2 lines into the contact's note within the hour. No template, no fields. Just what was said.

First action, 30 minutes: open HubSpot, create a free workspace, import your team's Outlook/Gmail contacts, and add two custom properties on the Contact record — "Relationship type" and "Aircraft of interest". Done.

What you're being oversold

Someone has probably pitched you Salesforce or a paid Pipedrive seat plan with pipelines, forecasts, and deal stages. Wrong shape entirely — you don't have a funnel, you have a network. Pipedrive's pipeline view will sit empty and your team will stop logging things within a month. Doing nothing costs you the deal you didn't bid on because no one remembered that counterparty mentioned a 737 coming off lease at the Dubai airshow.

When to revisit this

When someone on the team asks "did we ever talk to them?" and nobody can answer in under a minute — that's your signal you've outgrown notes-only.

The part worth getting right

The one judgment call: is this a contacts-and-history tool or a deals tool? If it's contacts (which your description sounds like), HubSpot Free configured around the Contact record is right and you'll never pay them a penny. If even 2–3 of those <10 monthly conversations are genuine buy/sell negotiations worth tracking through stages, you want Pipedrive instead and the setup is completely different — different objects, different daily habit, different reports. Pick wrong and in six months you're migrating, re-training four to ten people, and losing the notes you built. So which is it — are you tracking relationships, or tracking transactions?