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?

I spent years dealing with broken software, overpriced subscriptions, and CRMs that just feel like glorified spreadsheets. I finally hit a breaking point. Instead of paying for a dozen different fragmented tools just to run a business, I decided to build the exact solution I was looking for.

The journey to get here was an absolute grind. I put my head down and focused entirely on the product to build an ecosystem exactly how it needed to be built, doing it completely on my own terms.

The result is the OpenLuxe CRM. I set out to make something that actually works the way founders and operators think, solving the massive pain points that still plague the industry.

Here is how we fixed it:

• A built in AI partner: I didn't want a static database. We built Odysseus, an AI agent that acts as your personal intelligence hub. You can ask it anything about your pipeline, and it extracts structured bullet points to build out ongoing strategy threads for every single contact.
• Automated communication: We baked in configurable AI receptionists that can answer inbound calls, pull CRM data directly from the transcripts, and even auto-reply to inbound SMS messages.
• True consolidation: It connects natively with our Storyline Builder and custom website tools. Your leads flow directly into a customizable deal flow pipeline where you can track close likelihoods, and you can draft and send invoices or secure payment links all in one place.

But we know there are still more problems to solve, and the whole point of this post is that we want to make our CRM even better. I want to hear from you: what are the biggest pain points with your current CRM? What are the problems that nobody seems to be addressing? Tell us what is broken, and we will build the solution for you.

I’ve been looking at how small and mid-sized manufacturers manage their operations, and a common problem seems to be having enquiries, orders, inventory, production and dispatch spread across different tools.

We’ve been exploring what a manufacturing-specific CRM/management system could look like:

Enquiry → Quotation → Order → Inventory → Production → Dispatch → Payment

With inventory tracking, suppliers, production status, order management, invoices and reporting connected in one place.

I’m with GLAD Studio, and we build custom business software, but I’m particularly interested in hearing from manufacturers:

What’s the #1 process in your business you’d want such a system to automate?

Would also be interesting to know what you currently use — Excel, ERP, custom software, or something else?

Seeing a lot of posts here about switching CRMs so I figured I would share what I have learned running migrations across HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive. Most failures are not technical. They are planning gaps. Here is the breakdown.

Where migrations actually go wrong

• Data mapping, not data volume. The problem is rarely "too many records." It is mismatched field types, custom objects with no equivalent in the target system and duplicate or dirty records that get faithfully copied over instead of cleaned.
• Underestimating integration debt. Every Zapier zap, webhook and third-party app connected to your old CRM has to be rebuilt, not just "migrated." Teams find this out mid-project, not during planning.
• No rollback plan. If cutover day goes sideways, you need a way back. Skipping this is the single most common cause of "we migrated but now we are firefighting for two weeks."
• Treating it as an IT project instead of a change management project. The tooling is the easy part. Getting sales and support to actually use the new system with clean habits is the hard part.

Sequence to follow

1. Audit before you map. Inventory every custom field, workflow, and integration in the source system. Flag what is actually used versus legacy clutter. Do not migrate dead weight.
2. Clean at the source. Dedupe and standardize data in the old CRM before export. It is far easier to fix there than after import.
3. Migrate in phases, not all at once. Start with core objects (contacts, deals) in a sandbox, validate, then move workflows and automations, then integrations last.
4. Run parallel for a defined window. Keep both systems live for a set period (one to two weeks typically) so you can catch what broke before fully cutting over.
5. Train on workflows, not features. Do not just show people buttons. Show them how their existing process maps to the new system.

Timeline reality check: for a mid-size team (50-200 users, moderate customization), budget six to twelve weeks. Anyone promising a clean migration in a weekend is either overselling or you have a very simple setup.

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!

people kept arguing in here about which sending platform is "the best" and i got tired of opinions so i just... tested it myself.
im the founder of a b2b saas (keeping it vague on purpose, sorry). 5 of us, $73k MRR, i do all outbound personally because we cant afford a dedicated SDR yet. every dollar in my stack comes out of product budget basically so i care a lot about what actually works vs what looks cool in a demo.
the test: same exact campaign, same copy, same list, sent from 3 platforms over 6 weeks. Instantly, Lemlist, and Reply.io. i wanted to know if the platform itself actually matters or if its all just infrastructure and copy.
BEFORE
i was running everything through Instantly because someone in a slack group told me it was the cheapest option for multi-inbox sending. and it is cheap. but my numbers were rough. 1.8% reply rate, open rates hovering around 38-41% depending on the week, and bounce rate sitting at like 4.2% which i now know is way too high. i was also warming up inboxes for only 10 days because i was impatient and wanted to start booking meetings yesterday.
the list was 2,400 contacts. mid-market ops leaders, director level and above. i used Clay to pull the initial list and Prospeo for email finding, then ran everything through ZeroBounce before sending. after verification i had about 2,100 usable contacts so i split them into 3 groups of 700 each.
same subject lines. same 3 step sequence. same sending schedule (8am-11am recipient timezone, weekdays only). only variable was the platform.
AFTER
ok so 6 weeks later here are the actual numbers.
Instantly: 44.1% open rate, 2.9% reply rate, 1.7% bounce rate. this was on 5 inboxes warmed for 21 days this time (learned my lesson from rushing warmup before, cost me 2 domains that got burned). sending 35/day per inbox. the deliverability dashboard in Instantly is honestly the best part of the product. the campaign builder UI is... fine. its fine.
Lemlist: 47.3% open rate, 3.4% reply rate, 1.4% bounce rate. same inboxes warmed for the same duration on Maildoso. lemlist surprised me here. the open rate bump might be noise but the reply rate was consistently higher across all 3 steps of the sequence. the liquid syntax stuff for personalization is nice but i didnt use it for this test since i wanted to keep variables controlled. costs more though, $59/mo per seat vs Instantly at $30/mo for the growth plan.
Reply.io: 41.8% open rate, 2.1% reply rate, 2.3% bounce rate. this one disappointed me. same list, same copy, worse results across the board. the bounce rate being higher on the same verified list is weird and i dont have a great explanation. maybe their sending infrastructure handles throttling differently? i tested it for the full 6 weeks and it never really caught up. the multichannel stuff in Reply.io is cool if you need linkedin + email in one place but for pure cold email it came in last.
so the winner was Lemlist by a decent margin. not massive but 3.4% vs 2.9% vs 2.1% reply rate on 700 contacts each is enough for me to care.
the thing i didnt expect: platform matters less than i assumed. the gap between first and third place was like 1.3 percentage points on reply rate. meanwhile when i fixed my warmup protocol (going from 10 days to 21 days) my reply rate on Instantly alone went from 1.8% to 2.9%. thats a bigger jump than switching platforms entirely. i spent weeks agonizing over which tool to use when the real problem was that i was being lazy about infrastructure.
my total monthly spend for outbound right now is about $280/mo. Lemlist seat, Maildoso for inboxes ($84/mo for 10), ZeroBounce credits, and Clay on the starter plan. thats it. for a company our size thats manageable but i feel it every month.
im sticking with Lemlist for now. the extra $29/mo over Instantly is worth the reply rate difference at my volume. if i was sending 10x more i might think differently because Instantly scales cheaper.
anyway thats basically it. the test took way longer than i wanted and i probably should have been doing product work instead but at least now i know

Been running a gym for a while, changed CRM software a couple of times, you know, checking out different options

So here's the deal. What gets advertised by these software companies isn't really aligning with what gym owners like me truly need on a daily basis.

Stuff I use all the time:

• an easy mobile booking system (if members need to tap 8 times to book, they won’t bother)
• a billing system that isn’t a headache and deals with failed payments by itself
• a simple check-in process, not one that feels like hacking into the Pentagon
• waitlists that automatically bump people up when a spot opens
• a quick way to send messages to attendees of tomorrow’s early class without needing a degree in data extraction

The stuff they pitch to me:

• fancy dashboards fit for big corporations (look, I have around 150 members, I don't need all that serious business tooling)
• links to dozens of other apps that I’ll probably never click on
• branded merchandise stores (really, during a demo with Mindbody this was a big sell, pretty sure none of us need that)

And what’s still missing:

• being able to see who hasn’t shown up for weeks and nudge them with a message directly through the software
• introductory offers that don't take an age to figure out
• a mobile admin interface that doesn’t crash (I mean, I should be able to manage stuff on my phone on-the-go)

Signed up with GloFox about 8 months back, and it’s doing okay for the stuff we do every day. The app works well, payments are smooth, and waitlists manage themselves. Still some features missing for keeping in touch with members, but, hey, it could be worse.

Sometimes I wish these software developers would just sit in a gym for a day to see what we really need, not what a big corporate buyer might want.

If you're a small agency owner and managing multiple clients, companies and deals at the same time, you've probably experienced at least one of these:

• Forgetting to follow up

• Losing track of deal status

• Having contacts scattered across different places

• Not knowing the real value of your pipeline

So I built this Notion CRM to solve those problems.

Problem: Losing track of which deals are active vs closed

Solution: Change one status, everything (companies, contacts, reports) moves automatically between Active/Won/Lost views

Problem: Forgetting to follow up until it's too late

Solution: Health check formula flags deals as On Track, Closing Soon, Late, or Done based on expected date

Problem: Not knowing real pipeline value

Solution: Weighted value formula calculates expected revenue based on deal stage a "New Lead" worth $10k isn't the same as a "Proposal Sent" worth $10k

I’ve spent the last year building a CRM/revenue platform, one thing I’ve realized is that everyone seems to hate something different about the software they already use but is it enough to switch?

Some people complain about data entry.
Others hate moving deals through pipelines.
Some spend hours creating quotes.
Others struggle with the handoff between sales and operations.

Before any useful tools can be built, we need to learn from people who use CRMs every day rather than assume we know the answers.

I personally come from a corporate energy and infrastructure role and the crm was the glue we used to hold our teams together but still each one had lacking capabilities which fostered the current platform I’ve built fortifiers.

So I’m not looking to promote anything but genuinely curious:

What’s the biggest frustration with your current CRM?
What’s one feature you wish existed but doesn’t?
If you could delete one part of your workflow forever, what would it be?
I’m not here to pitch anything. I’m genuinely trying to understand where existing CRMs still fall short. If anyone is interested in seeing what I’m building afterward, I’m happy to share it privately, but I’d value the discussion regardless.

does anyone have resources to study the sla for the on prem version? because Microsoft's documentation is focused on the power platform version (the cloud version)