There are so many options and I genuinely don't know where to start. Every fintech looks the same on the surface. What do people actually use, and what made you pick it over everything else?
We’ve been building RiverX, an AI platform for building and customizing web apps.
One of the templates we’ve been working on is a CRM with the basic stuff you’d expect:
- Deal board with stages you drag deals between
- Dashboard with pipeline totals and a stage chart
- Companies, contacts and deals linked together
- Sign-up and log-in already included
The idea isn’t to compete with every CRM out there.
It’s more about having a solid starting point and then being able to say things like:
“Add a separate pipeline for renewals.”
“Add lead scoring and show it on the dashboard.”
“Create an approval step before a deal can move to Closed Won.”
…and have RiverX actually modify the application.
You can also customize the template yourself, or if you have a specific CRM workflow you want to build, we’re happy to help customize it for you.
We’re trying to figure out whether there’s value in this approach, so curious:
If you could change one thing about your current CRM, what would it be?
Idea is simple. We built our company on the basis that organisations want out from HubSpot but not to a small own built vibe CRM without proper security or CRM development.
We decided for an outcome pricemodel with unlimited seats and access to the full product so the only way we grow is actually if our customers grow.
DM if you want in on it :)
When I joined an IoT company, its sales team was managing the entire process in spreadsheets. The business had been around for about six years and already had product-market fit.
I’d been building SaaS products for three years. I wanted to try working in another industry, and the founder gave me responsibility for working with the sales team.
I started building a CRM from scratch. The first version was a Kanban board for tracking leads, which gave us somewhere to put the enquiries coming through Google Ads.
As I understood the workflow, I wanted the system to help the team continue working on each lead. Someone opening a record needed to see its history and understand the next action.
Normal WorkFlow--->
Our pipeline started at “acquired.” A new enquiry needed a qualification call about the customer’s requirements. Smaller deals went to sub-dealers because we had a minimum ticket size for opportunities handled by our team.
Suitable leads moved to “verified.” We estimated device requirements and conducted a survey, then prepared a quote covering the devices, installation, and other charges.
After sending it, the lead moved to “quoted.” The team followed up, sometimes every 10 to 15 days, until the customer sent a purchase order and we closed the deal.
That could take three to six months altogether.
Building around those stages brought up more work than I’d originally pictured. We needed to track the activities completed for a lead, understand why deals hadn’t closed, and see how many deals each salesperson had closed. I also added duplicate-lead prevention.
Then I added My Sauce --->
For initial qualification, I built an AI voice agent that called new enquiries and asked the qualification questions. An Decision Model to evaluate the answers and scored the lead.
We then assigned leads using deal value and the number each salesperson already had, with higher-ticket deals going to more senior people.
I connected the WhatsApp API so quotes could be sent from the CRM. We also added offline conversion imports, sending lead progress and closed-deal events back to Google Ads.
I enjoyed seeing the system grow around the team’s process. Each addition had a place in the journey from enquiry to purchase order, and I could understand why the team needed it.
I handled everything from design to deployment, with plenty of bug fixes and sleepless nights along the way. After the product had been stable for about a month, I couldn’t think of any new features to build.
So I started using the CRM as a member of the sales team. I handled acquisition and lead verification myself, doing the work the application was supposed to support.
I found 30 features we didn’t need. I removed them and added features people actually wanted. Using the pipeline myself helped me understand needs I hadn’t picked up while building it.
That was one of my biggest reflections from the project. The team couldn’t always put what they wanted into words. Sometimes you have to get involved in their day-to-day work to understand what should be added and what can be removed.
Does anyone use incentives to drive CRM user engagement (besides the obvious threat of getting fired if they don’t 😅)?
I work for a fun-loving company that wants to make CRM adoption more fun and engaging, rather than just another task on everyone’s to-do list.
Aside from cash bonuses, do you offer incentives or prizes to recognize your most engaged CRM users? Think company swag, gift cards, fun perks, or other creative rewards.
I’d love to hear what’s worked for your team
decided to try prospeo about 2 months ago for our outbound campaigns. we're a series A startup doing ~5k cold emails/week.
the good: their email finder is accurate. we went from like 18% bounce rate with our old setup (mixing LeadIQ + Hunter) down to maybe 3-4% with prospeo's data. the direct dials are real too - people actually answer their phones now which is wild. the weekly data refresh is nice since we target fast-growing companies where people change roles constantly.
the meh: their chrome extension is pretty basic compared to something like LeadIQ. works fine for grabbing emails from linkedin but thats about it. also wish they had more integrations - we use outreach and had to jerry-rig it through zapier which was annoying.
pricing is reasonable, way cheaper than what we were paying for credits before. we burn through about 4k lookups monthly between email verification and enrichment. main thing is you only pay for verified contacts which saves money compared to tools where you burn credits on everything whether the data is good or not.
overall its become our primary b2b data provider. not perfect but the data quality is noticeably better than the bigger players we tried. curious if anyone else has a prospeo opinion or experience worth sharing
If your team wants a new CRM because nobody trusts the pipeline, give it a month first. In close to twenty years of sales and ops, I’ve watched teams switch and end up with the same complaints in a new tool. The bad habits get exported along with the contacts.
Here’s what I’d do instead. Check ten deals. Pick ten open ones at random and ask each owner: is the stage right, and will the next step actually happen? Write down how many are wrong.
Hide the junk fields. If half the entries say “tbd”, “n/a”, or just a period, reps are filling it in to get past the save button. Take it off the layout, but don’t delete it.
Define each stage in one sentence, like “Proposal: they have our pricing and confirmed they got it.” Right now every rep probably has their own definition.
Ask reps what they type twice. Email and calendar sync plus a simple Zapier or Make automation usually covers it.
Give each rep one saved view of deals with no next step or an overdue one. Their day starts there, and so does your pipeline meeting. Updates in side spreadsheets don’t count anymore (people will push back on this one).
After a month, check ten deals again. If it’s better, keep going. If not, and the tool really is the blocker, like it won’t connect to your phone system or billing, then switch. You’ll go into the demos knowing what you need.
Disclosure: my team builds CRM automations and integrations, so weigh that in.
I’ll be around in the comments. If you’ve cleaned up a CRM before, what made the biggest difference?
tl;dr: before switching, spend a month fixing fields, stages, and data entry. Check ten deals before and after.
Hi everyone,
We're the team behind LeadMino, a sales CRM we're building for growing teams.
We're interested in learning how small businesses and sales teams actually manage their pipelines day to day.
A few areas we're curious about:
For those working in small sales teams, which of these is the biggest challenge? Or is there something else that takes up more of your time?
We'd love to hear how you're handling it today, whether that's with spreadsheets, an existing CRM, or another workflow.
Not looking to promote anything here, just interested in learning from real experiences.
we run a small outbound sales team, about 12 agents. most of the day is spent dialing lists manually and a lot of time gets wasted on no-answers and busy signals. the managers keep pushing for higher connect rates but the agents are already burned out from constant redialing.
we recently started testing an auto dialer to cut down the dead time between calls. it’s helped a bit with volume but now the complaints are about the pace feeling too fast and some leads getting dropped mid-transfer.
how do you guys handle the balance between higher dial rates and agent burnout? and for teams that switched to predictive or power dialing, did talk time actually go up or did quality drop?
I work at a property management company. We handle about 30 buildings and around 4,000 tenants.
Tenants keep calling to ask about repair requests and lease documents. Our front desk spends hours on this every day.
A portal where each tenant sees their own requests and files would save us hours.
That’s why I’m thinking about CRM portals and app builders like Softr. Maybe it’s not meant for a company our size, so I’m asking for your opinions.
IT also wants single sign-on for staff and a record of who accessed what.
But before I pick one, how should I set up the data and access rules?
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