Myself and my team recently decided to consider newer CRM options to speed up our outreach/tracking process. We're a small advisory firm, maybe 6 or 7 or so of us who'd actually be in the system day to day.

We work project by project. For each advisory project we build a list of people who might be interested in that particular transaction, and then we reach out to them. So it's not selling a product to customers one at a time, it's more like, here's a mandate, who are the right people to talk to about it, and then we work that list. Each project ends up being something like 200-ish people, and we've got several of these projects running at the same time.

The way we want it to work: we've already got a big pile of contacts we've been in touch with over the years, and we want the CRM to hold those and enrich as we go. So we'd drop in a list of companies (an Excel sheet), and for the ones we've already dealt with, the CRM would pull up the contact we already have there (which would be imported from our Outlook system). For the companies where we don't have anyone yet, we use a separate tool to go find new contacts. Between the two we end up with a full outreach list for each project.

There’s an important issue that we want to address. Since we run a separate pipeline per project, the same person often shows up in more than one of them. Say we reach out to a guy named Zack at Company ABC about one project, and a while later we're also reaching out to Zack about a completely different project. We need the CRM to get that Zack is on two different outreach lists and to keep the email tracking straight between them, so it knows which emails belong to which project and tracks them separately. A couple of tools we tried just dump everything onto the contact and blur the two projects together, which does not work for us.

We also want that tracking to be automatic. We don't want to manually mark each email so it gets logged, that defeats the point, we want it to pick up the outreach and file it under the right project on its own.

And we're not trying to auto send anything. We send our emails ourselves because most of them need proper review before they go out. But it'd be great if the system could at least draft a rough first version by pulling from the info in our spreadsheet, so we can review it, fix it, and then send it ourselves.

The rest of the wishlist: we're a Microsoft/Outlook shop so Outlook syncing that runs in the background without us babysitting it is preferable. Being able to auto sync most email but keep certain confidential threads out of the system entirely would be great. Some decent internal dashboards plus reports we can export and send to clients. Dedupe and a shared contact history so we can tell if anyone here has been in touch with a person before. And it has to stay internal, no client logins or portals, and we're small so we're not looking to spend enterprise money.

So, what are you all running, how big is your team, and what do you like/hate about it? Would really love to hear from anyone doing deal or project-based work rather than high volume Saas sales. Thanks! 😊