Why

You're at 50–200 inbound bids/month across 5 estimators with a single bids@ inbox as the source of truth — that's exactly the volume where deals start slipping between estimators and nobody can tell you the win rate by line of service. The reluctance is the binding constraint: if your team has to manually create a record for every incoming RFP and outgoing bid, they won't, and you'll be back here in six months. The system has to do the data entry for them by reading the bids@ inbox.

What you actually need

1. Pipedrive Advanced (~$34/user/mo) — its email sync + "Smart Contact Data" auto-creates a deal from any email sent or received via bids@, so every outgoing bid (CC'd to bids@) becomes a lead with zero clicks from the estimator. One pipeline per line of service, four stages: Bid Requested → Bid Sent → Follow-up → Won/Lost.
2. Make.com or Zapier (starts ~$20/mo) — one scenario: "new email in bids@ → create/update Pipedrive deal, attach company, assign to estimator based on service line keyword in subject." This is the automation that removes the adoption problem.
3. A habit — Friday 15-minute "Bid Sent, no reply >7 days" review — each estimator opens their filtered view, fires a follow-up email on anything stale. That's the entire CRM ritual.

Do this today

Sign up for Pipedrive at pipedrive.com, connect the bids@ inbox via Tools → Email Sync (use "shared inbox" mode so all 5 estimators see it), and turn on "Create deals from emails." Import the last 30 days of bids@ history. By tomorrow morning every outgoing bid from this week is already a deal record with the company and contact populated — without anyone on your team lifting a finger.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Professional ($100/seat/mo) and Salesforce — both will get sold to you as "the standard for contractors" and both will die on the adoption problem you already flagged. Ignore ServiceTitan and FieldEdge entirely; those are dispatch/field-service tools, not bid-tracking for estimators. Don't let anyone upsell you Procore or BuildingConnected until you've proven the team will actually use a pipeline.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 10% follow-up slippage on the midpoint of 50–200 bids (~125/mo) = ~12 bids/month going un-chased. For utility contracting that's a meaningful share of your annual revenue walking out untracked — you don't know the number because you don't have the system, which is the point.

When to revisit this

When two estimators bid the same RFP because nobody saw the other's reply in bids@.