What's really going on

You get fewer than 10 inquiries a month, but each one can live in your pipeline for years across 40 countries. Three people cannot hold 300 deal-states, stakeholders, and next-step dates in their heads. Your channels — email, phone, referrals — leave the history scattered across inboxes and call notes. The failure mode isn't lead capture. It's the deal that goes quiet, then dies, because nobody remembered to nudge the procurement contact in Q3.

What to do instead

1. Pipedrive Advanced (~$29/user/mo annual, ~$87/mo for three) — one visual pipeline with email sync and follow-up automation. Every deal has an owner, a stage, and a next activity date. Nothing goes silent by accident.
2. HubSpot Free CRM (free) if you want to try before paying — but know the ceiling: free accounts are capped at 2 users, 1 deal pipeline, 10 custom properties. With three people and 40 countries, you'll outgrow it in a month.
3. First action, today: open Pipedrive's 14-day trial, create stages that match your defense cycle (Qualified → Demo → Technical Eval → Procurement → Contract), import your 300 deals from wherever they live, and set a next-activity date on every one. One afternoon, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce Sales Cloud or HubSpot Sales Hub Professional. Skip both. Salesforce is $80+/user/month once you get the features you'd actually use, and it needs an admin you don't have. Outbound tools like Outreach or Apollo are wrong too — you sell through referrals, not cold sequences. Doing nothing costs you deals you've already half-won: a defense contract that slips one quarter because you forgot to follow up is a year of revenue you'll never get back.

When to revisit this

When you hire a fourth person or add a channel-partner motion — that's when one pipeline stops being enough.

The part worth getting right

Look at your 300 deals honestly. How many are actually alive? If most are truly warm and multi-year, you need a CRM built for long-cycle tracking with per-deal stakeholder notes — Pipedrive Advanced fits. But if 200 of those 300 are polite silence from prospects who ghosted a year ago, no tool will save you; you'll just import a graveyard and pay per seat to stare at it. Clean the list first, or buy the wrong tier. Which of those 300 would you bet money on closing?