Myself and my team recently decided to consider newer CRM options to speed up our outreach/tracking process. We're a small advisory firm, maybe 6 or 7 or so of us who'd actually be in the system day to day.

We work project by project. For each advisory project we build a list of people who might be interested in that particular transaction, and then we reach out to them. So it's not selling a product to customers one at a time, it's more like, here's a mandate, who are the right people to talk to about it, and then we work that list. Each project ends up being something like 200-ish people, and we've got several of these projects running at the same time.

The way we want it to work: we've already got a big pile of contacts we've been in touch with over the years, and we want the CRM to hold those and enrich as we go. So we'd drop in a list of companies (an Excel sheet), and for the ones we've already dealt with, the CRM would pull up the contact we already have there (which would be imported from our Outlook system). For the companies where we don't have anyone yet, we use a separate tool to go find new contacts. Between the two we end up with a full outreach list for each project.

There’s an important issue that we want to address. Since we run a separate pipeline per project, the same person often shows up in more than one of them. Say we reach out to a guy named Zack at Company ABC about one project, and a while later we're also reaching out to Zack about a completely different project. We need the CRM to get that Zack is on two different outreach lists and to keep the email tracking straight between them, so it knows which emails belong to which project and tracks them separately. A couple of tools we tried just dump everything onto the contact and blur the two projects together, which does not work for us.

We also want that tracking to be automatic. We don't want to manually mark each email so it gets logged, that defeats the point, we want it to pick up the outreach and file it under the right project on its own.

And we're not trying to auto send anything. We send our emails ourselves because most of them need proper review before they go out. But it'd be great if the system could at least draft a rough first version by pulling from the info in our spreadsheet, so we can review it, fix it, and then send it ourselves.

The rest of the wishlist: we're a Microsoft/Outlook shop so Outlook syncing that runs in the background without us babysitting it is preferable. Being able to auto sync most email but keep certain confidential threads out of the system entirely would be great. Some decent internal dashboards plus reports we can export and send to clients. Dedupe and a shared contact history so we can tell if anyone here has been in touch with a person before. And it has to stay internal, no client logins or portals, and we're small so we're not looking to spend enterprise money.

So, what are you all running, how big is your team, and what do you like/hate about it? Would really love to hear from anyone doing deal or project-based work rather than high volume Saas sales. Thanks! 😊

Hi everyone,

I've been researching the CRM migration industry before building anything and I'm trying to understand how consultants actually run these projects. If you've ever worked on CRM/data migrations (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, etc.) I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Some questions I have:
- What are some parts of the process that really manual?
- What is your least favorite part of the process?
- What tools do you currently use?

If anyone knows anyone who has experience or knowledge in the field please let me know as well.

Thanks for the help!

What tools or software are you using that have helped your emails look better and function better? We use Hubspot and it is limited in the emails. Obviously I can custom code emails, but wondering if people have tools they like that do this more easily.

I’ve been using clickup for quite some time but that doesn’t have accounting and HR, for that I am using different softwares…. Literally a software for one work… aren’t there any software which gives the entire suite?

Do anyone know?

Most teams know what they pay for their CRM.

But when you look closer, the real costs often come from everything around it:

• Dialers and telephony
• Call recording and storage
• Integrations and middleware
• Data providers
• SMS platforms
• Reporting and analytics tools
• Admin time spent managing multiple systems

Sometimes the software itself isn't the biggest expense it's the extra tools, usage fees, and operational overhead that add up over time.

What's been the biggest hidden cost in your sales stack?

Has there been a tool, integration, or process that ended up costing far more than you expected?

This is a weekly post for you to let out about something which happened this week for you in CRM that mattered: features, client requests that were either great or awful this week, and just generally chat CRM / CRM consulting chatter.

No self promo, just a place to share tales from the front-line of CRM!

One of the most annoying things with outreach-heavy orgs is when the contact data lives in one system, the segment logic lives somewhere else, and the actual messaging happens in a third place. Then everyone wonders why reporting is fuzzy and follow-up gets inconsistent.

I’ve mostly seen this in campaign and advocacy setups, but honestly it applies to a lot of teams. If the workflow is messy, the outreach gets messy too.

I was reading through platform options and RumbleUp caught my attention because it seemed to be discussed less like a pure bulk SMS tool and more like something teams use when actual organizing is involved. Curious what people here think is the cleanest way to handle data + text outreach without building a Frankenstein process.

I've been obsessing over cold LinkedIn outreach for a while now. partly for my own pipeline, partly because I kept seeing people around me send completely reasonable messages and get nothing back.

So I started saving every opener that actually worked. Ones that turned into real conversations, not just a polite thumbs up or "thank you". Eventually I had about 50 of them across six industries.

Once I had enough I went back through all of them looking for patterns. Here's what almost every single one had in common:

1. Every message that worked ended with exactly one question. Not "thoughts on this? Also are you open to a call? I can also send a deck". Cutting the second ask is harder than it sounds but it's the difference between a message that gets answered and one that gets skimmed.

2. No pitch in the first message: Out of 50 messages, zero of them pitched anything in the opener. The only job of message one is to earn message two. That's it.

3. Signal-based beats evergreen every time: About 7 out of 10 of the messages that worked referenced something the other person did in the last week or two (a post, a hire, a product update, a comment they left somewhere.) The freshest openers consistently outperformed the generic reusable ones by a wide margin.

4. Specificity over cleverness: "Saw you hired three SDRs in Q3" will always outperform the wittiest line ever written. Not one of these 50 openers is clever in the LinkedIn influencer sense. Every single one references something real.

5. Peer framing, not target framing: The messages that converted treated the other person as an operator with an interesting problem, not as a budget to unlock. Ironically that framing tends to unlock more budget than any direct pitch ever could.

6. Always keep it short: Average length across all 50 is around 50 words. Nothing needed to be long to work. If a message needs three paragraphs to make its point, the point probably isn't sharp enough yet.

I ended up turning the whole collection into a proper doc organized by industry with a breakdown of why each one worked because the template is useless without understanding the reasoning behind it. The moment you paste one of these word for word to someone who didn't actually do the thing it references, it becomes spam like everything else in their inbox.

Happy to share the full doc in the comments if anyone wants it. It's free, no email wall or anything. just figured it's more useful out in the world than sitting in my notes.

We are trying to connect our sales process with project delivery and the handoff is where things start breaking down.

Customer information lives in the crm but once a deal closes, the project team needs context without copying everything manually

We’re replacing a CRM that technically works, but nobody trusts the data inside it. Sales updates things late, marketing blames sales, reporting is always “close enough,” and management wants better forecasting without changing behavior.
I’ve been comparing platforms through SelectHub and it’s been a good way to separate actual fit from nice-looking sales pages.
Starting to think the best CRM is the one your team will actually keep updated without needing constant reminders.

I Built a Notion CRM template for freelancers, it's live on Notion's marketplace now. Would genuinely love honest feedback from people who've used similar tools.

It has Companies, Contacts, and Deals as main databases, plus a Reports database with its own dashboard page.

Features:

Deals automatically move between Active, Won, or Lost views just change one status and everything connected (companies, contacts, reports) moves with it automatically

Active is your main working view

Inbox view for quick additions you want to edit later without cluttering active work

Health check formula shows if a deal is on track, closing soon, late, or done based on expected date

Weighted value formula calculates expected revenue based on deal stage

Its mostly for small businesses

Everywhere I look I see references to GHL and HubSpot and SalesForce etc. Are you guys using all these features that are offered? It seems they have a feature for every edge case. I have a CRM targeted at tradespeople and small business owners currently and its discouraging to think I may have pigeonholed myself. I am not including a link on purpose to avoid sounding spammy but my CRM is deliberately lean and simple.

Leads, Deal, Contact, Notes, Calendar. It has the essentials like per-contact notes and such. Supports webhooks in to fill entries. Has a little AI agent to ask questions about the database. It doesn't require an instruction PDF or clicking through six menus to add a contact and it looks basic but deliberate and refined. It is not a CRM clone of the week. I am not going to add tons of features to try and compete but are there some non-negotiables that pretty much everyone needs these days?

For the techies I run a single binary written in a compiled language. No mult-tenant. One client per VM. One client per DB. Takes 150MB RAM to serve 60000 leads. No node/react/postgres/javascript etc. It loads instantly no matter what, the only thing that impacts the speed is the network connection of the client. Users are allowed to register via email whitelist and there are no special user privileges.

What are your thoughts on simple CRMs? I don't want to occupy a niche where people would rather use GHL or a spreadsheet than me. For those of you in defined sectors like real estate do you prefer "real estate CRMs" or do some of you use generic CRMs for specialized work? Is automation a requirement for most of you?

A lot of small businesses seem to have the same problem: clients contact them directly on WhatsApp, conversations happen there, groups are created, follow-ups are discussed, but none of that data really ends up anywhere useful.

Then after a few months, you have customer history, leads, names, group members, and conversations sitting inside WhatsApp, but nothing structured to analyze, back up, or move into a CRM.

I built a Chrome extension for WhatsApp Web to help export this kind of data into files, mostly for teams that use WhatsApp as a messy pre-CRM layer.

The idea is not to replace a CRM, but to make sure the data is not trapped inside chats forever.

Curious how others here deal with this. Do you manually copy WhatsApp leads into your CRM, use a shared inbox, export periodically, or just leave everything inside WhatsApp?

I’ll add the link in the comments in case anyone wants to try it.

Howdy all! I am working on a custom CRM project right now for a client and this is actually my first CRM build. I have a decent amount of experience using CRMs over the years and have really tried my best to incorporate as many helpful features as possible.

I am obviously not completely at liberty to add whatever I want since this is something I am coding for someone else, but I do have quite a bit of control and sway as far as my input, just because the client's themselves are unfamiliar with exactly what finer details they want and need. I wanted to inquire here if anyone has any must-have CRM features they love that might be a positive addition to this project that I am not aware of. Currently we having the following functionality:

• Lead management
• Public lead intake plus manual lead creation
• Lead statuses: New, Scheduled, In Progress, Canceled with broader internal mappings including follow-up/completed
• Lead search, filters, archived vs active views
• Lead fields for service, device, preferred date/time, visit type, requester type, issue, summary, notes
• Tech assignment and workload visibility
• Lead notes/history
• Dashboard and operations visibility
• Lead volume/activity graph
• Pipeline overview by status
• New customer overview
• Technician workload summary
• Embedded calendar view
• Customer CRM
• Customer profiles separate from leads
• Contact info, address, preferred contact method
• Membership tracking: active membership, plan, start date, renewal date, membership notes
• Customer status tracking: Active, Follow Up, Completed, Inactive
• Customer notes with visibility controls for techs vs admin-only
• Ticket history attached to each customer
• Archive customer flow
• Ticket/case management
• Dedicated tickets section
• Ticket numbers/case references
• Ticket status, priority, assigned tech, schedule, device, issue, outcome/resolution
• Search/filter tickets across customers
• Billing and payments
• Outstanding balance tracking
• Missed payment / billing follow-up flags
• Payment status and method tracking
• Run card in CRM via Stripe
• Invoice generation
• Billing document area for invoices and receipts
• Payment audit ledger
• Staff/ops management
• Staff directory
• Roles and permissions
• Branch / territory / manager hierarchy
• Dispatch/reporting access flags
• Tech-specific performance exports
• Security / compliance / control
• Role-based access for owner, admin, developer, regional manager, territory manager, tech
• Notifications drawer/activity alerts
• Audit log for profile changes, lead updates, note actions, payment changes, deletes
• CSV exports
• Password management
• Cleanup/admin tools for deleting records and clearing audit history

I am curious, is there anything you guys could suggest adding to this project? Please feel free to ask anything you like and I would be happy to elaborate on it.

There are 10,000 AI CRMs startups - have you found a reliable one? I am looking for one which lets me keep track of my follow ups, and where leads are in my funnel across the following channels:

- reddit

- whatsapp

- imessage

- email

Claude often misses emails, making it unreliable.

imessage and whatsapp can be done via beeper.

Why is it impossible to find one that reliably works?

Please help.

Has anyone found a CRM that can predict when a deal is going cold? I’m head of sales at a 30-person B2B SaaS startup and I’m getting frustrated because we keep losing warm leads just because no one is paying attention to how long it’s been since we’ve communicated with them.

What I want is something that will automatically flag when a prospect we’ve flagged as “strong” in our system has gone quiet for 1-2 weeks.

If I absolutely have to, I guess I could build something manually to serve as a reminder system. But I feel like this must be a common enough issue that surely somebody’s What tool would you recommend that can help with this?

Build a tool for my sales team for telecalling..

After every single call, they'd spend another minute or two filling out the CRM. Things like whether the lead was interested, call outcome, feedback, follow-up, and a bunch of other fields.

It doesn't sound like much, but after hundreds of calls a day, that's a lot of time spent typing instead of actually talking to people.

So I built a small tool for them.

Now, as soon as a call ends, it fills in all the required CRM fields automatically based on the call. They can just move on to the next call instead of stopping to update everything manually.

This is a follow up post from my original post where am looking for CRM for my small business and I need help on picking one without getting scammed of hidden fees.

Someone asked me to post what features I want for my CRM so I have listed here some of them and open to any others that you recommend.

Customer data management
Lead management
Online enquiry forms
Automated follow up
Integration to website, phone number, email and social medias with instant automated follow up
Schedule social media posting
Quote and invoice management
Email Marketing, promotions, discounts
Scheduling and task management
Booking management

Hi,
I have a small cleaning business. We already have a website and we are looking for CRM.
Which one do you guys recommend? For a small cleaning business?
What are the setup cost?
And are there any hidden cost?
I have been researching around but they always trying to sale themselves as the best.
Just wanted to know what we should know before choosing.

Thanks you

I spent the last few months building a custom CRM for a fresh-produce wholesaler that supplies dozens of restaurants daily. Wanted to share what it does, because I think a lot of distribution/wholesale businesses are sitting on the exact same problem and don't realize software can fix it.

The "before": every order came in over WhatsApp, some typed, some as voice notes, some as a photo of a handwritten pad. Employees read all of it and hand-typed everything into a stack of spreadsheets. If that person was sick, the business was blind. No real-time view of anything. not scalable at all.

What I built: an end-to-end CRM where WhatsApp is the order channel and AI does the reading and typing.

Here's the flow now:

- A customer sends a WhatsApp, typed text, a voice note (even in mixed local language), or a photo of a handwritten order. Integration done through WhatsApp Business API from Meta

- The system transcribes the voice (Whisper), reads the handwriting (GPT-4o vision), and parses the text then matches it against that customer's actual product catalog, including nicknames and local units, so it becomes a real, structured order. No guessing, actually fetched/stored in backend/database

- It sends the customer a clean itemized summary with native Confirm / Cancel buttons right in WhatsApp. They can also just reply "make it 20 not 30" and the AI edits the order.

- The confirmed order drops straight into the Web CRM dashboard. Zero manual data entry.

On top of the order engine:

- Customer master, product catalog, standing/recurring orders, activity log, roles & permissions ; the full CRM experience, not just a chatbot.

Live dashboard - the owner finally sees every order, message, and voice note in one place, in real time, no refresh needed. The one-person bottleneck is gone.

- Auto-purchasing: it consolidates every confirmed order into a single supplier purchase sheet (exact Excel format their buyer already uses) and sends it over WhatsApp on request. It only ever includes new orders, so nothing gets double-bought.

- Analytics

- Accounting sync (QuickBooks) + local tax-compliant invoice formats — sales, cost-of-goods, and receivables flow to the books automatically. they literally laid off few people after I automated their workflow

- Doubles as an AI assistant: customers can ask about pricing/availability in the WhatsApp and get a real answer from an AI enriched with the context of the whole business.

Sales & customer relationships (what every CRM must nail)

- Leads & pipeline — track prospects from first contact to first order, with stages, owners, and follow-up reminders so nothing slips.

- Customer health scoring : automatic flags when a regular's order volume drops or they've gone quiet, so you win them back before they churn instead of after.

- Relationship & follow-up engine: scheduled check-ins, "last ordered 12 days ago" nudges, re-order prompts, the CRM chases retention for you.

- Customer self-service B2B portal: customers browse the catalog, re-order in one tap, track their delivery live, and see their own balance & statements. Fewer "where's my order" calls.

Inventory & supply

- Warehouse / pack-house stock, batches & FEFO (first-expiry-first-out): the right stock goes out first, waste drops.
- Procurement & vendor scorecards: rate every supplier on quality, price, and reliability; buy smarter.

- Spoilage & waste analytics: see exactly where money is rotting.

the "Intel Center"

The owner's command dashboard: gross profit per single order, vendor scorecards, receivables aging, market/price trend tracking, and spoilage analysis the numbers an owner has never been able to see in real time

- Reports & exports across every module.

Biggest lesson: for non-technical, older, mixed-literacy users, meeting them where they already are (WhatsApp) beats any app you could build. Nobody had to learn new software. They just kept sending WhatsApps; the software got smarter, they didn't have to.

Happy to answer anything on the architecture, the AI parsing accuracy, or the WhatsApp Business API side, that part has some gotchas. If you run a distribution/wholesale/B2B-ordering business drowning in manual order entry, feel free to drop a comment; I'm always down to talk shop