Because I'm building for the people who hate hubspot or any bigger player who is calling themselves as CRM

I'm thinking I can't farm any of my ICP if I use the word CRM for Seo.

Cuz I need anti-CRM people, at the same time my SaaS product is genuine it's simple and have alot of useful feature and I don't care if the idea fails too cuz I created it for myself

So tell me am I wrong to not use the word CRM, even though I'm close to one?

TBH I wanted to call it CCM ( client context management ) there is bigger reason behind it

And also in few hours my product is launching on PH, wish me luck with the above concept if you agree...

I’ve seen teams continue logging into their CRM every day while gradually stopping their actual work inside it.

Sales conversations happen through calls and private messages. Decisions happen in meetings. Notes get added later, mainly so management reports look complete.

The dashboards still appear healthy, but the CRM is no longer helping people decide what to do next.

What are the earliest signs that this is happening?

More importantly, how do you turn the CRM back into a tool the team depends on rather than a database they update for management?

Most CRM advice here is about which tool has the feature you need. We came at it from the other end. We run a two-person studio, we tried the usual tools, and every one of them died the same way - not for lack of a feature, but because keeping them current became a second job.

So when we built our own, the question each time was what to remove.

Kept out, or kept optional:

Pipeline stages. A two-person business doesn't have a pipeline, it has a list of people it owes an answer to. Stages are there but they are optional.

Reporting. Nobody with eight active clients needs a chart to know how it's going.

Team permissions and assignment. There is no team (yet - may change if users want it).

Automation sequences. If you send enough email to need sequences, you're a different business than this.

Mattered more than expected:

More than one date on the same record. Quote sent, follow-up, work starts, invoice due. Almost every tool gives you one date field, which is exactly why people go back to a spreadsheet.

Being able to write a plain sentence about a person that isn't a structured field.

Opening it on a phone in a van and it not being a worse version of the desktop (it's a PWA).

The honest downside: it's not ideal if you hire a fifth person or your sales cycle passes a few months. That isn't a roadmap item, it's the point.

I built it, so read accordingly.

Recruiters were spending weeks reviewing CVs, and great candidates were dropping off before getting a response.

We built an AI-powered workflow that screens, scores, shortlists candidates, syncs with the ATS, schedules interviews, and keeps applicants updated automatically.

Results:

- 1,500 CVs screened/month

- 70% faster time-to-shortlist

- 8 days faster average hire

How does your team handle high-volume hiring today? AI, ATS rules, or mostly manual?

Lately, I have seen quite a few posts along the lines of: I replaced my CRM SaaS with a vibecoded CRM, it works perfectly for my business... etc..

I’d genuinely love to see what these applications actually look like. Especially from a UX and usability perspective. Any screenshots?

Hey guys, I work mainly in construction but I'm taking a bit of a break and thinking of doing lawn care as a side hustle. I know there's tons of reasons to get a CRM that I'd be interested in like scheduling, routing, and invoicing. But looking at the costs I'm thinking if it'd be worth or not.

I've tried the free trial for Jobber, but there were just too many features that I don't think I'll need especially as a solo runner. I'm considering the alternatives like Tofu, Yardbook, and even saw there was a lite plan for Jobber. Right now, I'm thinking of trying out a week or two without a CRM and see if I can manage. But if I do consider getting one, would love some advice on what you guys would recommend. Thanks!

Do other people have similar issues? I'm not near my desk for a considerable amount of time, for e.g. I'm in the car or in meetings most of the day, and at the end of the work day there's an hour of typing up into the CRM what I already know. By the time I get to my laptop, some of the info is lost. So the record's basically useless to anyone but me. Has anyone found something that actually sticks? Can I not just talk to my CRM, like literally voice or text it

I've been thinking about this lately.

A lot of businesses invest time and money into generating leads, but what happens after someone fills out a contact form or requests a quote?

How do you make sure every lead gets a timely follow-up?

Do you use a CRM, spreadsheets, reminders, or some kind of automation?

The more I looked into it, the more I realised this is a common problem for many businesses.

I'd love to hear what works for you and what you've found to be the biggest challenge when it comes to following up with new leads.

You're getting leads.

You're getting deals.

But suddenly things start getting messy.

• You forget a deal because nobody reminded you.

• You check every active deal manually just to see what's due tomorrow.

• Your database gets crowded with old deals and completed projects.

• You know follow-ups matter, but keeping track of everything takes too much time.

• Calculating your real pipeline value manually becomes impossible.

And yes...

You could build your own CRM.

But most agency owners should be spending their time getting clients, not building systems.

That's why I built this.

✅ Automatic weighted pipeline value

✅ Deal health tracking

✅ Follow-up visibility

✅ One-click Won / Lost organization

Instead of manually cleaning databases and moving things around.

If you're running a small agency or service business, I'd love to hear what you currently use to track deals.

TL;DR scroll to the bottom where I have a —- that is where my question begins

I have had an interest in developing business systems as a software developer since early 2000

Back then my first contract job as a software developer was building a backend business system, which consisted of LMS, a contact manager with some sales reports .. they offered coaching and consulting for insurance agencies

I called that a BMS or business management system. That was my lingo almost 30 years ago. :p

Since then I’ve built a dozen BMS type systems for a variety of businesses from coaching and consulting, knowledge management and education, manufacturing across multiple industries (environment controlled systems, aerospace/MRO, distribution, industrial coatings, agriculture, heavy equipment, transportation, and railway most recently).

These are fairly complex systems typically would take about 3 to 5 years of full-time development. One of them turned into a full-time contract or gig that lasted over 12 years. :p

Over the last decade I’ve since renamed what I do “custom ERP developer for midsize markets who have unusual business requirements due to regulation, certification, etc”

Every single one of my clients just had off-course, albeit complex or sophisticated (I don’t know what the word is?) domain model requirements.

For instance, a project that can have one or more crew teams, each team can have one or more members - not totally unusual but wouldn’t work for MRO or industrial coatings or insurance.

Each of those three levels of hierarchy can have one or more associations like equipment .. and equipment can have consumables and/or tools which can be assigned to crew members or individuals or projects

Expenses that can be applied to projects or crew teams, or crew members

And on and on and on .. the list goes on .. the unique requirements of niche markets .. means that there is very little likelihood of finding an existing off the shelf piece of software that does what my clients need and that’s where I have entered the picture

Most of these systems have somewhat generalized versions of a PO .. sometimes a work order .. it’ll have a contact module with some minimal or limited version of what I would call a CRM with pipelines, kanban boards, etc.

—-

So here in lies my question. I see a CRM as a simple version of a sales tool that ties into a Contacts module of some sort simple SAAS apps like pipe drive I think it’s called or other simple CRM‘s where it’s literally a contact manager with some towing for sales people to keep track of sales pipelines and may be issue tracking at the most

But I’ve seen people talk about CRM’s like what I would call an ERP which if you didn’t know stands for enterprise resource planning

That is a blanket term for a piece of software that does everything .. it’s your God app.

So I’m curious if I start to market myself as this contract, I’m working on right now begins to wind down. Am I best to use language like ERP or CRM or custom software development?

I’ve always been very fortunate and capable of somehow finding contracts every year or every couple of years sometimes they overlap sometimes there’s a gap between projects

But I’m really starting to think I need to change that .. I need to bring in more work that I’m capable of doing solo, so I can actually build a business-ish :p

Regards,
Alex

Hi everyone! I'm looking for a public (or open-source) CRM/ERP dataset that contains a realistic sales pipeline with opportunities, quotes/orders, invoices, and ideally several years of historical data for revenue forecasting.

Does anyone know of a benchmark, sample database, or anonymized dataset that resembles a real B2B sales workflow? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone! I'm currently researching CRM and donor-management tools used across the nonprofit sector, and would love your input if you have 5 minutes. The link will be posted below

If you know anyone else in fundraising, ops, or database management at a charity who might be willing to fill it in too, I'd really appreciate you passing it along.

Thank you!

I am a development associate at a midsize nonprofit. We use Raiser's Edge as our CRM. I have been tasked with helping my department decide if we should switch from WealthEngine to ResearchPoint or iWave for research and prospecting. ResearchPoint is fully integrated with Raiser's Edge and would save time for staff. However, it's expensive and doesn't have the research capabilities like the other two do. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is there a tool that you could recommend to make the import/export process easier if we decide to stick with something outside of the Raiser's Edge ecosystem? Please help! I am new and a little in over my head here :)

Maybe I need to be talked out of this - but all roads keep leading me back to building our our solution. For context, we have built custom internal tools/platforms over the past several years, (automated showing scheduling, lease template + Make RPA for rent roll entry into our ERP, Work order management with field service/inventory/tenant comms, After hours Ai agent with n8n routing etc) so I do have access to a small dev team, QA etc.(but they don't have CRM experience - so that's an issue) I'm trying to talk myself out of this build as I know it's probably a beast to undertake, but I just can't find the right solution to our use case. At the moment we're using Follow-up boss (FUB) - reason was a strong mobile app for our rental agents in the field, real estate based. The mobile app has had issues lagging, poor ability to search contacts by tags/type. Fine for searching by name or phone number, but when you have 1,500 leads in a 3 month span - how would this even work? It didn't, we had to change their last names to the tags we wanted to search. We also have a custom scheduling platform we built that the rental agent selects their properties they want to show (similar to Google Cal) the next day and notice goes out to all tenants. This transaction lives outside the CRM so we could't track showings for that lead unless manually entered by the agent back into the CRM, well that turned out to be an administrative nightmare. So we lost visibility on which leads saw what properties & when.

Then if the lead wanted to rent, the agent would need to manually move them to a different stage and again, visibility would be lost as we moved to our lease template builder, which again sits in
another siloed platform we built with API to Pandadoc. Again this lead would need to manually be pushed through each stage from Lead to Lease. If this was forgotten, well you know how this starts to look. Our company pushes a decent leasing volume in a 4-5 mnth timeframe (peak season)

So my thought was to even create a basic CRM, remove the bloat, we use like 30% of FUB features. Then link leads to showings > follow-up > application submitted > deposit
> lease signed etc with full visibility along the way. We have an ultra clear view of what we need to do at each step and it's quite difficult to find a platform that will accomplish this.

The other layer was an Ai native first approach - I feel this is where the gap in the market sits (or
maybe just from the ones I've seen). It would be great to mine data about your leads in natural language. For eg. "all 3 bed leads looking for Downtown" and the platform could surface all of these active leads for you - not something buried behind smartlists & filters. At the moment in FUB we have to use smart lists, and like they say "garbage in, garbage out" - these lists got messy very quickly, we spent more time trying to make sure these leads were sanitized and up to date then it was worth. A lead would email they wanted a 3 bed, Downtown with 2 parking spots, and each one of these data points would need to be entered as a separate tag - but tags were not searchable in FUB. So they we have to place this lead in smart lists, but now we have 20 smart lists for all of the variations... etc etc

Anyway if you made it this far I appreciate the time you took to read this. Not sure if I need to be talked out of attempting to build something like this or is it worth to effort?

Disclosure at the top since it's relevant: I work at Veridion, we do company data, and I mention one of our tools at the bottom. The method below works with any registry source and I've named a free official one too.

Most CRM dedupe runs on company name and fuzzy matching. It half-works, which is worse than not working, because it merges genuinely different companies with similar names while leaving obvious duplicates alone. Acme Inc, Acme Incorporated, ACME INC, and Acme Inc. survive as four records. Meanwhile two unrelated firms both called Meridian Consulting get merged.

The reason is that a company name is a description, not an identifier. Companies change names, trade under names they aren't registered under, and abbreviate inconsistently. There's no rule that makes them unique.

What actually works is deduping on jurisdiction plus registry number. Every registered company has a number issued by the registry it's incorporated in. It's unique within that jurisdiction and it doesn't change when the company rebrands. Store it as a field and dedupe becomes exact instead of probabilistic, and it works retroactively across records you already have.

Two other things fall out of it once the field exists:

Dissolved accounts become visible. Registries publish status. Companies dissolve, get struck off, or restructure into new entities, and none of that reaches your CRM. Most databases contain accounts that legally stopped existing years ago, and the only symptom is that outreach quietly never lands. With registry status as a field, that's a filter instead of a mystery.

Inbound gets validated at entry. Free-text company fields produce whatever someone types. A lookup at submit tells you whether the entity exists, so junk gets flagged before routing.

The trap to avoid: legal name isn't trading name. "Google" isn't registered anywhere; "Google LLC" and "Google Ireland Limited" are. First-pass match rates are lower than people expect. Treat no-match as "needs review," never as "invalid" - auto-rejecting on no-match is how teams quietly discard real records.

Getting the data: UK-only, Companies House has a free official API and it's good, use that. For multi-country, ours is at [registry-lookup.com] - searching on the site is free with no account, and there's an API at 5,000 lookups a month free if you want to automate the dedupe. Any registry source works, the method is the point.

Curious what percentage came back dissolved, because the numbers I've heard vary enormously and I don't trust my own sample.

Hi everyone, what are the chances of landing a US-based CRM Specialist or Administrator role while being based in Europe, specifically Serbia? These positions are quite rare here and mostly limited to the capital city, Belgrade. I am looking for a fully remote opportunity with a US company because most European remote jobs still require you to live in the same country due to GDPR regulations.
I have about three years of experience in the telecom sector, working in sales and customer support. During this time, I used Spice CRM as an end-user and worked with Avaya and Genesys CCaaS systems. I also hold a Bachelor's degree in Business Management.
Recently, I started learning HubSpot because I want to transition away from frontline customer service and sales into a more technical role. However, I want to make sure I am investing my time and effort into something that is actually monetizable for a remote worker in my position.
I would really appreciate any advice, insights, or tips you might have. Thanks in advance.

I built a Notion template to track:

• Applications

• Interview stages

• Follow‑ups

• Resume versions

No more messy spreadsheets.😁

If you’re applying to multiple roles and want to stay organized,Try it out.

It's finally time for us to get a proper CRM instead of running our entire business on Google Sheets. It's just getting to be more hassle than it's worth, and we're ready to invest in something that'll be able to grow with us.

Wondering what everyone recommends for a smaller business with a smaller budget?

We don't have Salesforce or Hubspot money. I'm considering building something out on Airtable, but would really prefer a dedicated CRM. Most of what we need it for is call and email tracking, sales automations, pipelines, etc. Nothing too crazy imo

hello. this is my first time here. My agency is on the fence about switching to chronos CRM. We tested it and I just wanted to make 1 last check before we do. we saw the good side, we liked the features and the prices. But I don’t see a lot of bad comments anywhere . Does anyone have any horror stories or any bad feedback?