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.