Hi All,

We have recently been testing GHL and have found a few limitations and are just now exploring additional options on CRM alternatives based on our current structure.

Core requirements:

• Email conversations with reliable reply threading (this is our current platform's biggest pain point)
• SMS and WhatsApp conversations
• Inbound and outbound calling
• Landing page builder
• Lead capture via webhook/API (from WordPress Gravity Forms and a Live Chat tool)
• Calendar / appointment booking
• Marketing attribution - tracking a lead from first click (paid, organic, social) through to closed sale

Multi-brand / multi-user structure (our key requirement):

We operate 9 distinct brands across 4 regions under one company, each region has one primary brand plus several secondary brands (some owned, some reseller relationships).

We don't need client-facing logins or portals per brand, this is purely internal.

What we do need:

• Reps working across multiple brands in the same session
• Outbound emails/SMS/WhatsApp sent under the correct brand identity and domain automatically, based on which brand the lead belongs to
• Access scoped by team: each regional team covers its own region's brands
• Reporting and attribution split cleanly by brand, not just company-wide

We're currently at 15 users, with room to grow.
Just wondering what people would recommend for this type of setup, or if anyone has anything that has worked quite well / or pitfalls etc

Curious on Bitrix24 - we had been working with GHL but are finding the Conversation section (particularly email) had some real major flaws / limitations (particularly the reply threading).

One of the main drawcards to GHL was the pricing structure... We operate 9 distinct brands across 4 regions under one company, each region has one primary brand plus several secondary brands (some owned, some reseller relationships), with regional staff looking after each brand (eg AU staff covering 5 brands, US staff covering 4 etc) we were finding that the user seat costs was pushing up significantly in other platforms....

So the question:
- I can see Bitrix24 has an enterprise plan which specified unlimited "branches" and 250 users
- For the component of the branches are these all able to be setup under the one enterprise account, or would we have to have 9 seperate accounts which all have to be billed individually??

If there are any glaring problems with Bitrix that would be great to hear also

Me and my partner built a CRM that's basically fully AI driven — lead scoring, auto summaries, AI replies — and it connects to WhatsApp Business directly, plus the normal CRM stuff. Trying to sell to US companies in the 50-500 employee range first.

Still not sure on pricing. Right now thinking something like $80-100/user monthly for smaller teams, dropping to maybe $40-60/user once you're past 100 seats. For AI usage I want to give some credits free then charge per use after, don't want the heavy users to kill our margins if we just charge flat. WhatsApp messaging would be billed separately, basically pass the cost plus a bit extra. Also thinking a one time setup fee, $1500-5000ish, for onboarding and getting the AI trained on their data.

Worried this ends up feeling like a million different charges though. Anyone dealt with pricing AI features separately from the base plan? Does that scare off mid-market buyers or is it normal now? Also not sure if the setup fee is even worth charging anymore or if people expect free onboarding.

Would genuinely appreciate any input from people who've actually changed their pricing around AI stuff and seen how customers reacted.

I get why they’ve been around forever being in the field with a rep tells you a lot you’d never see in a CRM. But it’s also a pretty expensive way to learn what happened on one or two conversations. A lot of sales managers are already stretched across too many reps, too many locations, and too many follow-ups. Spending half the day in the car just to catch a small sample of conversations feels harder to justify now. I’ve been seeing Rilla come up more in this conversation. I wanted to know what teams are doing instead, are managers still riding along as much or are more teams moving toward recorded conversations, call reviews and coaching reps after the fact?

Like if companies can make it using AI like claude and the such why would they buy it from someone like me?
Is it still worth it in 2026 and if yes how would one be able to narrow it down and find the right niche according to the demand in today’s market?

Please give me your thoughts on this one guys im very curious

We're a small nonprofit that runs a lot of events. Free monthly mixers (70 to 100 people), members-only events, and professional development events that are free/discounted for members and full price for non-members.

Right now we use DonorBox because it's free and lets us set up each event separately. It works fine for registration and payments. The problem is attendance tracking.

We can see who attended a single event and export that to Excel. What we can't do is pull up one person and see every event they've attended over time. And the bigger issue: DonorBox only credits the ticket purchaser. So if one person buys 5 tickets for their friends, we only see the buyer as an attendee. The other 5 people are invisible in our records.

We want something that automatically ties attendance to each individual attendee, not just the purchaser, and rolls it into their profile. That way we can see how engaged each member and non-member is across events over time.

We looked at Wild Apricot and it does what we need, but at our volume the pricing gets close to $400/month, which we can't do.

For scale: 500 to 1,500 total contacts (members and non-members combined). Budget needs to be well under Wild Apricot. Open to either replacing DonorBox entirely or adding a tool alongside it.

Anyone using something that handles this without breaking the bank? Would love real recommendations from people running similar event volume.

My department of 50 people is gearing up for a switch to Halo CRM for B2B purposes. I am familiar with Salesforce and ServiceNow. If you moved between Halo and one of those, what do you like or miss most?

Hey guys, anyone has an experience automating follow ups with AI? I made an automation in claude that reads my playbook, the meeting transcript and generates the follow ups, but it isn't there yet.

Curious to see if anyone had success doing this?

The sales team keeps flagging that records are out of date. Contacts who've changed roles, companies that have restructured, accounts that no longer fit the ICP but are still in active sequences.

Tested a few options. Apollo is solid with contact coverage but the company record freshness has been inconsistent in testing. PDL has better raw volume but the dataset refresh cadence on company records hasn't been tight enough. Coresignal has been a more reliable option for data freshness so far.

Has anyone built something more automated here? Interested in what the trigger logic looks like when it actually works.

After talking to founders and sales people, I noticed something interesting.

Nobody complained about having a CRM.

They complained about keeping it updated.

Creating contacts, updating deals, writing notes and follow ups after every meeting felt like admin they'd rather avoid.

That became the whole idea behind Kessio. Instead of manually updating everything, you type what happened after a meeting and it takes care of the rest.

I'm curious if I'm solving the right problem.

If you use a CRM every day, is updating it actually one of your biggest pain points, or is there something even more frustrating that you'd rather see solved?

I’ve been looking at Dynamics 365 Business Central and it feels like the partner matters almost as much as the software itself.

Licensing is one thing, but implementation, data migration, reporting, training and process fit seem to be where projects either work or become a mess. I came across Infinity Group while looking at UK Business Central providers, and they seem more focused on implementation and support than just selling licences.

For people who have gone through an ERP rollout, what did you wish you checked before choosing your partner?

I'm reviewing our CRM costs and realized that the subscription itself is only part of the total expense.

Once you factor in integration platforms, automation tools, reporting/BI software, e-signature services, email marketing, data enrichment, scheduling apps, and other add-ons, the monthly cost can grow pretty quickly. On top of that, there are separate invoices, taxes, and vendor management for each service.

I'm curious how everyone else approaches this.

• Which third-party tools are essential in your CRM stack?
• Which category ends up costing the most over time?
• Have you found it more cost-effective to keep using specialized tools, or have you moved toward a more all-in-one solution?

Interested to hear real-world numbers, experiences, and whether you've found any good ways to reduce the overall cost without sacrificing functionality.

ive been meaning to put this all down somewhere for a while now. the full arc of going from managing a team of 8 SDRs at a series B to sitting alone in my apartment sending cold emails for other peoples companies. its been about 22 months and honestly the first year was a mess that slowly turned into something real. gonna try to lay out every number i can remember because i think the specifics are what actually help people

BEFORE

i left my SDR manager role in august 2023. we had just lost a $340k deal i had been quarterbacking for 6 months because the champion left the company mid-cycle and nobody had built a second thread. that loss broke something in me. not in a dramatic way, more like i just looked around and realized i was building pipeline for someone elses vision and i wasnt even that good at the politics required to move up. so i quit with about 4 months of savings and told myself id figure it out

first client came through my network. old colleague needed help with outbound for his fintech startup. i charged him $2,500/mo which looking back was way too low but i had zero leverage and zero proof i could do this solo. the problem was that everything i knew about outbound was built on having a team, having Salesforce with enrichment integrations already wired up, having an ops person who handled deliverability. i had none of that

month one revenue: $2,500. one client. and i was spending probably 50 hours a week on it because i was doing everything manually. scraping LinkedIn, finding emails one by one through Hunter, writing sequences in google docs and then copy pasting them into... i think i was using Woodpecker at that point. maybe Lemlist. honestly the first two months blur together

the numbers from that period were bad. like actually bad. bounce rate was sitting around 8.5% on most campaigns because my email sourcing was garbage. i was pulling contacts from LinkedIn, running them through Hunter for enrichment, and just hoping for the best. reply rates were around 1.1% which if youve done any volume you know is basically nothing. i booked my client 3 meetings in the first month which sounds ok until you realize i was sending close to 2,000 emails to get there

month two i picked up a second client through a cold DM on twitter of all things. saas company selling to mid-market HR teams. $3,000/mo. so now im at $5,500 and feeling like maybe this could work. except i was drowning. i didnt have systems for anything. i was using a personal gmail to send some campaigns (i know i know) and a couple google workspace accounts i had set up myself. no warmup. no rotation. just vibes and desperation

by month three the wheels came off. one of my domains got blacklisted. bounce rates on the HR campaign hit 11.2% which is insane and i should have caught it way earlier but i wasnt monitoring anything properly. my fintech client was getting frustrated because the meetings i was booking were mostly unqualified. i lost that client at the end of month three. back down to $3,000/mo and honestly questioning whether i should just go back to a W2

the low point was probably early december 2023. i remember sitting in a coffee shop running numbers on my laptop and realizing that at my current burn rate i had maybe 7 weeks before i needed to either get new clients or start interviewing. i had spent about $800/mo on tools (Woodpecker, Hunter, a couple random data tools i barely used) and wasnt even close to breaking even when you factored in the domains and inboxes

AFTER

the turn started because i swallowed my pride and called a friend who runs a bigger outbound agency, maybe 15 people. she basically told me i was doing everything wrong from an infrastructure standpoint. her exact words were something like "youre sending from 3 inboxes and wondering why your deliverability is trash." fair point

first thing i fixed was infrastructure. this was january 2024. i set up 12 inboxes across 4 domains using Mailforge. cost was about $3/inbox/mo so like $36/mo for all of them which felt like nothing compared to what i had been spending on google workspace accounts. warmed them all up for 3 weeks before sending a single campaign email. i was using the warmup built into Lemlist at that point because i had switched over from Woodpecker (Woodpecker is fine but Lemlist felt more natural for the way i think about sequences)

the warmup period was painful because i had no revenue coming in and i was just... waiting. but those 3 weeks changed everything about my results going forward. took me way too long to understand that deliverability isnt something you fix after the fact, its something you build before you start

january i also landed two new clients through referrals. one was a cybersecurity company selling to mid-market IT directors, $3,500/mo. the other was a recruiting firm, $2,800/mo. so i went from $3,000 to $9,300/mo in about 3 weeks which felt surreal

second thing i fixed was data quality. this is where things got specific. my old workflow was LinkedIn Sales Nav to Hunter to send. the problem was Hunter was missing emails for probably 35-40% of my list and the ones it did find had a bounce rate that was way too high. a guy in a slack community i was in mentioned running a waterfall enrichment setup and i started experimenting with that in february 2024

i added Prospeo to my enrichment stack alongside Hunter and the difference was immediate. bounce rates on my cybersecurity campaign dropped from around 7.8% to 1.6% within the first two weeks. i was actually shocked because i had assumed the bounce issue was a domain reputation thing but it turned out most of it was just bad email data

the workflow became: pull from Sales Nav, enrich through Clay (which lets you chain multiple providers), run Prospeo as the primary enrichment source, then verify everything through ZeroBounce before it goes into Lemlist. Prospeo found valid emails for about 82% of the contacts i fed it which was way better than what i was getting before. only complaint is the bulk processing can be slow when youre running 2,000+ contacts, like sometimes id start a job before bed and it still wouldnt be done in the morning. but the data quality was solid so i just planned around it

third thing: i actually learned to write copy that doesnt sound like a robot. my SDR manager brain had been trained on these very structured, very corporate email templates. "i noticed your company recently..." type stuff. i started studying what was actually getting replies in my own inbox and realized the emails that worked were short, specific, and sounded like a person wrote them in 30 seconds. my reply rates went from that 1.1% range to about 3.4% across all campaigns by march 2024

let me give you the month by month revenue because i think the trajectory is useful:

jan 2024: $9,300 (3 clients) feb 2024: $9,300 mar 2024: $12,800 (added a logistics company, $3,500/mo) apr 2024: $12,800 may 2024: $16,300 (added two small clients) jun 2024: $14,500 (lost the recruiting firm, they went in-house) jul 2024: $18,200 aug 2024: $21,700 sep 2024 onward: stabilized around $22-24k/mo

the jump from march to august was mostly about getting better at closing my own deals ironically. i was so focused on doing outbound for clients that i neglected my own pipeline for months. once i started running a small campaign for my own services (literally 50 emails a week, super targeted to series A and B founders) i started getting 2-3 discovery calls a month and closing about 40% of them

current monthly costs for context: Lemlist is $99/mo, Clay is $149/mo (the credit system is confusing and i always run out mid-month), Mailforge is around $45/mo now because i have more inboxes, ZeroBounce is maybe $50/mo depending on volume, Prospeo runs me about $79/mo, LinkedIn Sales Nav is $99/mo, and then domains are like $60/mo across all of them. so total tooling cost is somewhere around $580-620/mo which against $24k revenue is pretty comfortable

the thing i still havent figured out is scaling without hiring. im at capacity with 6 clients and every time i think about bringing someone on i remember all the management overhead from my old job and i just... dont want to go back to that. but theres a ceiling here and i can feel it. i turned down a $5,000/mo client last month because i literally didnt have the hours. that was a weird feeling after spending months desperate for any revenue

oh wait i should mention - the cybersecurity client from january is still with me and theyve expanded twice. started at $3,500, now paying $6,200/mo because were running campaigns into 3 different ICPs for them. that single client relationship has been worth more than any tool or tactic. i almost lost them in april when a campaign targeting CISOs at healthcare companies completely bombed (0.4% reply rate, booked zero meetings in 3 weeks) but i was transparent about it, showed them the data, adjusted the targeting, and the next campaign did 4.1% reply rate. that saved the relationship and honestly taught me more about client management than anything from my corporate days

i also lost a deal in june that still bugs me. $8,000/mo engagement with an edtech company. we were in final negotiations and they went with a bigger agency because they wanted someone who could also do LinkedIn outbound through Dripify or Waalaxy. i didnt offer that at the time (i do now, added it in september) and it cost me what would have been my biggest contract. that one stung for weeks

my average across all campaigns right now is about 3.1% reply rate and roughly 0.8% positive reply rate which translates to about 12-18 meetings per month per client depending on their TAM and how niche the ICP is. cost per meeting for my clients ranges from about $180 to $340 depending on the vertical. cybersecurity is the most expensive because the audience is small and skeptical. logistics is cheapest because nobody is doing good outbound to that market yet

anyway this got way longer than i planned. 22 months ago i was an SDR manager who thought he knew outbound and it turns out knowing how to manage a team doing outbound and actually doing outbound yourself are completely different skills. the infrastructure stuff alone took me 4 months to figure out and i could have done it in 2 weeks if someone had just told me what i wrote above

Hi everyone,

My company is looking to implement a CRM as we bring on two new salespeople. We've managed with spreadsheets until now, but we're at the point where we need something more robust that can grow with us.

We're a small B2B food business with relationship-driven sales cycles that can range from a few weeks to several months. Most of our business comes from outbound sales, referrals, repeat customers, industry networking, and inbound inquiries.

Some of the capabilities we're looking for include:

• Account and contact management
• Multiple contacts under a single company/account
• Pipeline management
• Activity tracking (emails, calls, meetings, notes)
• Mobile-friendly for salespeople in the field
• Lead source tracking
• Reporting on pipeline, conversion rates, and sales performance
• Integration with QuickBooks Desktop
• Easy implementation and adoption—we'd rather have something the team actually uses than an enterprise platform with every feature imaginable

I've looked at HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Monday CRM but I'd love to hear from people with firsthand experience.

A few questions:

1. What CRM are you using?
2. What do you like (or dislike) about it?
3. If you were implementing a CRM today, would you choose the same one?
4. Are there any CRMs you'd recommend avoiding?
5. For those of you with smaller sales teams (2–10 reps), what ultimately made you choose your CRM?

Hello Everyone, We are a small team of 6 looking for a CRM that works for both commercial real estate leasing and sales. I have many clients who own multiple properties and most CRMS aren't built for that. I need to be able to Bulk upload as I have over 30k contacts. Also third party integration is important as I have conversational dialers that calls our CRM and live transfer.

We currently use Pipedrive and I like it but its not for commercial real estate and I feel like we need something more. Please give me your reccomendations other than ascendix or buildout. I am considering Ascendix but looking for more reccomendations before I commit to the one year upfront payment. Thank You!

Hey guys, I'm looking for a CRM tool to generate leads. So far i've used Clay, apollo, zoom, etc. I burn the credits too quickly and the leads aren't really qualified + the prices are not in my budget. I'm running outreach right now and wondering if there any better 1s for pre-seed/bootstrapped startups - thanks!

Saw a stat somewhere that something like 60%+ of reps miss quota, and the more outreach I've done the more I believe it's not a copywriting problem. It's that everyone's working off stale data, no real process, and whatever free tool they found last week.

Personalizing with {first_name} and {job_title} isn't personalization, it's a find-and-replace. Without actual context behind it the message is still hollow, it just has a name in it now.

Here's the stuff I actually check before I write anything that gets me 20% to 40% reply rate:

1. Real signals like Funding round, new exec hire, event interest anything that just happened. this tells you WHY to reach out now, not just who to reach out to.
2. Actual intent, not assumed intent Did this person engage with anything relevant recently (a post, a topic, a piece of content) more than once? Someone who reacted to "AI sales strategies" four times this week is a very different conversation than someone who's never touched the topic.
3. Reference something real "Looks like you're into X, here's a resource on it" lands completely differently than a generic pitch, because it proves you actually looked before you typed.
4. Timing over guessing "Saw the new feature drop yesterday, that's a solid addition" works because it's tied to something that just happened. The same line sent two weeks later just sounds late.
5. Make it feel like a conversation not a script.
6. Be the one outreach that isn't generic Most outreach in anyone's inbox sounds identical. The bar to stand out is embarrassingly low right now, you basically just have to not sound like everyone else.

None of this requires being a stalker, it just requires actually looking before you hit send, sadly this is the part most people skip because it doesn't scale by hand.

I get it, the manual version of this gets old fast, checking signals and intent by hand for every single lead is a nightmare. For this, I ended up putting together my own setup that scans for the signals, pulls together the relevant info on each person, drafts the personalized message, and handles the follow-up sequence and booking on the back end, so the only part that's still actually me is showing up to the demo (if you automate it things will get so much easier).

Anyway curious what everyone else checks before sending, feel like there's always one more signal people swear by that I haven't tried yet.

Every email you get, every call you make — normally that means manual data entry afterward. Updating the deal stage, writing notes, setting a follow-up reminder.

I built a layer that does this automatically using AI:

-Email comes in → AI extracts contact info, deal details, sentiment, lead temperature → shows up in an approval inbox for you to review or edit and save to HubSpot

- After a call → paste your notes → AI extracts goals, objections, budget, timeline, scores the call, suggests next deal stage, and drafts a follow-up email

-Follow-up reminders that adjust automatically based on how hot the lead is

This project is currently still in devolping . So every bit of your feedback will help.

If lifecycle stage, source, owner, segment, or next step are messy, AI just summarizes the mess faster. The boring fields become more important when leadership starts using AI outputs for decisions.

Which CRM field causes the most damage when it is wrong?

I'm looking for a developer to help build a simple landing page for a small business project.

Scope

• Responsive landing page
• Hero section with call-to-action
• About/Benefits section
• Services section (3 service cards)
• Contact form
• Basic backend integration (email notifications or database storage)

Preferred Technologies

Open to suggestions, but comfortable with:

• React or Next.js
• Node.js
• Firebase, Supabase, or MongoDB
• Tailwind CSS or similar

Timeline

Approximately 2 weeks.

Budget

Fixed-price project. Please include your rate expectations when reaching out.

If you're interested, send:

• Portfolio, GitHub, or recent work
• Examples of landing pages you've built
• Preferred tech stack
• Estimated completion time

I'm primarily looking for someone with clean coding practices and good communication. There may be additional projects in the future if we're a good fit.