We have a SOC 2 readiness kit with policy templates, a checklist, and an evidence tracker for SaaS companies preparing for SOC 2.
If you’re building or running a CRM and customers are starting to ask about SOC 2, or you’re preparing for an audit and need a structured way to get ready, feel free to reach out.
Anybody ever build their own CRM? I’m thinking about it wondering about dev time quality product MVP finish product the whole nine.
I don't need that many features: simple UI, multiple users, managing contacts and setting client/project interaction reminders (including repeating ones aka "every week/every month") and see them as popup/in a list somewhere.
Should be self hostable. I'm not interested on relying on some third party service that will lure me, collect my contacts, bind me to themselves with a few shiny features and then change their tariffs so sneezing now suddenly costs 100$. I'm not interested in AI-first projects either.
Shouldn't be a freshly made one-man project.
And should be pretty lightweight.
So far I looked at:
UPD: Thanks everyone. I think I'll try to stick with Twenty for now. Workflows can be extended with logic functions which are a bit clunky, but they seem to work.
Im seeing AI sales coaching come up for field teams and I’m still not sure how well it works in real life. For leasing agents home builders or senior living reps the manager usually sees the CRM outcome but not the actual conversation. Seems useful in theory, but if reps hate recording or stop using it after a few weeks then it kind of defeats the point so my question is does anyone here use this with an in person sales team and how well does it work?
I’ve been experimenting with pulling public business data from Google Maps and enriching it with things like emails and owner information.
One thing I’m trying to figure out is which filters actually help identify businesses that are more likely to need marketing services.
For example:
For agency owners or anyone doing outbound B2B lead gen, what signals do you actually use before deciding a business is worth contacting?
I’m especially curious whether there are less obvious filters that have improved your response or close rates.
One dashboard, built in CRM, marketing, automations, workflows, reputation management, all client conversations across facebook, instagram, email, text all managed in the same place. This way you dont have to fill your business suite with 50 different softwares, tools and platforms. thought I'd just share the not so secret sauce today lol 😂
We’re a small B2B business with 6 people and sales is still pretty founder led, but revenue has grown enough that keeping leads, follow ups and customer conversations spread across spreadsheets and inboxes is starting to fall apart. I’m trying to figure out what the best CRM for a small business looks like when you need something the whole team can use without spending weeks setting it up.
I keep finding everything from really basic small business CRM tools to newer AI native CRM platforms, and I’m more interested in something that can take some of the sales work off the team rather than just becoming another database we have to maintain. Main thing is finding a CRM we can grow into without needing a dedicated ops person just to keep it running.
Small-ish sales desk (~12 agents), B2B outbound + some inbound. Stack is HubSpot + a separate dialer. On paper CRM is fine: tasks, pipelines, notes. In practice most of the day happens in the dialer and HubSpot becomes a graveyard of half-updated records.
Biggest pains lately: 1. Connect rates keep sliding. Feels like half our DIDs show as spam / Scam Likely, so the CRM "activity" charts look healthy while actual conversations tank. 2. Agents burn time on answering machines. When they do connect, switching tabs to log the call means notes get skipped or written 3 hours later. 3. Supervisor coaching is all after-the-fact QA. By then the bad habit already shipped 40 more calls.
Tried the usual: rotating numbers, tighter call dispositions, "please update HubSpot" nagging. Adoption doesn’t stick.
Curious what actually worked for you: - Do you run dialer + CRM as one system, or keep them separate and force sync somehow? - Anyone solved screen-pop + auto post-call notes without a Frankenstein Zapier mess? - For spam-flagged DIDs / connect rates — what moved the needle that wasn’t just "buy more numbers"?
Not looking for a vendor pitch dump. Want war stories: what broke, what you switched, what you’d never do again. Team size + industry helps.
I have been working around CRM systems and noticed something interesting: businesses often spend a lot of time asking whether a CRM has every possible feature, when the features they actually use regularly are much fewer.
For example, things like:
Lead and contact management
Pipeline/deal tracking
Follow-up reminders
Email integration
Task automation
Reporting
But then there are dozens of advanced features that sound useful during the buying process but may not get much real-world usage.
I’m curious about the experience of people here:
What CRM feature did you initially think was essential but later realized you rarely use?
And on the other side, what’s one simple CRM feature that has had a much bigger impact on your daily workflow than you expected?
Would be interesting to hear experiences from both small teams and larger organizations.
I have a unique instance we're struggling to work through and was hoping someone might have ideas.
We use Salesforce for sales and our record of truth, and we us HubSpot for marketing. We are moving sales into HubSpot just for sequences (moving them from Outreach), SF will remain their primary CRM.
Here's the weird and annoying part. Our Salesforce doesn't use email as a unique identifier, it uses a combination of email + lead source + line of business. So John could easily have multiple records that would look like:
- John / Webinar / Product A (Lead Status: Open)
- John / Webinar / Product B (Lead Status: Unqualified)
- John / Tradeshow / Product A (Lead Status: Open)
- John / List / Product B (Lead Status: Contacted)
- etc.
Currently all info is aggregated on 1 HS record, so HS shows 1 John with Webinar, Tradeshow, and List as lead sources and Product A, Product B for LOB, and Lead Status doesn't really matter to marketing.
With all this in mind.... How do we get sequence activity to log to the correct SF record? How can we say enroll John in Sequence 1, and then that activity should go to John / Webinar / Product A (Lead Status: Open) and not a different one? Using the most recent lead isn't reliable enough and we're at a loss for what other logic could be used.
Any help or ideas would be much appreciated!
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!
[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]
Hey everyone! I'm a marketing student and I've been trying to understand sales operations better from people who actually work in this field.
One thing I keep hearing about is how scattered everything can get between the CRM, emails, meetings, pipeline and account activity. Then you end up with things getting missed, CRM data not always being accurate, deals going quiet, missed follow ups, or just not knowing what actually needs attention.
But I'm curious, is this actually a big problem for you guys? Or are there other problems in Sales Ops that are way more painful day to day?
Also what software are you currently using to manage all of this? Is there anything you actually love or couldn't work without? There is a wide range of software that sales and revenue managers are using these days so what is something you guys are looking for when trying to choose one?
And I'm curious about pricing too. For software that genuinely solves an important Sales Ops/revenue problem, what would you consider a reasonable monthly price for a team?
Just trying to understand how this actually works in real companies rather than guessing from the outside and classroom.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because a lot of CRM discussions focus on choosing the right platform, features, integrations, and pricing.
But I’m curious about the problems that happen after the CRM is already set up.
Things like:
- Duplicate contacts entering the system
- Leads coming in with missing information
- Bad or outdated contact details
- Leads sitting unassigned
- Sales reps manually checking and cleaning records
- Information getting lost between forms, email, CRM, and other tools
- Having to manually decide where each new lead should go
Which of these causes the most headaches for you?
And if you could completely eliminate one repetitive CRM task tomorrow, what would you choose?
Hey everyone —
I’m the founder of ServiceFlow Pro (scheduling, estimates, dispatch, invoicing, payments — built for trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, garage door, etc.).
I’m looking for a small group of real operators (owner / office manager / dispatcher) to use it on live work for 30 days, free, and tell me what’s good, what’s broken, and what’s missing.
What you get
What I ask
Ideal fit
Not looking for tire-kickers or “just send me a login.” Prefer people who’ll put a few real jobs through it.
If you’re interested, comment or DM with:
I’ll pick a few people and get you set up this week.
Thanks.
I want to pull Google reviews into the dashboard for basic analytics. Looking for genuine recommendations from people who have actually implemented this, not vendors promoting their own tools.
What’s the most reliable approach: Google Places API, established third-party API or maybe something else? I’m particularly concerned about ToS/legal risks, data storage restrictions, and long-term reliability.
For those of you who use a recruitment CRM/ATS with email campaigns, how does it handle replies?
I’m building a CRM/ATS and I’m currently working through how bulk email campaigns should behave compared with normal 1:1 emails/sequences.
For sequences, I already send emails through the recruiter’s connected Outlook/Gmail provider. That means the message is genuinely sent from their mailbox, appears in Sent Items, and replies naturally remain within the normal mailbox conversation.
We also monitor sending volumes at mailbox level and throttle/queue sequence emails in line with the provider’s API rate limits and mailbox sending limits, rather than simply firing every due sequence email at once.
That works well for sequences, where the number of emails being sent from an individual recruiter’s mailbox is relatively controlled.
The question is what to do with larger campaigns.
Microsoft 365 and Gmail aren’t really intended to be bulk email infrastructure, so for campaigns potentially going to hundreds or thousands of candidates I’m considering using something like AWS SES instead.
For example:
From: Sarah Jones [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
Reply-To: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
The organisation would verify its domain or provide SMTP credentials, so to the candidate the email still appears to come from Sarah at the agency. If they click Reply, their mail client would address the reply to Sarah’s normal email address and it would arrive in her Outlook/Gmail inbox.
The obvious difference is that the original campaign email wasn’t actually sent through Sarah’s mailbox, so it wouldn’t naturally appear in her Outlook/Gmail Sent Items and therefore the reply would appear without context if the sent message.
The CRM would retain the exact outbound campaign email against the candidate. Because their mailbox is also synced with the CRM, the candidate’s reply could then be associated with that outbound campaign message and displayed as part of the same conversation/activity history inside the CRM.
For people using systems such as Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Recruit CRM, Loxo, etc., I’d be interested to know how your current system handles this in practice.
- Does a campaign reply simply arrive in your normal Outlook/Gmail inbox as well as the CRM?
- Can you see the original campaign email in Outlook/Gmail, or only within the CRM?
- If you receive a reply and need context, do you generally open the candidate in the CRM to see the original email?
- Does your CRM somehow add bulk campaign emails to your Sent Items? Or are replies routed through the CRM itself rather than directly back to your mailbox?
My current thinking is essentially:
Sequences: connected Outlook/Gmail mailbox, with sending volumes monitored and throttled according to provider/API limits.
Campaigns: bulk delivery infrastructure such as SES, but still using the recruiter’s name/domain and directing replies back to their real mailbox.
I’m trying to work out whether the fact that campaign emails don’t appear in Outlook/Gmail Sent Items is actually an issue for recruiters in practice, or whether people naturally use the CRM conversation history for that context anyway.
Hi everyone! I've spent the last 2 years building a CRM for entrepreneurs and small businesses. I'm a technical developer, I really love the product, and I know it has potential, but I have zero sales skills and I have no idea where to start.
I'd really appreciate any advice on how to land my first customer.
CRM demonstrations usually focus on what happens inside the platform.
But many of the real problems appear between systems: customer-service records, contact-centre conversations, billing data, analytics, marketing activity and knowledge bases.
If you were evaluating a CRM or CX platform, which integration would you insist on seeing live rather than accepting a slide that says “seamless integration”?
And what failure or limitation would you specifically test?
I’m helping organise an online CX technology event where providers will give focused demonstrations followed by Q&A.
Disclosure: I’m involved in organising the event.
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