// The situation

Ailin Health (ailin.es) is a Madrid-based health-tech startup. We run at-home and decentralized diagnostics and B2B population screening programs - large-scale biomarker testing using capillary (finger-prick) blood that can be collected outside a lab. Alongside the screening, we run educational "awareness" programs that help doctors understand, test for, and interpret innovative biomarkers. Our customers are mainly pharma companies, who are usually the ultimate payer. If it asks for more detail, here's the rest, broken out: How we make money / who pays: Mostly B2B. Pharma funds our screening and awareness campaigns because the industry is shifting from treating disease to preventing it, which depends on new biomarkers actually being tested and prescribed by doctors. If doctors aren't aware of a biomarker and don't order the test, the drug doesn't get prescribed - so pharma pays us to run the screening and raise awareness. Grants, foundations, and public health bodies also fund some programs. Who we sell to: Clinical decision-makers in pharma and at medical congresses, across Europe - Medical Affairs, Market Access, and Brand Management. What we screen for (examples): Innovative biomarkers like Lp(a) for cardiovascular risk, type 1 diabetes screening, and others. Screening, not diagnosis. How many people are involved in sales? 3 now, 4-5 at most - you (BD), Sofía (BD lead, owns clinical relationships), Isa (CEO, executive-level contacts), possibly 1-2 from ops. What do you use to track sales today? Notion (linked accounts / contacts / pipeline / next-steps databases), plus SharePoint and email. It's disorganized - roughly 83% of the inherited lead export is dead or placeholder data. How many leads / deals / accounts are you tracking? Dozens of pharma accounts and a modest set of active opportunities (not thousands). Enough that things get lost, not so many that it's industrial-scale. Do leads or follow-ups fall through the cracks? Yes - this is the core problem. Warm leads no one is contacting, follow-ups forgotten, no record of who reached out to whom. (Sofía said this outright.) How many people touch a single deal? Multiple, with handoffs - you source and prospect, Sofía runs the clinical relationship, Isa handles executive-level contacts. Deals have already been handed between people over time. How long / complex is your sales cycle? Long and complex. Multi-stakeholder pharma sales: international parent to national subsidiary to specific departments, crossed with multiple products (screening, awareness, different biomarkers). Deals take months and often sign after long delays. Do you need reporting or forecasting? Yes. Isa is very data-driven and wants reach/reply numbers and a real pipeline forecast, which you currently can't produce. Is it repeat business or one-off? Repeat and ongoing - annual congresses, recurring campaigns with the same pharma accounts, one-year lead times. Inbound or outbound? Both. Some companies come inbound, but a lot is outbound - you'll be doing heavy LinkedIn prospecting. Do you need it to connect to other tools? Yes - LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo (enrichment + outreach), and email all need to sync to it. Notion can't do that. Are you growing / changing? Yes - actively rebuilding the sales engine and expanding across Europe (into those national subsidiaries).

The verdict · Jul 9, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM — but not the one Salesforce or HubSpot Sales Pro will pitch you.

What's really going on

Notion is a wiki with tables. You are running multi-year, multi-stakeholder pharma deals across parent companies, national subsidiaries, and three departments (Medical Affairs, Market Access, Brand). That is an account graph, not a pipeline. Warm leads die because no one owns the next-step field, and 83% of your inherited data is dead because Notion has no enrichment, no email sync, and no way to see "Sofía last touched Novo Nordisk Iberia 47 days ago." Isa cannot forecast because there is nothing to forecast from.

What to do instead

  1. HubSpot Free CRM (€0, unlimited users) — use the company-hierarchy field to model parent pharma → national subsidiary → department, and connect Gmail/Outlook so every email logs itself. Free CRM with up to 1,000,000 contacts and companies, unlimited tasks, and unlimited deals; limited to 2 free seats for editing. With 3-5 people, buy Sales Hub Starter only for the BD seats — HubSpot Sales Hub Starter is $15/seat (check EUR pricing).
  2. Pipedrive Growth (~€39/user/mo annual, check pricing) — Growth plan is marked at €39 per user monthly billed annually or €49 with monthly billing. Better if you want a sales-first pipeline with native Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator connectors; jump to Premium only when Isa needs real forecasting.
  3. Habit: a 20-minute Monday standup — Sofía, Isa and you walk every account with "last touch > 21 days." No agenda, no slides.

First action, today: open your Notion "linked accounts" database, filter to the 17% that is real, and paste those 20-40 accounts into a HubSpot free portal. One person, one hour. Delete the rest — it is lying to you.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce Sales Cloud because pharma runs on it. A 10-person team on HubSpot Professional runs about $13,500 in year one without add-ons, and Salesforce is worse for a team your size — Professional carries a $1,500 one-time onboarding fee, Enterprise $3,500. You will spend three months configuring instead of selling. Doing nothing has a real cost too: with one-year lead times and warm pharma contacts going cold, every quarter of drift is a campaign that signs a year late — or with a competitor.

When to revisit this

When your active opportunities pass ~60 or a fourth BD joins — that is when a Starter tier stops being enough.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides this: is your unit of work the account or the deal? A pharma parent with three subsidiaries and two live biomarker campaigns is one account with many deals — HubSpot's company hierarchy handles that natively, Pipedrive flattens it into a mess of duplicates. But if most revenue comes from a clean "one subsidiary, one campaign, one signature" motion, Pipedrive's pipeline view will make Sofía faster than HubSpot ever will. Pick wrong and you migrate in nine months. So which one is Novo Nordisk in your pipeline — one account or six?

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