I've spent the last few years building a CRM from the ground up, and one thing that surprised me is how many platforms are really just collections of unrelated modules glued together. What initially started as a CRM essentially became a business operating system.

You'll have customers in one place, scheduling somewhere else, dispatch living in its own world, invoicing in another system, marketing bolted on later, and payroll handled by something completely different. It works...until you start trying to make those pieces communicate with each other.

I eventually stopped thinking about building "features" and started thinking about building a business domain.

A customer shouldn't exist five different times across five different modules. There should be one customer entity. A work order shouldn't be copied into dispatch, invoicing, reporting, and marketing. It should be the same object moving through different stages of the business.

Once I started designing it that way, a lot of things became simpler.

A lead comes in---they become a customer.

A customer schedules a job.

Dispatch assigns the technician.

The technician updates the work order from the field.

Completing the work automatically updates reporting, revenue, payroll, customer history, and marketing because every module is referencing the same business object instead of trying to synchronize duplicate records.

The same philosophy applied to employees.

Most CRMs treat everyone like they're just another user account.

That never made much sense to me.

A road technician has a completely different workflow than a dispatcher. A dispatcher doesn't need the same interface as accounting. Sales shouldn't have payroll permissions.

Instead of one generic user model, I built role-specific workflows backed by RBAC so permissions are enforced on the server, not just hidden in the UI. Technicians authenticate differently than office employees because they're solving different problems.

One thing I learned pretty quickly is that architecture decisions matter a lot more than feature count.

Adding another button is easy.

Designing a data model that can support years of new features without becoming a maintenance nightmare is the hard part.

I'd rather spend an extra week redesigning a database relationship than spend the next three years working around a bad decision. 💯

Hello all, currently our team is using jobber and hubspot. For clarity we are a window and kitchen installer/distributor. We use jobber for creating quotes, schedules, jobs, and we get all our financial data through there. We just starting using hubspot as a way to track customer communication because there were gaps from our sales team that needed to be tracked.

The main issue i'm already seeing is multiple entries of clients and redundancy. Currently when customer information comes in we create the client in jobber, create the client as a company in hubspot (even if they are a homeowner) and then create the client again with the same information as a contact and associate it to the company.

Somewhere in this process we create a quote in jobber for the customer and also create a deal in hubspot so we can associate communication through the deal. This is where the issue lies is doing everything twice, I am trying to solve for this problem. Currently it doesn't seem possible to quote through hubspot at least now cost wise, i've been looking into jobbers client communication side of things and can't seem to find if its good or not.

There are also redundancies when it comes to writing out orders and invoicing but that is for another time.

This is a weekly post for you to let out about something which happened this week for you in CRM that mattered: features, client requests that were either great or awful this week, and just generally chat CRM / CRM consulting chatter.

No self promo, just a place to share tales from the front-line of CRM!

Volume + generic copy scaled fast because it felt like a cheat code. Everyone piled in. Reply rates tanked. The cheat code is now just the default, which means it's not a cheat code anymore, it's just noise.

Prospect research never got crowded because it takes real time. Checking what someone posted last week. Noticing they just hired three engineers or expanded into a new market. Finding the one line that makes the email feel like it was written specifically for that person and not pasted from a sequence template.

Nobody automated that part well enough to flood it. So it stayed open.

Shortcuts get you into a lot of inboxes. Research gets you a reply.

The funny thing is the research part is also the part that's actually gotten easier to automate recently, not the blasting part. Blasting a thousand emails was always easy. Finding the right signal for each person at scale was the bottleneck, and that bottleneck is mostly gone now if you're using the right setup.

The lane is still open. Most people are too busy blasting to notice.

In vertical sales teams, old records sit untouched because notes, timing, ownership, and follow-up context are scattered. For teams that actually revive old contacts, what fields or context determine "contact now" versus "leave alone"? What does your CRM fail to show at the moment someone needs to write the follow-up?

I run an events agency and am struggling to find a CRM that may work for my business. Truthfully I think what I am looking for, doesn't exist. I have tried a few creative specific ones (dubaso, wedola, boda) and some general ones (hubspot, monday & zoho). For the creative specific ones, I struggle as they are created for specific roles e.g. photographers etc. For the general ones, I struggle with the cost per seat as I only need 1 seat most of the year and a 2 seats during peak periods.

I think part of the reason I am struggling is what my perfect CRM is doesn't exist and what I am looking for is very specific. However I am happy to work with a CRM that may not meet everything if I can reduce my reliance on about 4 spreadsheets and am using googledrive for sharing documents with clients.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions , I have noted below my needs/wants.

Needs

- Customer portal where they can view documents. They don't need the ability to edit them but if they can download documents, this would be great

- Lead forms that integrate into the CRM

- Lead Status Tracker

Wants

- Ability to create automations .e.g. follow up emails

- Ability to send customer's messages via the portal and it send them an email with the information. [Bonus points, if they can reply to the email and it appear on the portal.]

- Sales dashboard (ability to pull stats and to also compare against the forecast)

- Ability to add and track contact details for suppliers without adding them as clients.
- Ability to create proposals within the CRM

- Mobile App would be amazing.

I have been going back and forth with this. i thought of starting with generic crm like Salesforce but as per the suggestion from my business friends, i should go with dedicated real estate crm as it already has list stacking, drip campaign and buyer management built for this exact business. what's everyone else running? I am genuinely curious if i am missing something.

Hi All,

We have recently been testing GHL and have found a few limitations and are just now exploring additional options on CRM alternatives based on our current structure.

Core requirements:

• Email conversations with reliable reply threading (this is our current platform's biggest pain point)
• SMS and WhatsApp conversations
• Inbound and outbound calling
• Landing page builder
• Lead capture via webhook/API (from WordPress Gravity Forms and a Live Chat tool)
• Calendar / appointment booking
• Marketing attribution - tracking a lead from first click (paid, organic, social) through to closed sale

Multi-brand / multi-user structure (our key requirement):

We operate 9 distinct brands across 4 regions under one company, each region has one primary brand plus several secondary brands (some owned, some reseller relationships).

We don't need client-facing logins or portals per brand, this is purely internal.

What we do need:

• Reps working across multiple brands in the same session
• Outbound emails/SMS/WhatsApp sent under the correct brand identity and domain automatically, based on which brand the lead belongs to
• Access scoped by team: each regional team covers its own region's brands
• Reporting and attribution split cleanly by brand, not just company-wide

We're currently at 15 users, with room to grow.
Just wondering what people would recommend for this type of setup, or if anyone has anything that has worked quite well / or pitfalls etc

Curious on Bitrix24 - we had been working with GHL but are finding the Conversation section (particularly email) had some real major flaws / limitations (particularly the reply threading).

One of the main drawcards to GHL was the pricing structure... We operate 9 distinct brands across 4 regions under one company, each region has one primary brand plus several secondary brands (some owned, some reseller relationships), with regional staff looking after each brand (eg AU staff covering 5 brands, US staff covering 4 etc) we were finding that the user seat costs was pushing up significantly in other platforms....

So the question:
- I can see Bitrix24 has an enterprise plan which specified unlimited "branches" and 250 users
- For the component of the branches are these all able to be setup under the one enterprise account, or would we have to have 9 seperate accounts which all have to be billed individually??

If there are any glaring problems with Bitrix that would be great to hear also

Me and my partner built a CRM that's basically fully AI driven — lead scoring, auto summaries, AI replies — and it connects to WhatsApp Business directly, plus the normal CRM stuff. Trying to sell to US companies in the 50-500 employee range first.

Still not sure on pricing. Right now thinking something like $80-100/user monthly for smaller teams, dropping to maybe $40-60/user once you're past 100 seats. For AI usage I want to give some credits free then charge per use after, don't want the heavy users to kill our margins if we just charge flat. WhatsApp messaging would be billed separately, basically pass the cost plus a bit extra. Also thinking a one time setup fee, $1500-5000ish, for onboarding and getting the AI trained on their data.

Worried this ends up feeling like a million different charges though. Anyone dealt with pricing AI features separately from the base plan? Does that scare off mid-market buyers or is it normal now? Also not sure if the setup fee is even worth charging anymore or if people expect free onboarding.

Would genuinely appreciate any input from people who've actually changed their pricing around AI stuff and seen how customers reacted.

I get why they’ve been around forever being in the field with a rep tells you a lot you’d never see in a CRM. But it’s also a pretty expensive way to learn what happened on one or two conversations. A lot of sales managers are already stretched across too many reps, too many locations, and too many follow-ups. Spending half the day in the car just to catch a small sample of conversations feels harder to justify now. I’ve been seeing Rilla come up more in this conversation. I wanted to know what teams are doing instead, are managers still riding along as much or are more teams moving toward recorded conversations, call reviews and coaching reps after the fact?

Like if companies can make it using AI like claude and the such why would they buy it from someone like me?
Is it still worth it in 2026 and if yes how would one be able to narrow it down and find the right niche according to the demand in today’s market?

Please give me your thoughts on this one guys im very curious

We're a small nonprofit that runs a lot of events. Free monthly mixers (70 to 100 people), members-only events, and professional development events that are free/discounted for members and full price for non-members.

Right now we use DonorBox because it's free and lets us set up each event separately. It works fine for registration and payments. The problem is attendance tracking.

We can see who attended a single event and export that to Excel. What we can't do is pull up one person and see every event they've attended over time. And the bigger issue: DonorBox only credits the ticket purchaser. So if one person buys 5 tickets for their friends, we only see the buyer as an attendee. The other 5 people are invisible in our records.

We want something that automatically ties attendance to each individual attendee, not just the purchaser, and rolls it into their profile. That way we can see how engaged each member and non-member is across events over time.

We looked at Wild Apricot and it does what we need, but at our volume the pricing gets close to $400/month, which we can't do.

For scale: 500 to 1,500 total contacts (members and non-members combined). Budget needs to be well under Wild Apricot. Open to either replacing DonorBox entirely or adding a tool alongside it.

Anyone using something that handles this without breaking the bank? Would love real recommendations from people running similar event volume.

My department of 50 people is gearing up for a switch to Halo CRM for B2B purposes. I am familiar with Salesforce and ServiceNow. If you moved between Halo and one of those, what do you like or miss most?

Hey guys, anyone has an experience automating follow ups with AI? I made an automation in claude that reads my playbook, the meeting transcript and generates the follow ups, but it isn't there yet.

Curious to see if anyone had success doing this?

The sales team keeps flagging that records are out of date. Contacts who've changed roles, companies that have restructured, accounts that no longer fit the ICP but are still in active sequences.

Tested a few options. Apollo is solid with contact coverage but the company record freshness has been inconsistent in testing. PDL has better raw volume but the dataset refresh cadence on company records hasn't been tight enough. Coresignal has been a more reliable option for data freshness so far.

Has anyone built something more automated here? Interested in what the trigger logic looks like when it actually works.

After talking to founders and sales people, I noticed something interesting.

Nobody complained about having a CRM.

They complained about keeping it updated.

Creating contacts, updating deals, writing notes and follow ups after every meeting felt like admin they'd rather avoid.

That became the whole idea behind Kessio. Instead of manually updating everything, you type what happened after a meeting and it takes care of the rest.

I'm curious if I'm solving the right problem.

If you use a CRM every day, is updating it actually one of your biggest pain points, or is there something even more frustrating that you'd rather see solved?

I’ve been looking at Dynamics 365 Business Central and it feels like the partner matters almost as much as the software itself.

Licensing is one thing, but implementation, data migration, reporting, training and process fit seem to be where projects either work or become a mess. I came across Infinity Group while looking at UK Business Central providers, and they seem more focused on implementation and support than just selling licences.

For people who have gone through an ERP rollout, what did you wish you checked before choosing your partner?

I'm reviewing our CRM costs and realized that the subscription itself is only part of the total expense.

Once you factor in integration platforms, automation tools, reporting/BI software, e-signature services, email marketing, data enrichment, scheduling apps, and other add-ons, the monthly cost can grow pretty quickly. On top of that, there are separate invoices, taxes, and vendor management for each service.

I'm curious how everyone else approaches this.

• Which third-party tools are essential in your CRM stack?
• Which category ends up costing the most over time?
• Have you found it more cost-effective to keep using specialized tools, or have you moved toward a more all-in-one solution?

Interested to hear real-world numbers, experiences, and whether you've found any good ways to reduce the overall cost without sacrificing functionality.

ive been meaning to put this all down somewhere for a while now. the full arc of going from managing a team of 8 SDRs at a series B to sitting alone in my apartment sending cold emails for other peoples companies. its been about 22 months and honestly the first year was a mess that slowly turned into something real. gonna try to lay out every number i can remember because i think the specifics are what actually help people

BEFORE

i left my SDR manager role in august 2023. we had just lost a $340k deal i had been quarterbacking for 6 months because the champion left the company mid-cycle and nobody had built a second thread. that loss broke something in me. not in a dramatic way, more like i just looked around and realized i was building pipeline for someone elses vision and i wasnt even that good at the politics required to move up. so i quit with about 4 months of savings and told myself id figure it out

first client came through my network. old colleague needed help with outbound for his fintech startup. i charged him $2,500/mo which looking back was way too low but i had zero leverage and zero proof i could do this solo. the problem was that everything i knew about outbound was built on having a team, having Salesforce with enrichment integrations already wired up, having an ops person who handled deliverability. i had none of that

month one revenue: $2,500. one client. and i was spending probably 50 hours a week on it because i was doing everything manually. scraping LinkedIn, finding emails one by one through Hunter, writing sequences in google docs and then copy pasting them into... i think i was using Woodpecker at that point. maybe Lemlist. honestly the first two months blur together

the numbers from that period were bad. like actually bad. bounce rate was sitting around 8.5% on most campaigns because my email sourcing was garbage. i was pulling contacts from LinkedIn, running them through Hunter for enrichment, and just hoping for the best. reply rates were around 1.1% which if youve done any volume you know is basically nothing. i booked my client 3 meetings in the first month which sounds ok until you realize i was sending close to 2,000 emails to get there

month two i picked up a second client through a cold DM on twitter of all things. saas company selling to mid-market HR teams. $3,000/mo. so now im at $5,500 and feeling like maybe this could work. except i was drowning. i didnt have systems for anything. i was using a personal gmail to send some campaigns (i know i know) and a couple google workspace accounts i had set up myself. no warmup. no rotation. just vibes and desperation

by month three the wheels came off. one of my domains got blacklisted. bounce rates on the HR campaign hit 11.2% which is insane and i should have caught it way earlier but i wasnt monitoring anything properly. my fintech client was getting frustrated because the meetings i was booking were mostly unqualified. i lost that client at the end of month three. back down to $3,000/mo and honestly questioning whether i should just go back to a W2

the low point was probably early december 2023. i remember sitting in a coffee shop running numbers on my laptop and realizing that at my current burn rate i had maybe 7 weeks before i needed to either get new clients or start interviewing. i had spent about $800/mo on tools (Woodpecker, Hunter, a couple random data tools i barely used) and wasnt even close to breaking even when you factored in the domains and inboxes

AFTER

the turn started because i swallowed my pride and called a friend who runs a bigger outbound agency, maybe 15 people. she basically told me i was doing everything wrong from an infrastructure standpoint. her exact words were something like "youre sending from 3 inboxes and wondering why your deliverability is trash." fair point

first thing i fixed was infrastructure. this was january 2024. i set up 12 inboxes across 4 domains using Mailforge. cost was about $3/inbox/mo so like $36/mo for all of them which felt like nothing compared to what i had been spending on google workspace accounts. warmed them all up for 3 weeks before sending a single campaign email. i was using the warmup built into Lemlist at that point because i had switched over from Woodpecker (Woodpecker is fine but Lemlist felt more natural for the way i think about sequences)

the warmup period was painful because i had no revenue coming in and i was just... waiting. but those 3 weeks changed everything about my results going forward. took me way too long to understand that deliverability isnt something you fix after the fact, its something you build before you start

january i also landed two new clients through referrals. one was a cybersecurity company selling to mid-market IT directors, $3,500/mo. the other was a recruiting firm, $2,800/mo. so i went from $3,000 to $9,300/mo in about 3 weeks which felt surreal

second thing i fixed was data quality. this is where things got specific. my old workflow was LinkedIn Sales Nav to Hunter to send. the problem was Hunter was missing emails for probably 35-40% of my list and the ones it did find had a bounce rate that was way too high. a guy in a slack community i was in mentioned running a waterfall enrichment setup and i started experimenting with that in february 2024

i added Prospeo to my enrichment stack alongside Hunter and the difference was immediate. bounce rates on my cybersecurity campaign dropped from around 7.8% to 1.6% within the first two weeks. i was actually shocked because i had assumed the bounce issue was a domain reputation thing but it turned out most of it was just bad email data

the workflow became: pull from Sales Nav, enrich through Clay (which lets you chain multiple providers), run Prospeo as the primary enrichment source, then verify everything through ZeroBounce before it goes into Lemlist. Prospeo found valid emails for about 82% of the contacts i fed it which was way better than what i was getting before. only complaint is the bulk processing can be slow when youre running 2,000+ contacts, like sometimes id start a job before bed and it still wouldnt be done in the morning. but the data quality was solid so i just planned around it

third thing: i actually learned to write copy that doesnt sound like a robot. my SDR manager brain had been trained on these very structured, very corporate email templates. "i noticed your company recently..." type stuff. i started studying what was actually getting replies in my own inbox and realized the emails that worked were short, specific, and sounded like a person wrote them in 30 seconds. my reply rates went from that 1.1% range to about 3.4% across all campaigns by march 2024

let me give you the month by month revenue because i think the trajectory is useful:

jan 2024: $9,300 (3 clients) feb 2024: $9,300 mar 2024: $12,800 (added a logistics company, $3,500/mo) apr 2024: $12,800 may 2024: $16,300 (added two small clients) jun 2024: $14,500 (lost the recruiting firm, they went in-house) jul 2024: $18,200 aug 2024: $21,700 sep 2024 onward: stabilized around $22-24k/mo

the jump from march to august was mostly about getting better at closing my own deals ironically. i was so focused on doing outbound for clients that i neglected my own pipeline for months. once i started running a small campaign for my own services (literally 50 emails a week, super targeted to series A and B founders) i started getting 2-3 discovery calls a month and closing about 40% of them

current monthly costs for context: Lemlist is $99/mo, Clay is $149/mo (the credit system is confusing and i always run out mid-month), Mailforge is around $45/mo now because i have more inboxes, ZeroBounce is maybe $50/mo depending on volume, Prospeo runs me about $79/mo, LinkedIn Sales Nav is $99/mo, and then domains are like $60/mo across all of them. so total tooling cost is somewhere around $580-620/mo which against $24k revenue is pretty comfortable

the thing i still havent figured out is scaling without hiring. im at capacity with 6 clients and every time i think about bringing someone on i remember all the management overhead from my old job and i just... dont want to go back to that. but theres a ceiling here and i can feel it. i turned down a $5,000/mo client last month because i literally didnt have the hours. that was a weird feeling after spending months desperate for any revenue

oh wait i should mention - the cybersecurity client from january is still with me and theyve expanded twice. started at $3,500, now paying $6,200/mo because were running campaigns into 3 different ICPs for them. that single client relationship has been worth more than any tool or tactic. i almost lost them in april when a campaign targeting CISOs at healthcare companies completely bombed (0.4% reply rate, booked zero meetings in 3 weeks) but i was transparent about it, showed them the data, adjusted the targeting, and the next campaign did 4.1% reply rate. that saved the relationship and honestly taught me more about client management than anything from my corporate days

i also lost a deal in june that still bugs me. $8,000/mo engagement with an edtech company. we were in final negotiations and they went with a bigger agency because they wanted someone who could also do LinkedIn outbound through Dripify or Waalaxy. i didnt offer that at the time (i do now, added it in september) and it cost me what would have been my biggest contract. that one stung for weeks

my average across all campaigns right now is about 3.1% reply rate and roughly 0.8% positive reply rate which translates to about 12-18 meetings per month per client depending on their TAM and how niche the ICP is. cost per meeting for my clients ranges from about $180 to $340 depending on the vertical. cybersecurity is the most expensive because the audience is small and skeptical. logistics is cheapest because nobody is doing good outbound to that market yet

anyway this got way longer than i planned. 22 months ago i was an SDR manager who thought he knew outbound and it turns out knowing how to manage a team doing outbound and actually doing outbound yourself are completely different skills. the infrastructure stuff alone took me 4 months to figure out and i could have done it in 2 weeks if someone had just told me what i wrote above