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.