What's really going on

You have 100 contacts, one person, and a slow biotech deal cycle where a partner conversation can go quiet for six months. Excel holds the notes fine. What it can't do is tap you on the shoulder when it's time to follow up with a VP of BD who said "circle back in Q3." That's the whole gap. Everything else — meeting notes, email history, deal stage — is a formatting problem, not a software problem.

What to do instead

1. Capsule CRM (free tier for up to 250 contacts) — contact-first CRM with tasks that sync to your calendar. Built for exactly your shape: relationship-led, low volume, solo.
2. Outlook's own "Follow Up" flags + categories — free, already installed, and honestly might be enough on its own. Flag each sent email with a due date; it appears in your To-Do list.
3. Import your Excel into Capsule this afternoon. File → Import → CSV. Map "last contacted" to a date field. Set a next-step task on every row that doesn't have one. One hour, done.

What you're being oversold

Someone will push you toward HubSpot or Salesforce because biotech BD sounds enterprise. It isn't at 100 contacts and one seat — HubSpot's free tier is built for teams sharing ownership, and you'll be nudged toward paid Sales Hub within a quarter. Pipedrive is a fine tool but per-seat pricing for a solo user with a long, quiet cycle is money burned. Doing nothing costs you the deals that die from silence — the partner who forgot you existed because you forgot to ping them in March.

When to revisit this

When a second BD person joins, or when your contact list crosses 300.

The part worth getting right

The real question is whether your follow-ups need to live inside Outlook or can live in a CRM that emails you. If most of your day is already in Outlook and you want reminders showing up next to your inbox, Capsule's calendar sync is the path. If you'd rather have one clean dashboard of "who's gone cold" and check it Monday mornings, the CRM's own task view is better and Outlook stays just for mail. Pick wrong and you'll ignore the reminders — which is worse than Excel, because now you're paying to ignore them.