The trouble that you’ve probably felt is CRM are sold to sales exec and as such, focus on sales exec needs.
You’d be better served not with CRM, but a personal contact management system.
Something like https://www.monicahq.com/
So why not build it? Sounds like you have the academic and research resources. It's just entities, relations and timelines. There's a thousand ideas out there in games, logistics and asset tracking that are so nearly what you want and can be adapted. Many now well known tools only evolved as a side effect of another niche business need, to scratch a singular itch.
There are a few built on salesforce but there are others that are standalone, and they all implement CRM in some way.
Do you host it yourself, what database is used?
I've done some work for a homeless advocacy group that uses Salesforce, it keeps track of donors as well as information on clients.
We are academic group who is looking to increase collaboration both in industry and academia. While we have "products" (which we don't sell), we also have other initiatives like an education program. We also may want to set up a consortium with industry, which may include them giving us money, but not in a "buy a product or service" sense (but still needs to be thoroughly tracked).
So I'd really like a platform that holistically tracks people and our engagement with them. Some of this is done by traditional CRM, but the focus on selling products & services is too narrow.
Some desired features:
* Tracking our contacts, so we don't forget to follow through on something (CRM generally does this)
* Tracking people through time. If/Where they did their PhD, postdoc, are they in industry now. CRM I've looked at tend to be very fixed-point in time.
* What their research interests are and have been. Are they in an area we are looking to expand into? What conferences do they typically go to?
* How they have engaged with us before. Was it through an educational workshop? Did we mentor them in a mentorship program? Just someone we met sometime and seemed interested? People can be part of multiple groups.
* If they are using our projects, how are they using them? We are looking for good stories to give to our own funding agencies (and for general marketing).
* If they are interested in giving us money, what is the status of those talks?
If there's a better term for software that does this kind of thing, I'm very open to ideas. This isn't a strength in academia, as is pretty obvious, and I'm very new at this :)