I keep running into the same issue with CRM imports:

Some rows are clearly fine.

Some rows are clearly trash.

But the painful ones are in the middle.

Examples:

same email, different phone

same phone, different name spelling

same company, slightly different title / city / source

records that look mergeable, but not safely

The obvious stuff is easy.

What I’m trying to understand is the middle zone.

How do you actually handle that at scale before import?

Do you:

hold them back in a review bucket

manually label them

merge conservatively

import and fix later

just accept some contamination

I’m not asking for theory. I mean your actual workflow.

I specifically want to be able to export those notes, weekly, and use them for a sales report, but Hub Spot dont do this unless you pay for the next tier up, and Nimble dont have the functionality. Can anyone recommend one? Its esentially something we could run out of an excel spreadsheet so we're looking for something cheap. Thankyou!

I built an AI Agent that fully controls my CRM. Contacts, tagging, workflows, communication, internal notifications, pipelines, scheduled tasks, posting, etc. Anyone else build something like this that runs on auto-pilot. Curious to learn who else is doing this.

For people who actively use a CRM for outbound sales, do you prefer keeping prospecting, enrichment, outreach, and CRM as separate tools, or would you rather manage more of the workflow in one place?

For example, would it be useful to define your ICP and receive a smaller list of already-researched and qualified companies, including the right decision-makers, enrichment data, why they match, and why they may be worth contacting?

Only approved leads or positive replies would then be added to the actual CRM, rather than filling it with every prospect.

Would that make your workflow easier, or do you prefer using tools such as Sales Navigator, Clay, Apollo, outreach software, and your CRM separately?

What would a combined platform need to do before you would consider using it instead of your current setup?

Thanks for any constructive feedback!

We (our team) recently made a few websites for a college, integrating a CRM system to make the application process and customer service easier. It was AI-integrated.

We want to know whether a manually managed CRM system is more effective than an AI-integrated CRM, if so, then in what ways? Advantages, limitations and other things.

Was there a specific moment when spreadsheets started becoming frustrating?

What was the biggest challenge?