I run a non-profit and need suggestions about the best database to get. I loved Giftworks but they don't convert to the cloud so went with Frontstream that bought up so many databases. I paid a lot and it's totally useless for me. Only way to ask questions is with a chat or email. They are more interested in upselling. All I need is a database that stores records about my donors - runs reports- mailing lists - info on constituents.

I’m looking for alternative for Salesforce CRM. In my current salesforce org, I had implemented customizations for accounts, opportunity, opportunity product, product, product schedules, price books, price book entry, contacts, leads, 12-15 custom objects

2 custom apps, approval process, flows, triggers, and some lwc component, validation rules were also present.

The org is for about 100+ users.

Any recommended alternatives which will have the similar capabilities to implement all the above features.

I use the Whatsapp API for the "new leads". But whenever I need to transfer the lead to a seller, it's creating a new lead card, duplicate. Is there a way for the seller to send a message from inside the CRM and inside the lead card, only changing the number that they wanna use (a normal number, using whatsapp lite, separate from the API) and the CRM not creating a duplicate card for that person?

Hello, I have started an agency focusing on CRM cleanup, enrichment and scoring. I am looking to do a free service project in return for a logo and testimonial. Would any b2b folks be interested?

CRM founders (people actually running and supporting production platforms), what feature ended up being far more important than you expected?

I've spent a lot of time talking with service businesses, and it's interesting how often the things founders think are important differ from what customers actually use every day.

For example, I originally expected reporting and analytics to be a major selling point.

Instead, I keep hearing more about dispatching, technician communication, appointment management, customer self-service, and simply getting invoices paid faster.

What's surprised me most is that many customers don't seem to care how sophisticated the system is under the hood. They care about whether it removes friction from their day.

I'm specifically interested in hearing from founders, operators, and people responsible for maintaining real-world CRM deployments—not just building demos or prototypes.

What feature ended up driving adoption, retention, or customer satisfaction that you didn't initially think would matter?

And conversely, what feature did you spend months building that customers barely cared about?

I am going to take time and build a crm and I need your opinions on what all you think should be added and how it will help business

I will add integration and plugins

Will keep updating you

So this is day 1 of building crm

Please feel free to put out your suggestions

We run a small business with 4 people handling customer inquiries and sales conversations. Most new inquiries come through WhatsApp, and that has started creating a few challenges as volume has increased. Right now, conversations are mostly managed manually, which means customer history is spread across different devices and it is not always easy to see who last spoke with a lead or whether a follow-up has already happened.
We are not looking for a huge enterprise setup. The main goal is simply to keep conversations organized, avoid missed follow-ups, and give everyone on the team visibility into customer interactions.
For those dealing with a similar situation, what are you using? Are you connecting WhatsApp to an existing CRM, using a shared inbox solution, or doing something else entirely?
Interested in hearing what has worked well and what you would avoid.

Just finished a trial of both for teh past month with my agency. we run about 50k emails per week across diffrent clients.

Instantly is solid for the basics. the warmup pool is huge, inbox rotation works well, and the analytics are clean. but their a/b testing is pretty basic and the api limits can be annoying if your doing anything custom. also their support takes forever to respond sometimes.

Smartlead has better features on paper. the subsequences are nice, better webhook options, and the white label setup works. but man, the ui feels clunky compared to Instantly. and we've had more deliverability issues with Smartlead accounts even with proper warmup.

we were using Apollo for contact finding before but the data quality was hit or miss, lot of bounces that were messing with our sender reputation. been testing Prospeo for the lead enrichment side since both of these cold email tools are weak on building lists. curious what others are using for their full stack?

price wise they're basically the same once you factor in everthing. Instantly's a bit cheaper at scale but Smartlead includes more in the base plan.

we're probably sticking with Instantly for now but might keep Smartlead for specific campaigns that need the advanced sequencing.

I found this CRM called Apex-CRM.com for my small business, it’s like $29 a month.

CRMs are built for managers. Reps end up logging a sanitized version of reality and keeping the real story in their head ("Bob is wobbling on price, Sarah went dark, manager hates this account").

So I built a tool around what the rep does between meetings:

- Voice or text dump after a call on mobile. No fields, no forms.

- The dump turns into CRM-ready reminders in a Chrome extension that sits next to the CRM. One click to copy each into the CRM.

- Every morning, an intel digest per prospect with news, hiring signals, competitor moves.

- A private coaching tab where reps can think out loud about a deal.

Data stays in the browser. By design, the promise only works if the manager doesn't see it. Which raises the real question:

If the manager has no visibility, the company won't fund it. Would a rep pay for this out of their own pocket?

Or is "personal productivity for salespeople" a category that just doesn't exist, because reps are wired to expect the company to provide their tools?

I manage a sales floor for my day job and have spent a lot of time working with leads, follow ups, call lists, pipelines, sales reporting, etc.

A while back I started building my own CRM on the side because I kept running into the same thing: either the system is too basic, or it does everything but takes forever to set up and costs a fortune once you start adding users and features.

It kind of snowballed from there and I ended up building Straton. It has contacts, pipelines, tasks, email/SMS, booking, workflows, landing pages, a dialer, and some other stuff I thought small businesses would actually use.

I’m getting close to launching it, but before I start spending money trying to get customers, I’d rather get some honest opinions from people who actually use CRMs every day.

What would make you take a serious look at a new CRM instead of just sticking with HubSpot, GHL, Pipedrive, Zoho, Salesforce, whatever you are using now?

Also, what is the one thing your current CRM does that you absolutely would not give up, and what is the one thing about it that drives you insane?

I’m not looking for people to blow smoke up my ass. If a new CRM is a hard sell no matter what features it has, tell me that too.

I think a lot of CRM migrations happen for the wrong reason.

The old CRM gets blamed for bad adoption, bad data, poor reporting, messy handoffs, missed follow-ups, weak pipeline hygiene, etc.

Then the company buys a new CRM, recreates the same messy process in a cleaner UI, and six months later the same complaints come back.

Sometimes the CRM really is the problem.

But a lot of the time the bigger issue is that the business has not agreed on the customer process, ownership, required data, stage definitions, or what “good CRM usage” actually means.

So the CRM becomes a very expensive mirror.

For people who have done CRM migrations: how often did the new tool actually fix the problem, vs just expose the same process issues again?

We're a small SaaS in the property/hospitality space, team of 8 with around 4-5 of us split between sales and customer onboarding/support. The goal is to run the whole customer lifecycle in one place and make the experience cohesive and holistic end to end. We're scaling quite fast so ideally we want it to be scalable and future proof as we GTM.

We previously looked at Zoho but found it a bit too clunky to use. Attio is nice but there's no ticketing/helpdesk. Hubspot looks good and cohesive but is too expensive for us right now. Our setup is currently spreadsheets and a vibe coded frontend form that stores in a basic database made from Claude Code in ~2 hours or so haha

What we are looking for:

- A pipeline that drives the process/SOP. Our VAs shouldn't be able to skip stages or move a deal forward until the required steps are done. Mandatory fields, gated stage transitions, that sort of thing (nice to have but not essential)

- A support desk / ticketing built in. Would really rather not pay for and babysit a separate help desk if the CRM can handle it. Ideally this is included and any bugs discovered from the support desk can be integrated and forwarded to Linear so our Engineering team can work on it

- Workflow automation. Follow-up reminders, auto-creating tasks, a nudge when a deal's gone quiet. Time-based alerts (e.g. no contact in 14 days, remind team to message them), auto-created tasks etc

- Some way to track onboarding tasks/checklists per customer.

- Decent integrations, or at least a proper API. We use Calendly, Stripe, Slack, WhatsApp for notifications, Linear (devs live in there). We'd also want to push our own product usage data into the CRM via API. Also APIs to hook and ingest external webforms into our CRM - we use Claude Code quite a lot and right now we have a vibe coded front end webform which we use to track our client leads

- Our main communications will be between email and WhatsApp. If the CRM can cover these and gather context from both and store to the same customer that would be amazing too. Currently looking at unified inbox solutions which includes those two above and also linkedin, instagram etc. to manage our customer funnels

On budget: we're small, so Salesforce-Enterprise pricing or a $30k implementation is a hard no. Hoping it can be kept under $250 a month or so!

So really, the question is whether there's an all-in-one that does deals pipeline + onboarding support + automation + Helpdesk without costing a fortune, or whether everyone just ends up running a CRM plus a separate help desk and gluing them together anyway. Keen to hear what you're actually running, and just as useful, what you'd tell me to stay away from.

Bit of a big spiel so thank you for anyone that has the time to reply to this! 😄

been doing outbound for a while and most of my prospecting still happens inside sales navigator, but every lead i want to work eventually has to land in hubspot. wasn't always the case, we used to only import a contact once they booked a meeting, and tbh that was the better setup but anyway. right now my sync is copy paste into a google sheet at the end of the day, then importing once a week because doing it everyday just kills my productivty.

trying to figure out the cleanest way to push sales nav lists into hubspot.

My startup closed our Series A recently and it’s time to migrate our database from Google Sheets into an actual CRM. I want to avoid ending up with a bloated HubSpot nightmare. I’ve seen this happen twice. It starts out well but after a year or two you’ve got 50 custom properties no one remembers creating, and the dashboard takes an eternity to load.

I’m looking for recommendations for a CRM that will be fast, solid UI, and can serve as the single source of truth for a 20-50 person GTM team. Not interested in enterprise grade systems like Salesforce. We don’t need that level of complexity. But to be clear I want this to still work when we have 200 people without having to hire a FTE to manage it. I know it probably sounds like I’m asking for the moon and if I am then feel free to say so lol. What CRMs should we consider?

I've been building business systems and CRMs for a while, and I've worked with hundreds of people who use them.

I've noticed something interesting:

Most people don't stop using their CRM because the software is bad.

They stop using it because it becomes extra work.

At the beginning, everyone is excited.

They create contacts, Build pipelines, Add custom fields, Import hundreds of leads.

Everything looks great.

Then a few weeks later, the CRM is abandoned.

From what I've seen, there are a few common reasons:

1. Nobody updates it

This is probably the most common mistake.

Everyone is supposed to update the CRM, so nobody actually does.

1. Too much information

People create dozens of fields they'll never use.

Especially for small teams, most of those fields aren't necessary.

After a while, updating the CRM feels like filling out paperwork.

1. No clear next step

A CRM shouldn't just tell you who the lead is.

It should tell you what to do next.

Follow up?

Send a proposal?

Book a call?

Many CRMs become storage systems instead of action systems.

1. The process is unclear

Teams spend weeks choosing CRM software but never define their sales process.

The software isn't the problem, The process is.

1. It isn't connected to daily work

The best systems are part of the workflow.

If people have to open a separate tool just to update records, they eventually stop doing it.

That's been my experience, at least.

What's the biggest reason a CRM failed in your business?

We have got cart abandonment flows set up, and they are driving about 80% of our email sales. But here's the thing, i feel like there's a lot of room to improve the engagement. The open rates are decent, but the click through and conversion rates aren't where i want them.

I have been thinking about adding personalized product recommendations based on what they left behind in their cart, but not sure how to make it feel natural and not too pushy. Have you guys had success with more dynamic content like this?

Would love to hear your strategies for tweaking cart abandonment emails to make them more engaging.

We kept seeing the same thing with shop owners, agencies, and small manufacturers we worked with. Leads coming in from WhatsApp, Justdial, IndiaMART, Instagram DMs, walk-ins, and all of it living in someone's head or a messy Excel sheet. Follow-ups missed. Customers forgotten. Sales lost for no reason other than disorganization.

Most CRMs we tried recommending were either built for US sales teams (overkill, expensive in dollars) or too clunky for a 3-10 person team to actually adopt.

So we (Tidbit Technologies) built Pillar CRM around how Indian SMBs actually work:

• An AI voice agent that calls and qualifies new leads automatically, so a fresh enquiry gets a real conversation in minutes instead of sitting in a queue while your team is busy. It asks the right questions, scores the lead, and hands the hot ones straight to your sales person.
• A WhatsApp agent that qualifies leads right inside the chat, so no enquiry gets buried or forgotten in a flooded inbox. Every conversation is captured, sorted, and followed up instead of lost.
• Daily status updates and queries on whatsapp without having to worry about constantly dealing with a UI and getting info that you need on the go
• Direct whatsapp based support, without having to go through various IVR menus
• Built so a non-technical team can actually use it daily, not abandon it in a week
• Pricing runs from ₹1,200 to ₹10,000 a month, so it scales from a solo operator up to a proper sales team. No dollar billing, no enterprise minimums.

Not trying to spam, genuinely want feedback from people running businesses here, also looking to connect with people for co-sell opportunities.

Looking for an experienced HubSpot CRM specialist to help organize and automate a growing mobile diesel emissions testing business in California.

Project includes:

Cleaning and organizing a customer spreadsheet (approx 1700 customers) Removing duplicates Standardizing customer data Preparing data for HubSpot import Creating Company, Contact, and Vehicle records Importing historical customer information Setting up automated email and text reminders for recurring compliance due dates

Building dashboards for customer retention, due dates, and revenue tracking (TBH I'm not sure what dashboards are, I had chatgpt help me with this post)

Experience with HubSpot CRM, data cleanup, workflow automation, and custom properties is required.

Please provide:

Relevant HubSpot experience Examples of similar projects Hourly rate $35/hr Please provide an estimated timeline for project, if you need more details I'd be happy to do that - thank you!!

We currently have 80 business using our crm, you can save customers, as customers or leads, you can save them into lists, and each customer can have a status (you custom create these) and each customer has set and custom fields, you can call using voip, chat on WhatsApp and email and send sms. And send bulk sms/wa/email. You can also manage tickets, and a stand alone on system calendar. What else is needed? Or what other good suggestions do you guys have?