Been looking at CRM options for my lawncare business. People here love to recommend Jobber, but I have some concerns about the bloat. I doubt I'll need GPS tracking, payroll management, or crew dispatch as someone that runs the work solo lol. Also checked out Housecall Pro, but it looks like it has the same issues as Jobber. But I have no experience with CRMs, so if I'm wrong please tell me.

Then I started to look into lightweight options, stuff like YardBook, GorillaDesk, Tofu which seemed to be built with solo operators in mind. So yeah, I'm thinking I'd need a suggestion from this side instead of the bigger side. But again, I have no prior experience with looking for CRMs, knowing what makes them better than the other, or if I even need a CRM to begin with. Afterall, I've managed just fine so far without, but I'm more on the side of feeling like I've scaled enough to need this.

I'm open to any suggestions as long as it has basic features like scheduling, client tracking, and invoicing. Let me know if I'm wrong about the CRMs I've mentioned, or if you have any straight recommendations. Thanks guys!

I'm looking for 5-10 advanced Slant users. My linkedin connection volume is pretty high and i'm trying to automate a lot of processes and I'm not 100% the best process flow.

I've already built a killer chrome extension that exports Sales Nav profiles directly into Slant. It works great. I'm trying to refine my internal Slant process workflow now and I'm looking for help.

Anyone want to jump on a zoom and chat for 20-30 minutes about Slant?

Hi everyone!

A group of coworkers and I have left our jobs to open our own accounting firm (We were all working in the accounting field previously) and we're looking into alternatives to the programs we've been using the past few years at our old place of employment.

The program we want to replace most out of all of them is Goldmine as Goldmine has been an absolute nightmare for us in the past.

We mainly used it to schedule appointments and as a logging system for our client files. So, that's what we're mainly looking for.

In terms of logging client files, we just need a system that lets us enter the names and phone numbers of clients and allows us to log the date they brought their paperwork in and who their file was given to within our office. Having a program to log files like this makes it easier for us to quickly look up who has each client's file in and when their paperwork was dropped off.

What we don't want:

- Nothing too complicated, we'd prefer to keep things as user friendly as possible

- Nothing too expensive, this is a new business and a lot of the other programs we need are not cheap lol

- No AI. We'd like to keep client info as secure as possible. We also like to avoid Gen AI as much as possible for moral and ethical reasons.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Dear redditors, would you use a CRM that has lead-generation with AI automation? Like basically CRM that searches for potential clients, stores them as leads, evaluates whether they are worth contacting, and helps prepare a personalized offer.

"I've worked with different CRM systems and one thing keeps happening.

The software is rarely the biggest problem.

Usually it's the process around it.

Messy data.

Different teams tracking things differently.

Nobody knowing who owns the next step.

What problems did your team struggle with the most?"

I do not know how this fits into the rules so please let me know if it is not allowed.

I propose a battle to see how fast the community CRMs are. I feel this gives everyone a chance to name drop their CRM without being spammy to people in the other threads and presents a challenge for who has the fastest and leanest CRM (or most optimized). Most of the test is network latency but server time is the time it takes for your CRM to receive the request, run your auth system and respond to the client (TTFB - SSL). Scripts are what javascript has to load after the request to fully serve the page.

Post your VM provider and server specifications and if you are located in the same geographical area. Then run the script or run the command on its own and post your results. May the fastest CRM win.

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Google Cloud - E2-Micro 2 cores 1GB RAM

Running google central and located on the SD/WY border.

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Me (SudleCRM) TTFB: 240ms Server: 34ms Size: 0.9KB Scripts: 0

Pipedrive TTFB: 426ms Server: 234ms Size: 36.7KB Scripts: 8

GoHighLevel TTFB: 294ms Server: 90ms Size: 9.3KB Scripts: 6

Salesforce TTFB: 326ms Server: 113ms Size: 12.0KB Scripts: 9

HubSpot TTFB: 465ms Server: 261ms Size: 20.1KB Scripts: 19

Zoho CRM TTFB: 1255ms Server: 281ms Size: 28.3KB Scripts: 11

The links used are in the script and all providers are tested the same way.

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Here is an internal test that requires your session cookie and actually tests the speed of the CRM. Use your real session cookie in the script and hit an actual route in your CRM.

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Endpoint: /api/leads/rows (59892 leads, paginated, server rendered HTML)

TTFB: 334ms

Server: 65ms

Size: 7.7KB

I've got a few GoHighLevel sub-accounts available if anyone's looking for GHL without paying full price.

Each account includes:

• Independent platform sub-account
• Unlimited users
• Unlimited contacts
• Built-in CRM & pipelines
• Unlimited funnels
• Email & SMS builder
• Calendar & appointment booking
• Forms & lead capture

Pricing

• $39/month
• $400/year (works out cheaper if you know you'll be using it long term)

I also handle GHL setup if you don't want to spend days figuring everything out. That includes CRM configuration, funnels, workflows, calendars, forms, pipelines, and full account setup.

There's a 3-day free trial, so you can log in, test everything, and decide if it's a good fit before paying.

One thing to mention: I only onboard 30 new accounts each month so I can actually provide support instead of disappearing after the sale. Once those spots are gone, new signups have to wait until the following month.

If you're interested or have any questions, just send me a DM or leave a comment and I'll be happy to help.

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! 😊

Hi everyone,

I've been researching the CRM migration industry before building anything and I'm trying to understand how consultants actually run these projects. If you've ever worked on CRM/data migrations (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, etc.) I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Some questions I have:
- What are some parts of the process that really manual?
- What is your least favorite part of the process?
- What tools do you currently use?

If anyone knows anyone who has experience or knowledge in the field please let me know as well.

Thanks for the help!

What tools or software are you using that have helped your emails look better and function better? We use Hubspot and it is limited in the emails. Obviously I can custom code emails, but wondering if people have tools they like that do this more easily.

I’ve been using clickup for quite some time but that doesn’t have accounting and HR, for that I am using different softwares…. Literally a software for one work… aren’t there any software which gives the entire suite?

Do anyone know?

Most teams know what they pay for their CRM.

But when you look closer, the real costs often come from everything around it:

• Dialers and telephony
• Call recording and storage
• Integrations and middleware
• Data providers
• SMS platforms
• Reporting and analytics tools
• Admin time spent managing multiple systems

Sometimes the software itself isn't the biggest expense it's the extra tools, usage fees, and operational overhead that add up over time.

What's been the biggest hidden cost in your sales stack?

Has there been a tool, integration, or process that ended up costing far more than you expected?

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!

One of the most annoying things with outreach-heavy orgs is when the contact data lives in one system, the segment logic lives somewhere else, and the actual messaging happens in a third place. Then everyone wonders why reporting is fuzzy and follow-up gets inconsistent.

I’ve mostly seen this in campaign and advocacy setups, but honestly it applies to a lot of teams. If the workflow is messy, the outreach gets messy too.

I was reading through platform options and RumbleUp caught my attention because it seemed to be discussed less like a pure bulk SMS tool and more like something teams use when actual organizing is involved. Curious what people here think is the cleanest way to handle data + text outreach without building a Frankenstein process.

I've been obsessing over cold LinkedIn outreach for a while now. partly for my own pipeline, partly because I kept seeing people around me send completely reasonable messages and get nothing back.

So I started saving every opener that actually worked. Ones that turned into real conversations, not just a polite thumbs up or "thank you". Eventually I had about 50 of them across six industries.

Once I had enough I went back through all of them looking for patterns. Here's what almost every single one had in common:

1. Every message that worked ended with exactly one question. Not "thoughts on this? Also are you open to a call? I can also send a deck". Cutting the second ask is harder than it sounds but it's the difference between a message that gets answered and one that gets skimmed.

2. No pitch in the first message: Out of 50 messages, zero of them pitched anything in the opener. The only job of message one is to earn message two. That's it.

3. Signal-based beats evergreen every time: About 7 out of 10 of the messages that worked referenced something the other person did in the last week or two (a post, a hire, a product update, a comment they left somewhere.) The freshest openers consistently outperformed the generic reusable ones by a wide margin.

4. Specificity over cleverness: "Saw you hired three SDRs in Q3" will always outperform the wittiest line ever written. Not one of these 50 openers is clever in the LinkedIn influencer sense. Every single one references something real.

5. Peer framing, not target framing: The messages that converted treated the other person as an operator with an interesting problem, not as a budget to unlock. Ironically that framing tends to unlock more budget than any direct pitch ever could.

6. Always keep it short: Average length across all 50 is around 50 words. Nothing needed to be long to work. If a message needs three paragraphs to make its point, the point probably isn't sharp enough yet.

I ended up turning the whole collection into a proper doc organized by industry with a breakdown of why each one worked because the template is useless without understanding the reasoning behind it. The moment you paste one of these word for word to someone who didn't actually do the thing it references, it becomes spam like everything else in their inbox.

Happy to share the full doc in the comments if anyone wants it. It's free, no email wall or anything. just figured it's more useful out in the world than sitting in my notes.

We are trying to connect our sales process with project delivery and the handoff is where things start breaking down.

Customer information lives in the crm but once a deal closes, the project team needs context without copying everything manually

We’re replacing a CRM that technically works, but nobody trusts the data inside it. Sales updates things late, marketing blames sales, reporting is always “close enough,” and management wants better forecasting without changing behavior.
I’ve been comparing platforms through SelectHub and it’s been a good way to separate actual fit from nice-looking sales pages.
Starting to think the best CRM is the one your team will actually keep updated without needing constant reminders.

I Built a Notion CRM template for freelancers, it's live on Notion's marketplace now. Would genuinely love honest feedback from people who've used similar tools.

It has Companies, Contacts, and Deals as main databases, plus a Reports database with its own dashboard page.

Features:

Deals automatically move between Active, Won, or Lost views just change one status and everything connected (companies, contacts, reports) moves with it automatically

Active is your main working view

Inbox view for quick additions you want to edit later without cluttering active work

Health check formula shows if a deal is on track, closing soon, late, or done based on expected date

Weighted value formula calculates expected revenue based on deal stage

Its mostly for small businesses

Everywhere I look I see references to GHL and HubSpot and SalesForce etc. Are you guys using all these features that are offered? It seems they have a feature for every edge case. I have a CRM targeted at tradespeople and small business owners currently and its discouraging to think I may have pigeonholed myself. I am not including a link on purpose to avoid sounding spammy but my CRM is deliberately lean and simple.

Leads, Deal, Contact, Notes, Calendar. It has the essentials like per-contact notes and such. Supports webhooks in to fill entries. Has a little AI agent to ask questions about the database. It doesn't require an instruction PDF or clicking through six menus to add a contact and it looks basic but deliberate and refined. It is not a CRM clone of the week. I am not going to add tons of features to try and compete but are there some non-negotiables that pretty much everyone needs these days?

For the techies I run a single binary written in a compiled language. No mult-tenant. One client per VM. One client per DB. Takes 150MB RAM to serve 60000 leads. No node/react/postgres/javascript etc. It loads instantly no matter what, the only thing that impacts the speed is the network connection of the client. Users are allowed to register via email whitelist and there are no special user privileges.

What are your thoughts on simple CRMs? I don't want to occupy a niche where people would rather use GHL or a spreadsheet than me. For those of you in defined sectors like real estate do you prefer "real estate CRMs" or do some of you use generic CRMs for specialized work? Is automation a requirement for most of you?

A lot of small businesses seem to have the same problem: clients contact them directly on WhatsApp, conversations happen there, groups are created, follow-ups are discussed, but none of that data really ends up anywhere useful.

Then after a few months, you have customer history, leads, names, group members, and conversations sitting inside WhatsApp, but nothing structured to analyze, back up, or move into a CRM.

I built a Chrome extension for WhatsApp Web to help export this kind of data into files, mostly for teams that use WhatsApp as a messy pre-CRM layer.

The idea is not to replace a CRM, but to make sure the data is not trapped inside chats forever.

Curious how others here deal with this. Do you manually copy WhatsApp leads into your CRM, use a shared inbox, export periodically, or just leave everything inside WhatsApp?

I’ll add the link in the comments in case anyone wants to try it.