I've designed software to protect you from dialing or texting people outside of the tcpa calling hours. I'm really trying to show some comparisons between it and any other programs or crms that have similar features. Usually that's a dialer. If any of you are curious and willing to try the experiment, then the tests are simple:

Make a test lead and use a dummy phone number like (areacode) 555 0157. That range of numbers are not given to real people so they can be used in movies etc.... The area code you choose shouldn't matter since the service should go by state/zip with people moving around.

Set the state for RI zip code 02901 and try to call it after 6 pm EST. Your system should block you.

Set the state for FL zip code 32003 during the day and try to call it 4 times. It should block you on the 4th try.

Set the state for AL zip code 35004 and try to call it on Sunday. Your system should block you.

If any one of those goes through, then your system isn't blocking correctly. If all of them go through, then your system probably doesn't block calls based on state rules at all. 23 states are more restrictive than the federal guidelines. If you can call or text earlier than 8 am or later than 9 pm, then your system doesn't block Federal law either.

Please post the results here or send me a DM. I'll give you a free subscription to my software for a year for testing, but I don't need too many people to test each one so first come first served.

I'm throwing this out there as my team uses GHL but I hate the CRM and its clunky to use.

So I went down the path of using API's from it to custom build a layer that allows me to send notes back to GHL, search, and create daily call lists so much faster than GHL.

All of this was done with Claude Code.

If you're CRM has API's just build something custom that is tailored to your workflow and setup.

I am frustrated with every CRM marketing to me that they will save me time and increase productivity but as soon as I sign up I have to relearn their whole system and create workflows by their rules. What CRM frustrations do you have?

I can't be the only one who is fed up. Am I crazy?

Bill McDermott was pretty blunt on ServiceNow's results call. His pitch is that the old CRM was built for sales teams, and that service is where the customer relationship actually lives. He's openly talking about rip and replace, and says deployment times are now 30 or 60 days for a serious company at serious scale.

There are some numbers behind it. CRM showed up in 13 of ServiceNow's top 20 deals last quarter and CRM AI net new ACV tripled. HPE signed up for its Cloud and AI support services, and Stagwell is consolidating four legacy service desks across more than 70 agencies.

I'm sceptical of the 30 day bit. Data migration and integrations are what kill CRM projects, not the software.

Has anyone here moved service off Salesforce or Dynamics onto ServiceNow? How long did it really take?

Bill McDermott was pretty blunt on ServiceNow's results call. His pitch is that the old CRM was built for sales teams, and that service is where the customer relationship actually lives. He's openly talking about rip and replace, and says deployment times are now 30 or 60 days for a serious company at serious scale.

There are some numbers behind it. CRM showed up in 13 of ServiceNow's top 20 deals last quarter and CRM AI net new ACV tripled. HPE signed up for its Cloud and AI support services, and Stagwell is consolidating four legacy service desks across more than 70 agencies.

I'm sceptical of the 30 day bit. Data migration and integrations are what kill CRM projects, not the software.

Has anyone here moved service off Salesforce or Dynamics onto ServiceNow? How long did it really take?

So many CRMs list Google Calendar as a supported integration. But “integrates with Google Calendar” can actually mean very different things in practice.

For some tools, it means that events added to Google Calendar show up in the CRM. For others, it means that changes sync in both directions. And the difference between these only really surfaces the first time a rep moves a meeting in one of the apps, and the update doesn’t happen in the other app. It still shows the old meeting time.

Teams often evaluate the integration by whether it connects at all, rather than how the tools communicate changes between each other. But connecting is the easy part. The rest is where the real test is.

Consider, for instance, if a meeting is rescheduled, an invitation is declined, someone cancels at the last minute, or a rep edits the meeting details from their phone instead of at their desk. The test then is whether the other system finds out quickly and whether it attaches the change to the correct contact record.

What tends to happen when it doesn't is that reps start losing trust in one of the two tools. Typically, they’ll continue to check the calendar for the real schedule and treat the CRM as something they update later, if at all. When that habit sets in, the data in the CRM falls behind, and nobody can say exactly when it all began to fall apart.

So, if you're evaluating CRMs for a team on Google Workspace, what's the one thing you'd test before you call the Calendar integration good enough? And has anyone been burned by one that looked fine in the demo?

So many CRMs list Google Calendar as a supported integration. But “integrates with Google Calendar” can actually mean very different things in practice.

For some tools, it means that events added to Google Calendar show up in the CRM. For others, it means that changes sync in both directions. And the difference between these only really surfaces the first time a rep moves a meeting in one of the apps, and the update doesn’t happen in the other app. It still shows the old meeting time.

Teams often evaluate the integration by whether it connects at all, rather than how the tools communicate changes between each other. But connecting is the easy part. The rest is where the real test is.

Consider, for instance, if a meeting is rescheduled, an invitation is declined, someone cancels at the last minute, or a rep edits the meeting details from their phone instead of at their desk. The test then is whether the other system finds out quickly and whether it attaches the change to the correct contact record.

What tends to happen when it doesn't is that reps start losing trust in one of the two tools. Typically, they’ll continue to check the calendar for the real schedule and treat the CRM as something they update later, if at all. When that habit sets in, the data in the CRM falls behind, and nobody can say exactly when it all began to fall apart.

So, if you're evaluating CRMs for a team on Google Workspace, what's the one thing you'd test before you call the Calendar integration good enough? And has anyone been burned by one that looked fine in the demo?

Launching Make My Shop: An Open-Source Telegram E-Commerce & CRM Platform
I’m excited to share Make My Shop — an open-source Telegram e-commerce platform and lightweight CRM designed to launch fully functional online stores directly within Telegram in minutes.
While Telegram is becoming a primary sales channel for many businesses, managing orders, catalogs, and customer communication manually often creates unnecessary friction. Make My Shop solves this by providing a complete automated storefront out of the box.
Core Capabilities
Product Catalog & Search: Category-based navigation, real-time product search, rich media cards, and direct manager communication routing.
Interactive Shopping Cart: Live cart item counter, structured multi-step checkout, shipping address capture, and automated order total calculation.
Payment Verification: Streamlined customer receipt uploading (photo/text) paired with real-time admin payment confirmation workflows.
Embedded Order Chat: Isolated 1-on-1 messaging thread embedded directly within each order detail card for seamless customer-manager clarification.
Merchant Control Panel: Complete CRUD interface for product catalog management, order status tracking, and instant new order event notifications.
Native Localization: On-the-fly, edit-in-place interface switching across English, Spanish, and Russian.
Technical Architecture
Backend & Framework: Python 3.12, aiogram 3.x, Pydantic v2
Persistence & Database: Async SQLAlchemy 2.0 (PostgreSQL / SQLite), Alembic schema migrations
Execution Model: Fully non-blocking background task execution (asyncio), structured service layer, and comprehensive integration testing.
The project is completely open-source, lightweight, and ready for self-hosting.

Launching Make My Shop: An Open-Source Telegram E-Commerce & CRM Platform
I’m excited to share Make My Shop — an open-source Telegram e-commerce platform and lightweight CRM designed to launch fully functional online stores directly within Telegram in minutes.
While Telegram is becoming a primary sales channel for many businesses, managing orders, catalogs, and customer communication manually often creates unnecessary friction. Make My Shop solves this by providing a complete automated storefront out of the box.
Core Capabilities
Product Catalog & Search: Category-based navigation, real-time product search, rich media cards, and direct manager communication routing.
Interactive Shopping Cart: Live cart item counter, structured multi-step checkout, shipping address capture, and automated order total calculation.
Payment Verification: Streamlined customer receipt uploading (photo/text) paired with real-time admin payment confirmation workflows.
Embedded Order Chat: Isolated 1-on-1 messaging thread embedded directly within each order detail card for seamless customer-manager clarification.
Merchant Control Panel: Complete CRUD interface for product catalog management, order status tracking, and instant new order event notifications.
Native Localization: On-the-fly, edit-in-place interface switching across English, Spanish, and Russian.
Technical Architecture
Backend & Framework: Python 3.12, aiogram 3.x, Pydantic v2
Persistence & Database: Async SQLAlchemy 2.0 (PostgreSQL / SQLite), Alembic schema migrations
Execution Model: Fully non-blocking background task execution (asyncio), structured service layer, and comprehensive integration testing.
The project is completely open-source, lightweight, and ready for self-hosting.

I recently learned that some agencies work directly inside their clients’ CRMs, and it got me wondering how data confidentiality works in practice. You’re basically handling customer information, sales records, and other business data that don’t belong to you.
For those who do this, what safeguards do you typically have in place? Do clients set specific rules around access, data handling, governance and confidentiality, or is it mostly handled informally, especially with smaller businesses? What scale of businesses even do this mostly?

I recently learned that some agencies work directly inside their clients’ CRMs, and it got me wondering how data confidentiality works in practice. You’re basically handling customer information, sales records, and other business data that don’t belong to you.
For those who do this, what safeguards do you typically have in place? Do clients set specific rules around access, data handling, governance and confidentiality, or is it mostly handled informally, especially with smaller businesses? What scale of businesses even do this mostly?

Sometimes switching is the right call. Some tools really do fit how modern teams work better. But the most common mistake I see is migrating the same messy structure into a new tool and getting the same result.

A migration is a great opportunity to fix how your CRM is set up. These are some of the issues I see most that stop AI and automations from working consistently:

1. One pipeline for everything or one too many pipelines when a custom field for filtering would suffice.
2. Free-text fields that lead to inconsistent data that is hard to build automations around and surface reports.
3. Duplicate records.
4. The important stuff is in notes so it's impossible for an automation to act on it.

AI can help with messy data if you ask it to, but if you want to build automations that run without you and actually work consistently you need a strong foundation in place.

Whether you’re staying put or moving, fixing these makes your AI tools, automations and reports noticeably more useful. If you’re migrating, it’s much easier to do it on the way over than after.m

Link to a free session if you want to go deeper on any of this.

Anyone here switched CRMs and found the same problems followed them?

Hey everyone,

I’ve worked as a copywriter and content marketer for a few years. With AI changing so much on the writing side, I’m trying to move toward the more digital, technical side of marketing.

I was already writing a lot of emails back then, and I’d also done HubSpot’s free certifications, so lifecycle marketing felt like a natural fit. Over the last three months I freelanced in Mailchimp (the project is finished now), and I built my own automations in Brevo for a personal project.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next to become a stronger candidate for jobs, and honestly I feel a bit lost:

• What kind of roles should I be aiming for at this stage (e.g. email marketing specialist, CRM executive, lifecycle associate, marketing automation), and which ones have more opportunities right now?
• Should I go deeper into email marketing specifically, or broaden into CRM in general, like learning other CRM platforms?
• What skills or experience actually make someone stand out when hiring for lifecycle/CRM roles?
• Are there any guides, courses or certifications you’d recommend?

I’ve also put together a portfolio of what I’ve done so far and would love feedback on it. Happy to share the link in the comments if that’s allowed here.

Would really appreciate any advice from people who’ve made a similar move or who hire for these roles.

Thanks!

Sometimes switching is the right call. Some tools really do fit how modern teams work better. But the most common mistake I see is migrating the same messy structure into a new tool and getting the same result.

A migration is a great opportunity to fix how your CRM is set up. These are some of the issues I see most that stop AI and automations from working consistently:

1. One pipeline for everything or one too many pipelines when a custom field for filtering would suffice.
2. Free-text fields that lead to inconsistent data that is hard to build automations around and surface reports.
3. Duplicate records.
4. The important stuff is in notes so it's impossible for an automation to act on it.

AI can help with messy data if you ask it to, but if you want to build automations that run without you and actually work consistently you need a strong foundation in place.

Whether you’re staying put or moving, fixing these makes your AI tools, automations and reports noticeably more useful. If you’re migrating, it’s much easier to do it on the way over than after.m

Link to a free session if you want to go deeper on any of this.

Anyone here switched CRMs and found the same problems followed them?

Hey everyone,

I’ve worked as a copywriter and content marketer for a few years. With AI changing so much on the writing side, I’m trying to move toward the more digital, technical side of marketing.

I was already writing a lot of emails back then, and I’d also done HubSpot’s free certifications, so lifecycle marketing felt like a natural fit. Over the last three months I freelanced in Mailchimp (the project is finished now), and I built my own automations in Brevo for a personal project.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next to become a stronger candidate for jobs, and honestly I feel a bit lost:

• What kind of roles should I be aiming for at this stage (e.g. email marketing specialist, CRM executive, lifecycle associate, marketing automation), and which ones have more opportunities right now?
• Should I go deeper into email marketing specifically, or broaden into CRM in general, like learning other CRM platforms?
• What skills or experience actually make someone stand out when hiring for lifecycle/CRM roles?
• Are there any guides, courses or certifications you’d recommend?

I’ve also put together a portfolio of what I’ve done so far and would love feedback on it. Happy to share the link in the comments if that’s allowed here.

Would really appreciate any advice from people who’ve made a similar move or who hire for these roles.

Thanks!

Reach out if you want a custom built CRM

I handle sales at a small B2B software company, and we're trying to get a better handle on our pilot process before it gets too messy. We sell reporting software, and prospects usually want to test it with their own data before committing. The tricky part is that it's not really a self-serve trial. Someone from our team often has to help with the import, get the first report working, and follow up when they run into issues.

We're tracking deals in our CRM, but it's hard to get a clear picture of how much time we're spending on pilots and which ones actually turn into customers. Some leads move through setup quickly, others go quiet halfway through, and sometimes we only realize how much work went into a pilot when we're looking back at the deal.

I'm considering setting up a more structured process to track each pilot's stage, setup tasks, blockers, and outcome. We might also start charging for pilots that require a lot of hands-on work, but I'd want to understand our conversion rates first.

For those running B2B sales through a CRM, how do you track pilots from the initial request through setup and conversion without creating a ton of admin?

I handle sales at a small B2B software company, and we're trying to get a better handle on our pilot process before it gets too messy. We sell reporting software, and prospects usually want to test it with their own data before committing. The tricky part is that it's not really a self-serve trial. Someone from our team often has to help with the import, get the first report working, and follow up when they run into issues.

We're tracking deals in our CRM, but it's hard to get a clear picture of how much time we're spending on pilots and which ones actually turn into customers. Some leads move through setup quickly, others go quiet halfway through, and sometimes we only realize how much work went into a pilot when we're looking back at the deal.

I'm considering setting up a more structured process to track each pilot's stage, setup tasks, blockers, and outcome. We might also start charging for pilots that require a lot of hands-on work, but I'd want to understand our conversion rates first.

For those running B2B sales through a CRM, how do you track pilots from the initial request through setup and conversion without creating a ton of admin?

Reach out if you want a custom built CRM

Hi guys, just looking for a few tips here. Our business uses old legacy software and has a lot of flaws, I come from teck background and my skills are being overlooked as I am new to the company. What's the best way to propose it? It can make the work we do so much quicker. I am thinking of a presentation and demo, but I also want to include factors like time management and extracting reports and stuff.