What's really going on

Your business runs on people, not pipelines. One guy's Outlook is a single point of failure — if he leaves, so does half your network. The RFPs you lose aren't lost at bid time; they're lost twelve months earlier, when nobody at your firm was building a relationship inside that account. A shared contact system won't win deals, but it will show you which target accounts have zero warm ties before the RFP drops, while there's still time to fix it.

What to do instead

1. Capsule CRM (~modest paid tier — check current pricing) — UK-based, ISO 27001 certified, data hosted in the EU/UK region. Contact-first, which matches how you actually sell. Confirm the UK data residency option on their current plans before signing.
2. A "target accounts" view — tag every contact by company and role, then flag accounts with fewer than two internal relationships. That list is your pre-RFP work.
3. A weekly 20-minute habit — one person exports last week's event badges and email threads into the CRM. No import, no relationship.

Today: pull the Outlook contacts to CSV, dedupe against the Excel, and load them into a Capsule trial. One afternoon, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce or HubSpot Sales Hub with "aviation vertical" workflows. For a referral-driven business with a long cycle, that's a five-figure mistake — you'll spend more on admin than the tool saves. Pipedrive is cleaner but US-hosted, which fights your ISO 27001 story. The cost of doing nothing isn't a number I'll invent for you; it's the next RFP where you realise, too late, that nobody at your firm has spoken to the buyer in two years.

When to revisit this

When you're chasing more than ten live opportunities at once, or when a second salesperson joins and needs their own pipeline view.

The part worth getting right

The one call your numbers turn on: is this a contact-coverage problem or a pursuit-discipline problem? If it's coverage — you simply don't know enough people inside target accounts — Capsule plus a target-account list solves it, and you spend your budget on more industry events. If it's discipline — you know the people but nobody's nurturing them between RFPs — then the CRM is the easy part and you actually need a named account-owner model, with review cadences, before any tool earns its keep. Pick the wrong one and you'll buy software to fix a behaviour problem, or hire process to fix a Rolodex problem. Which one is it, really?