I've got claude hooked into mine. It fills my lead list, logs my calls, tells me which leads are worth following up w etc.. Everyone else is busy building their own internal models. I built mine on the back of claude.

curious if anyone else is running their crm through claude or chatgpt, and what you let it do. just read, or actually write to it?

I’m building a Business Management OS that helps businesses manage CRM, leads, quotations, invoices, payments, bookings, operations, finance, marketing, analytics and more — all in one place.

I am giving this OS for free 5 business

I run a construction estimating/supplementing company with about 7-10 total clients and would really like to scale, but the disorganization from the lack of a CRM has started to make my life difficult.

I’ve been desperately trying to find a new CRM that will help me with Project Management and there are a few different things that I need it to perform.

I’ve been looking for something that offers two way Quickbooks integration, unlimited users, and an easy to follow UI.

I looked into SuiteDash but the learning curve was a little too steep and I unfortunately don’t have the time to train my contractors, as well as employees how to use it in a timely manner.

My workflow goal was to have my clients create a job, add all of the documents, contracts, photos, or other information needed and then push a request for work over to me, where I can then divy up the projects to my employees and the client who created the job/project can follow our progress throughout its life so that they are constantly updated/informed at all times. I’d like for it to be able to send emails and receive emails and for me to have the ability to send invoices & receive payments (with the above mentioned Quickbooks integration).

I apologize for the long post, but I’m desperate to find a good fit with how many options are out there. Would anyone have any recommendations?

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!

From my POV, the next step for SaaS is not a better dashboard. It is the possibility to operate from chat (and then with voice in the near future)

For twenty years, every CRM product has had the same shape: log in, click through menus, fill forms. Then AI arrived, and most big players were eager to add AI features and ended up with internal chatbots, summarisers, and some deal warmth calculations.

Now some big CRMs figured out users got used to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok chats, and just don't want to come inside their interface anymore.

I've already posted about our completely free (no paid plans) CRM previously, and now we've made the next step: transformed it into an AI-native platform. You have both classic UI and the ability to run it through plain text via LLM chat (even with a local one, so you don't need to pay for tokens)

How it works:

1. The CRM ships a native MCP server. MCP is the open protocol Claude, ChatGPT and Grok use to call tools in outside systems. Ours exposes 91 tools and 5 ready-made prompts, all scoped to your workspace, all writing to the same database the web app uses. No middleware, no Zapier, no second source of truth.
2. You add crm2crm as a connector. In Claude or ChatGPT that is one URL and an OAuth sign-in. In Grok it is a short form.
3. Then you talk to your pipeline in plain test. "Show me every deal stuck in negotiation for two weeks, add a follow-up task to each, and write a one line reason." The model reads the deals, creates the tasks and writes the notes. It does the work in the CRM instead of handing you a paragraph to copy somewhere.
4. You can add AI agents to perform different tasks, integrate it with outreach tools, like one of our users did with a network of 5 agents inside the CRM.

Search, people, deals, stage moves, notes, custom fields, inbox triage, lead scoring, web research, analytics. Every verb the CRM has, from a chat window.

What it costs: nothing. The built-in AI (lead scoring, account overviews, research agent) runs on your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Groq key, so there is no per-seat AI fee and your records never leave your contract with your model provider. Or run it with your chat, so within your regular subscription. If you need LinkedIn in it, the Ln2CRM extension saves any profile and log messages into it in one click.

One early appreciation signal: Google's AI Overview already cites crm2crm when people search for a 'free AI-native CRM' and about 80 registrations with ~20 active organizations.

P.S. When users came in, they found out a couple of dozen bugs or logic flaws. So now we are proud of its consistency and stability

Try it without an account: https://crm.ln2crm.com/.

P.S. There is a demo workspace. Can't demo chat capabilities w/o Oauth

A prospect is trying to choose between Monaco and Attio and personally I'm a big fan of Attio and have been using it for my agency's operations and for clients.

Monaco claims to be more "agentic" and "AI-native" but also thought the founder's video looks like a bag of bull, so I'm not so convinced.

Anyone with experience in it?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

A lot of small businesses run their actual sales conversation through WhatsApp, not their CRM. The contact info might be logged somewhere, but the back and forth that actually decides if someone buys happens entirely in the chat, disconnected from everything else.

So a lead replies, nobody follows up for a day or two because it wasn't visible to whoever was supposed to catch it, and by the time someone checks, the person's already moved on.

Is this just accepted as normal, or does anyone have an actual workflow that keeps WhatsApp conversations visible and tied to a CRM record without a ton of manual copy-pasting?

i’ve been messing around with using ChatGPT as a lightweight CRM / booking manager.

the set up I came up with: client data in Airtable, bookings to Google Calendar, Gmail for email. The nice part is obvious pretty quickly - instead of opening three tools aeparate apps and hunting around, I can just ask things like “who’s booked this week?”, “prepare a booking update”, “update their record”, “draft a follow-up”, “<client name> sent the deposit” etc.

But I didn’t really trust was the state of everything after a few changes. Say, a client reschedules over email, then I update the calendar event, then something gets updated in Airtable. at that point I want to know which system is actually right, whether all three match, and whether ChatGPT missed anything along the way.

once I started thinking about how to make that reliable, I ended up adding rules, checks, confirmations… which is basically the boring CRM stuff I was trying to avoid in the first place.

so TLDR: I wouldn’t use ChatGPT as the actual CRM. but as a lightweight CRM interface or booking manager sitting on top of the real systems, it actually makes a lot more sense to me.

wrote up the whole thing here if anyone’s interested: (apparently cant post it in the body, will try comments)

I’ve been looking into how smaller companies handle freight invoices, especially LTL.

Curious if this is actually a common headache or if I’m overestimating it.

Stuff like:invoice comes in higher than the quote

reclass / reweigh charges

liftgate or limited access fees

duplicate or unexpected accessorials

When this happens, does someone on your team actually go back through the quote/BOL/POD and dispute it with the carrier?

Or do most companies just pay it unless the amount is obviously wrong?Would be really interested to hear how people actually deal with this in practice.

How is your company dealing with the issue of two-party consent when it comes to recording sales calls and relating AI summaries back to your CRM?

Thinking of this from the perspective of a manufacturing company in B2B sales environment, where team selling is a big part of our sales process. It seems like there are number of tools/apps that can perform this functionality. But I'm not sure how they manage the consent piece (both within the U.S. and globally).

Do you take the universal consent approach and lead all calls/meetings with some type of disclaimer (which seems like an awkward way to start a conversation)?

Do you have some type of phone number lookup that traces the area or country code to determine consent rules?

Or are most sales reps / companies just going full steam ahead with their preferred recording method and throwing caution to the wind?

WE are currently on hubspot free and dont have the auto sequencing feature. Any other CRM offers it for free? We want to try and see if it works for us before we pay for something.

Also, anyone using instantly as a client followup sequencer with the main domain?

Suppose a three-rep B2B team reassigns a lead because of a territory change or someone going on leave. The contact owner changes from Rep A to Rep B, but A still owns a meeting follow-up task and has an unsent sequence step queued.

Moving every open task automatically could hide who promised the customer what. Leaving them with A risks a missed follow-up, and letting both sequences continue could send duplicate messages. I would preserve the owner-change history, pause outbound steps, and require B to accept the open tasks, but I am unsure what should be automated versus reviewed by a person.

How do you handle this in practice? In particular, what event makes the handoff complete, and what do you monitor for the first day to catch tasks or emails that stayed with the old owner?

I’ve noticed that many small businesses use WhatsApp for almost all of their internal and customer communication.

The problem is that important leads get buried in chats, follow-ups are forgotten, and there’s often no clear way to know which conversations need action.

At the same time, asking a small business to adopt a complex CRM can create another problem: too many steps and too much friction.

So I’m curious

How effectively manage and track business conversations on WhatsApp?

Are there any simple tools or workflows that help you capture leads, assign follow-ups, and make sure opportunities don’t get lost?

A CRM is a system that centralizes customer contact data and the history of interactions with those customers in a database.

Which means that it will do its job whether it was built with pencil and paper, Google Sheets, or the newest shiny programming languages with your favorite coding assistant.

And anything beyond the core centralization of customer data and interaction history is an add-on to enhance the system's capabilities.

So any additional features are considered optional enhancements.

Which means a CRM is not the sales pipeline, it’s not the marketing, it’s not the communication tools, it’s not job and team tracking, it’s not invoicing, etc, I could go on, but you get the point. 🧩

All those are added enhancements, that some of them would be useful to you, and some would not be useful, and some are added because they sound nice. 😊

So why I posted this?

Because I want to help you understand what a CRM is and is not so you can make an informed choice the next time you’re choosing a CRM system.

Just remember to disregard the bells and whistles, and make sure that the CRM you’re considering actually can do its fundamental job!💯

ok so for context we are a small b2b saas team, 3 aes and 2 sdrs, and leadership keeps throwing this line around about how we should be able to generate 4x more pipeline with the same headcount if we just "lean into signal driven outreach"

We do have intent tools, product usage data, crm activity etc but right now it feels like 20 dashboards and zero clear flow. Everyone is just cherry picking their own view and spraying emails at whatever lights up instead of a clean queue. Has anyone actually gotten signal based flows to work in a way that doesnt just torch the team and the brand? appreciate any thoughts

Hi! We have to build a database for users/members and different organizations of a network. That database will be the core of a big non profit project that is very important to us. At first we were thinking on designing the database and developing its interfaces from scratch, but we are now considering using a CRM. It has to be open source (we are considering suiteCRM, CiviCRM, Odoo, ERPNext/FrappeCRM, EspoCRM, Krayin/LaravelCRM, and Dolibarr, but we have yet to study them).

The thing is that we would then use the database of the CRM to hold the members/clients of the network, so we would need a very flexible database, and it being easily connectable via API to different other web services. I know this should be feasible, but would you recommend doing something like that?

The other way would be to make our own database and connect it via API with a CRM so the CRM database stays in sync with our core client/member database.

For you guys experienced in this CRM lands... does any of the proposals sound more practical than the other? or a third idea?

thanks!

Hello,

Can you share your platform and the annual costs and set up.

Having a nightmare with salesmen ATM hounding me for 45 mins calls just to get a rough idea of costs.

Thanks

I've spent quite a few years working with CRM and business software, and one thing keeps bothering me.

The software itself is often not even the expensive part.

It's everything around it.

Consultants. Implementation projects. Workshops. Custom configuration. Data migration. Training. Then months later you're still adapting your company to the software you bought.

I always wanted something much simpler:

sign up, bring the data you already have, answer a few questions about how your company works, review what the system proposes, and start.

No consultancy just to get started.
No custom code for every company.
No €50k implementation before you know whether the product even helps you.

And I also don't really want 15 separate SaaS tools anymore.

My ideal model is one platform with a small number of apps, like Sales, Support and Operations, sharing the same customers, work, automation and context underneath.

AI should mostly remove setup and admin friction. Not be another chatbot bolted onto the side.

So I've been building around a few principles:

• onboarding should take minutes, not weeks
• importing existing data should be normal
• software should adapt to the company
• configuration should replace customer-specific code
• you should be able to start small and add more later
• AI should prepare and configure work, while people stay in control

I'm not really looking for feedback on a feature list. More interested in whether this underlying idea matches how other people experience business software.

If you could replace your CRM / business software tomorrow, what would stop you?

The price?
Migration?
Implementation effort?
Losing your current processes?
Getting the team to adopt another system?

Curious which one is actually the biggest blocker.

I own a contractor business, and I have been with Jobber for approximately 2 years now. I noticed that for the last few months, I was being overcharged because they upgraded me to a plan I never asked for, and when I contacted them, threatening that I would file a chargeback, they deactivated my account and will not allow me to access my customer information. I am honestly sick of these guys. I keep trying to reach them, they say someone will get back to me and no one does, I read other reviews, and this doesn't seem as uncommon as I thought. They do a bunch of other scams. You'd think that because they're big in this field, you can trust them, but it seems to be the opposite.

At this point, I accepted that all my data would be lost, and I just want to migrate to something else that's reliable. Any recommendations you guys have will be appreciated. A couple of options I'm seeing on reddit is housecallpro, clientility and joist. I'm conflicted and don't want to find myself in a mess like this again. It has been stressful and disappointing dealing with this after being a loyal customer for 2 years.