I’m doing a bit research on how RevOps teams handle this problem today.

Let’s suppose something breaks somewhere in the revenue stack:
- a Salesforce/HubSpot workflow stops working
- attribution data starts drifting
- leads stop routing correctly
- billing and CRM data stop matching
- pipeline data becomes inaccurate

The issue might sit there for hours or days before someone notices it through a dashboard, a rep complaining, or a number suddenly looking wrong.
How do you catch these problems before they actually start affecting pipeline or revenue?

Do you already have something that tells you which operational issues are becoming financially important, or is it mostly dashboards, alerts, manual checks, and people noticing something looks off?

Trying to understand whether this is a real problem before building anything around it. Would especially like to hear from RevOps, SalesOps, Revenue Systems, or Revenue Engineering people who deal with this regularly.

we've been using a spreadsheet since the beginning and honestly it wasnt a problem until recently. now we're getting more leads, more follow ups and more people touching the same accounts, so things are getting a little chaotic. someone will update a deal in the spreadsheet but forget to mention something important from the latest call, or a follow up gets buried in someone's calendar. nothing disastrous, just a lot of little things that are starting to add up. we're looking at hubspot, was there a specific number of leads, sales reps or some other problem that made you pull the trigger?

We’ve been looking at how sales teams actually use their CRM day to day, and one thing I keep noticing is that the problem isn’t always lack of automation.

Sometimes there are too many workflows, reminders and sequences running at once, and reps eventually stop paying attention to them.

For people managing active sales pipelines:

Where do you draw the line between useful automation and automation that just creates more noise?

Especially curious about follow-ups — do you prefer the CRM to automatically handle most of them, or should reps still decide when and how each lead gets contacted?

Long time lurker, first real post. It's a long one so bear with me.

I've been building custom CRM / ERP type systems for small businesses since late 2022. Mostly companies that have outgrown their spreadsheets but are nowhere near the size where a Salesforce partner would even pick up the phone.

The client I still think about

There's one client I still think about a lot. A wholesale book distributor. Honestly the most excited person I've ever built anything for. He wanted everything in one place, sales, customers, prospects, inventory, deliveries, an online store, all of it, and he wanted it to work the way his team already worked and not the other way round. So that's what we built. Deployed it, it ran fine, he was happy, I was happy, project done.

A few months later they needed some new features and they didn't call us. They went to a local agency.

I am still not very sure why. My guess is they wanted it quick and cheap and we probably weren't that, which, fine. But the agency kept bolting things on and bit by bit the whole thing got worse. Slower, buggier, more confusing to use. And when something broke nobody on his team could even tell where the problem was, so they'd wait for the agency, pay, wait again. He told me later it just became too much. Nobody inside the company could own it, and honestly why would they, they sell products, they're not a software shop.

So they gave up and moved to Shopify. Which as far as I can tell wasn't because it fit them better. It was just the only option where nobody had to be on call for it.

It's not just him

That one bugged me for a long time. And since then I've seen more or less the same thing happen a few more times. Custom software fits perfectly on day one and then the fit slowly rots, because keeping it alive costs more than anyone planned for.

The part that surprised me though is that the clients who gave up and went to some big SaaS aren't happy either. When I catch up with them it's the same complaints every time. The app feels bloated, half the screens are stuff they'll never touch. It doesn't quite do what they need so they've got workarounds all over the place. The software calls things one name and their team calls them another, so there's this constant translating going on in people's heads. And their data is actually messier than before, because when the tool doesn't have a proper place for something people just shove it wherever it fits.

So you end up choosing between two bad options I guess. Custom fits great but it's expensive to keep alive, SaaS is cheap to keep alive but never really fits. The Odoo / Salesforce partner route is supposed to be the middle, but for a 10 person company that's a lot of money and months of onboarding before you see anything at all.

What I've been trying instead

I've been chewing on this for about a year and a half now. The question I kept coming back to was, what if the part that breaks and needs maintaining was shared across everyone, and the bit that's actually specific to your business was really small. Like, tiny.

That's more or less what I've been building. One core engine that I maintain, and then each business gets a thin layer on top that speaks their language, their workflow, their terms, nothing they didn't ask for. I've moved four of my old clients onto it so far. A hardware store that does retail and wholesale, an electrical goods wholesaler (wires, switches, fans, that sort of thing), a company that installs solar for homes and offices, and a hostel with a canteen across a few locations. Pretty different businesses, and that was kind of deliberate, I wanted to see if the same core could bend to all of them. So far it's going better than I expected. But these are four people who already trusted me, so I know it doesn't really prove anything.

What I actually want to understand is whether people even want software to work like this.

The way I've started thinking about it, and I'm not sure this is the right way to put it, most business software is sold a bit like a supplement. Here's 200 features, here's what's good to have, here's the "right" way to run your pipeline, and you sort of bend yourself around it. What I'm trying to do feels closer to medicine, if that makes sense. You come in with a specific pain, the thing that jams up your week, and the system is built around getting rid of that one thing and then staying out of your way. Less "here's how you should work", more "what's stuck, let's unstick it". I don't know. I keep going back and forth on whether that's a real distinction or just something that sounds nice.

So, honestly asking you guys

And maybe in reality everyone wants the 200 features anyway. So:

1. What's the one bottleneck in your day that your current software makes worse instead of better? Not a missing feature, I mean the actual thing that slows you down.
2. What's the workaround you've done so many times you stopped noticing it's a workaround?
3. If a tool just removed that one thing and did nothing else fancy, would that be enough for you? Or would you need the whole feature list before you'd trust it?
4. And has anyone ever tried to get a vendor to fix a real bottleneck instead of adding another feature? How did that go?

I'm not trying to sell anything here, I'm genuinely still working out whether I'm right about this. Happy to be told I'm not.

And if your situation is messier than a comment can hold, my DMs are open. No pitch, just curious what's getting in your way.

TL;DR: built custom CRMs for small businesses for 4 years, kept watching them get abandoned because nobody could maintain them, and the ones who fled to big SaaS aren't happy either. Now building something in between and want to know what your actual bottleneck is, not what features you want.

So I work for a team that manages a QSR brand (it’s a very famous burger brand but not the one you are thinking of) and we unfortunately need to use the designer on the client’s side.

I am really struggling on the design side cause first of all I am a strategist not a designer and no matter what I say, they just won’t create good emails like it’s beyond sad and they always say it’s not as per brand guidelines .

My only option now is to show they how the same brand is creating globally across markets. How do I access the emails from other markets? I tried signing up for various markets on the app but still won’t get them, I tried everything.

Only resort is for people to send them to me directly now but I ofc don’t know anyone globally and patient enough. Any ideas?

One of the drawbacks our pipeline reviews encounter is that we spot stalled deals when it is already too late. A deal may still be projected to close in three weeks; however; if we take a closer look, the last customer interaction was 18 days ago, the last meeting was postponed, and there are no plans for the next meeting. The CRM shows a live deal; however, activities suggest otherwise.

I wonder whether AI-based CRM solutions are sophisticated enough to detect these situations automatically rather than relying on managers to keep an eye on everything. I would really like the solution to be able to take engagement patterns, next steps and recent activities into account rather than just alerting us about a bad closing date. Has anyone found a way to use such a system efficiently?