Why

With 6 estimators sending proposals and a CC'd bid email, you already have the raw data — every bid is in that inbox. The problem is nobody can answer "which 40 bids from last month never got a follow-up call?" without scrolling. At 200–500 bids/month, manual data entry into Pipedrive will get abandoned by week three; you need a CRM that ingests email automatically. That's Salesflare's whole pitch — it reads the shared inbox and builds records for you.

What you actually need

1. Salesflare (~$35/user/mo) — connect the shared bid CC inbox plus each estimator's mailbox; it auto-creates accounts, contacts, and threads every sent proposal to a deal. This is the "reduce data entry" lever you asked about.
2. One pipeline with five stages — Bid Requested → Bid Sent → Follow-up 1 → Follow-up 2 → Won/Lost. Every deal must have a "Next Follow-up Date"; Salesflare's workflow can auto-set it 5 business days after a proposal is sent.
3. A habit — Monday bid-coordinator standup — your bid coordinator filters the pipeline by "Bid Sent, no reply, >7 days" and assigns each estimator their chase list for the week. 20 minutes.

Do this today

Start the Salesflare free trial at salesflare.com, connect the shared bid CC inbox plus one estimator's email as a test, and let it run for an hour. Then build the five-stage pipeline above and turn on the workflow "If deal stage = Bid Sent and no reply in 5 days → create follow-up task for owner." By tomorrow morning you'll see every bid from the last 90 days already populated as deals with no manual entry.

What to ignore

Pipedrive is fine software but its email sync is shallower than Salesflare's for your exact CC'd-inbox setup — you'd end up paying someone to copy-paste. Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Professional ($100/seat/mo) and Salesforce Sales Cloud entirely; both are massively over-spec'd for utility bid tracking and the implementation cost alone would eat a quarter. Ignore anyone pitching you Outreach, Apollo, or ZoomInfo — those are outbound prospecting tools, and you're inbound-bid-driven.

What doing nothing costs you

A conservative 10% slippage on 350 bids/month (midpoint of your 200–500 range) = ~35 un-chased bids monthly. Utility contracting bids vary wildly, but at even a $20K average job, recovering one extra win per month from disciplined follow-up pays for Salesflare across all 7 seats for two years.

When to revisit this

When you start bidding on multiple contract types (e.g., gas vs. fiber vs. water) and need separate pipelines with different stages — that's when you graduate to Pipedrive Advanced or HubSpot Sales Hub Starter.