Hello everyone.. so we’re on the process of reevaluating our CRM setup for a growing 12-person b2b sales team. Grateful for blessings 😄 We need something that handles inbound lead routing and email sequencing smoothly without requiring a full-time admin just to keep custom objects working.

RIght now we're looking at them both, anyone knows how do they compare when it comes to reporting flexibility, automation usability, and data cleanliness for bigger number of records (around 10k+ and growing)?? Thanks ! 😄

The Gap in the Market
The industry is dominated by massive legacy platforms built in the 90s/2000s. They cost small agencies $500–$1,000+ a month, take months to onboard, and are crammed with complex enterprise features a 2-person team will never use. Most scratch agencies either overpay for these bloated systems or run their entire business on messy spreadsheets.
What I’m Building
I’m building a clean, modern alternative focused strictly on speed, zero setup time, and core operational pain points:
Automated Rate Increase Flags:Instantly spotting client policy price hikes so agents can check in before clients shop elsewhere.

Account Bundling Identifiers:Automatically highlighting single-policy clients for easy cross-selling.

Instant Search Navigation: Allowing agents to pull up any client or file in under a second while on a live phone call.

Simplified Client Workflows:Streamlining public client intakes into a clean visual workspace for the agent.

My Question for the Community
My target audience consists of business owners who are heavily non-technical and used to clunky legacy software.
For those who have launched B2B SaaS into traditional, non-tech-savvy industries:
Onboarding: Do non-tech users prefer self-serve CSV imports, or should I mandate a 10-minute guided setup call?

Early Feedback: What’s the best way to extract honest, actionable product feedback from busy small-business owners who aren't used to testing beta software?

Would love to hear your thoughts or learn from anyone who has tackled a similar legacy industry!

For those using HoneyBook, Dubsado, 17hats or another CRM for an event-based business:

What does it handle really well for you?

More importantly, what do you still end up using Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, Notes, Google Calendar or other apps for?

Is there anything you wish your CRM handled that would actually make a noticeable difference in your day-to-day business?

And if you’re happy with your current setup, I’d love to hear that too.

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!

Looking for input from people who know CRMs better than I do. Long post, but the details matter.

Background: I’ve run my business on Salesforce since 2019. Started as a single license for just me. We’re now 12 people and the whole company lives in it. We’ve customized it heavily — it’s not a stock sales pipeline, it’s a system of record built around our specific operating model.
Where we are now: We’ve hit the point where we need to automate more, integrate across platforms, and cut friction so we can keep scaling. The use cases are legitimate and specific. But we’re boxed in on three fronts.

1. Professional Edition limits.
   We’re capped at 5 active flows. No native API access — that’s a $25/user/month add-on. Our current per-license cost is roughly $50–75, so we’re paying somewhere in the $8–10k/year range. To get API access and unlimited flows — features that cost Salesforce essentially nothing to enable — the real answer is upgrading to Enterprise at $165–175/license. That’s 2.5x our current spend before we’ve added a single new capability.

2. Everything else is a third-party subscription.
   Dialer. Call recording and transcription. Accounting sync. LLM integration. Forms — Formstack alone quoted at $4,800/year. Each one is a separate vendor with a separate 12-month lock-in. Stack them up and the per-seat cost gets absurd.

3. The comparison is brutal.
   HubSpot is comparably priced or cheaper and includes a native dialer, automatic call recording and transcription, real workflow automation, SMS, and dramatically better marketing tooling — out of the box. And it’s not just HubSpot. There are a lot of platforms doing this now.

The Agentforce demo.
When we started looking at what we needed, everyone was talking about Agentforce, so I asked for a demo. I told them in writing beforehand: I’m price-sensitive, I assume this requires a license upgrade, and I need to be confident it actually helps my business. No problem, they said.
I got on a call with four people — two from Salesforce, two from a separate implementation firm. The presentation ended at $85,000 for year one and roughly $30,000 ongoing. Nobody had spent enough time on my business to show me a single application relevant to what we actually do. It was generic Agentforce material. I told them they’d missed the mark and moved on.

The retention call.
We demoed HubSpot and were getting ready to switch. Before pulling the trigger, I went back to my rep and was completely candid: seven-year customer, seriously considering not renewing, here’s what I need, I’d rather stay if there’s a path. He said he couldn’t discuss pricing over email and asked for a 15-minute call.

I got on the call. It was him plus another third-party implementation team, and another prepared demo I couldn’t watch because I was driving. They started pitching without asking about my use cases. I cut in and asked for the annual number.

They’d moved me up to Unlimited — their top tier. $35,000/year. Plus the implementation firm on the call. Plus all the third-party apps I still need. When I pointed out I’m planning to double headcount this year, which puts me north of $70k, the answer was a four-year agreement for a better rate.

Where that leaves me.
I can’t spend $70–100k a year on a CRM at 12–24 people. But our workflows are deeply dependent on Salesforce, and switching to HubSpot means trading one set of problems for another plus a painful migration. I don’t know enough about the rest of the market to know what actually handles heavily customized, custom-object-driven workflows.

What I’m asking:
1. Has anyone negotiated Salesforce down meaningfully at this size? What actually moved the number — timing, escalation, multi-year, threatening non-renewal?
2. For those who left Salesforce after heavy customization: what did the migration actually cost you in time and money, and would you do it again?
3. What platforms should I be looking at besides HubSpot for a business with a lot of custom objects and non-standard workflows? Zoho One, Creatio, Attio, something else?
4. Anyone actually getting business value from Agentforce, or is it the emperor’s new clothes?
5. At what point does hiring an engineer to build something in-house stop being a bad idea?
Happy to answer questions about our setup. Not looking to bash Salesforce — it genuinely helped me grow this company. I just can’t make the math work anymore

Just curious

I'm doing some research into how people actually use CRMs day-to-day, and I'd love to hear from people who work with them regularly.

I'm especially interested in the gap between what a CRM can do and what people actually end up doing manually.

For those of you using a CRM:

• What's the most frustrating part of your current workflow?
• Do you frequently have to jump between multiple tools to complete one task?
• What customer information is hardest to get a complete picture of?
• What's one thing you wish your CRM could just handle automatically?
• If your CRM had an AI assistant, what would you actually trust it to do?

I'm trying to understand real workflows rather than just compare CRM feature lists.

If you're willing to share your experience, I'd really appreciate it. I also have a short research survey for anyone who'd prefer to answer anonymously.

One clinic group went from 38% of calls hitting voicemail to 0 missed calls, while new-patient bookings increased 31%.

The AI handles calls, bookings, rescheduling, and escalates edge cases to staff with full context.

Would you consider this part of your CRM stack?

Honestly, our biggest CRM problem wasn't the software itself. It was that our sales process didn't really fit the way the CRM expected us to work.

We spent about six months trying to get everyone to use it properly. Training, reminders, processes, etc. But people kept going back to WhatsApp and spreadsheets because that's where they were already comfortable.

Eventually, we stopped trying to force the process into the software and built something around the way our team actually works.

The biggest surprise wasn't even the features. It was adoption. People started using it naturally because they didn't have to completely change their workflow.

Looking back, those six months were frustrating, but they also made one thing pretty clear: a CRM can have every feature you need and still fail if your team doesn't actually want to use it.

Curious if other teams have experienced the same thing.

This question is raised more often than you might imagine, and the complexity of the move is almost never about the CRM itself. The bottleneck teams in this situation face most frequently comes down to what they’re carrying over into the software.

Many teams are under the impression that their spreadsheets are clean, but there’s often some work to be done to ensure the data is genuinely clean and ready for import. Small teams working with sizable spreadsheets can easily miss contact duplicates, different phone number formats, and rows containing blank fields.

Team members working in that spreadsheet daily might know which data is correct and which to avoid. They just may not have the time to clean up the data or think it’s necessary at that time. But when you try to move that data over into a structured system, the messy spreadsheet becomes a problem.

Here are a few steps to follow that will actually help make your import more efficient:

1. Decide on what data is necessary as you move forward and remove what you no longer need. Just because you tracked a specific data point in the past doesn’t mean it’s actually useful to your team and business going forward.
2. Standardize all your data formatting before you dive into the import, because fixing poorly formatted data inside your unfamiliar CRM will take much longer than doing it in the spreadsheet you've been working in daily. This includes text fields and numerical data, as well as phone numbers. If your vendor has a CSV template with required field formatting, work according to that.
3. Prioritize duplicate record removal to ensure you don’t create irrelevant contact records before you start using your CRM. Delete them from your spreadsheet prior to importing your data.

Spending more time getting your spreadsheet into the best possible shape is the best way to ensure a smooth spreadsheet to CRM transition.

Has anyone else experienced moving their data from spreadsheets into their first CRM? If so, what do you know now that you wish you’d known before importing your data?

What happens when your CRM stops being a place where leads simply sit and starts actively moving them toward a conversation? This lead engine was built around one simple idea: speed matters. Instead of leads from six different portals landing in six different inboxes and waiting an average of 9 hours for a response, it unifies lead capture, uses AI to qualify and score intent, and triggers personalized SMS/email follow-up almost immediately.

The result is a workflow where active buyers don’t get lost in the queue, they’re routed directly to an agent’s phone while they’re still actively browsing. With a 90-second median first response and a reported 2.3× increase in viewing rate, the CRM becomes more than a database, it becomes an active lead-conversion engine. For teams managing high volumes of inbound leads, this is a strong example of how AI, CRM integration and automated outreach can turn response time into a real competitive advantage.

Need help choosing a CRM for a small training/membership organisation
I’ve been given the task of reviewing our current CRM setup and deciding what we should move forward with.
At the moment, we use Glue Up, SurveyMonkey and Xero, and I’m leaning towards Zoho One as a potential replacement/central system.
We’re a training-based organisation, but we also run workshops, programmes and membership activities. A big part of what I’m trying to achieve is to bring everything into one system and automate as much of the admin work as possible.

For example, I’d like to automate things such as:
Membership management and renewals
Training/programme registrations
Automated emails and follow-ups
Surveys and feedback
Invoicing/payment processes
Reporting and analytics
Tracking participants, members and organisations
Tracking our company website and member activities on it
Internal workflows and notifications
Connecting different parts of the organisation so data doesn’t have to be entered multiple times

I’ve been using Glue Up and, honestly, I find its analytics quite limited for what we need. The integration and automation options also feel restrictive, which is becoming a problem as we try to improve our processes.
Zoho One seems to offer much more flexibility because of the wider ecosystem and the ability to build workflows across different applications rather than just using it as a CRM.
My main concern is the amount of work involved in building the system properly from scratch. I’ll essentially be designing the CRM structure, workflows, automations and reporting myself, so I don’t want to jump from one problem to another.
Has anyone here actually implemented Zoho One across an organisation in rather than just using Zoho CRM?
Would you recommend it for a training/membership organisation? What were the biggest problems you ran into, and is there anything you wish you had known before starting?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who have used Zoho alongside accounting, surveys, events/training and membership management.

I've been trying to work out what companies in Southeast Asia are actually using instead of Salesforce. HubSpot, Zoho, Freshworks and Neocrm all come up, but most of what I find is another feature comparison.

I'd rather hear from someone who had to use the replacement after rollout. Which one did you choose? Did regional support and integrations hold up, and was reporting across countries manageable? Did the sales team actually use it?

Would you make the same choice again? If you can share roughly how big the team was and which countries you were covering, that would help.

What has been your biggest challenge: admissions, lead management, student communication, automation, or integrations?

If you could change one thing about your CRM, what would it be?

I’ve been building a CRM focused specifically on the people and conversations you come across on Reddit.

I’m getting pretty close to launching it. Right now I’m mainly fixing bugs, cleaning things up, and making sure the core workflows are actually useful.

At the moment, the platform can:

• Discover relevant Reddit conversations based on what you sell or the kinds of problems your potential customers are talking about
• Save those searches and surface new relevant public posts when they appear
• Explain why a post may be relevant instead of just throwing keyword matches at you
• Let you decide yourself whether a post is actually worth engaging with
• Show whether you’ve already interacted with that person before
• Keep previous conversations and interaction history connected to that person
• Turn someone into a saved relationship when you actually want to keep track of them
• Automatically summarize conversations and pull out useful context
• Organize people into custom lists
• Track selected people with watchlists and see when they post something new
• Add tasks and follow-ups
• See who you’ve spoken to, what you talked about, when you last interacted, and what the next step is
• Keep opportunities → conversations → relationships → follow-ups in one place

One thing I want to make very clear:

The platform does not automatically DM people, auto-comment, or send AI-generated outreach.

For example, say you sell a CRM for social media and want to know when someone posts that they’re looking for a tool like that.

You could save that search, and when a relevant public post appears, the platform surfaces it.

You then decide whether it’s actually relevant, whether you want to reply, and what you want to say.

I personally don’t want to build another tool that turns Reddit into an AI-slop mass-outreach channel.

The bigger idea is to help you find relevant conversations, know whether you’ve interacted with someone before, remember the context, and keep track of the people you actually want to build a relationship with.

Before I launch, I’d really like feedback from people who use Reddit for business, sales, freelancing, community building, research, etc.

What would you actually want a Reddit CRM like this to do?

Is there something you currently do manually on Reddit that you wish a tool handled for you?

And looking at the features above, is there anything I’m missing or anything you think is completely unnecessary?

I’m still early enough that the feedback here can genuinely change what I build next.

Something I've been thinking about lately:

When a business starts getting more inquiries than usual, what system do you use to keep everything organized?

Do you reply immediately, set reminders for later, use a CRM, or have some kind of automated follow-up?

I've noticed that replying once is usually easy. The difficult part is remembering to follow up again when someone doesn't respond. I've noticed that Multi_Nudge helps with this by making the follow-up process easier.

I'm curious what other small businesses are doing to handle this without spending hours every day on it.

We brought in Scalelist for the past couple weeks after seeing it mentioned here. The UI is clean and the filters are pretty thorough - you can drill down by industry, company size, job titles, the usual stuff. Data quality seems decent, maybe 70-80% accuracy on emails from what I've spot checked.

The pricing is where it gets tricky. Their starter plan is like a hundred bucks a month for 1,000 verified emails, which feels steep compared to other lead list building tools. Also noticed their mobile number coverage is pretty limited - only found numbers for maybe 15% of my contacts.

Biggest frustration is the search speed. Running a search with multiple filters can take 30-45 seconds, which adds up when you're building multiple lists. Their Chrome extension is buggy too - crashes half the time on LinkedIn.

We've been looking at UpLead as well but their credits system is confusing and I keep hearing mixed things. Also been eyeing Prospeo which seems to have better mobile coverage from what I've read.

Anyone else using Scalelist for outbound prospecting? How's your experience been? curious what others think about it specifically before I fully commit to switching.

I’m building an AI CRM platform and struggling a bit with a good leads integration. I’ve tried Apollo, but the integration hasn’t been good. Any suggestions?

Some teams find CRMs helpful, while others feel they create more admin work.

What’s the experience for most teams, and what makes the biggest difference?

Recently I went to an AI conference and got quite a handful of leads ~300. Felt like the right point where I should switch from my excel sheets to actually start considering a CRM now since I will be needing things like email open rates, follow ups, tracking lead with a person in team etc.

Sadly, all the popular CRMs I checked out, had some small but critical feature behind a paywall. I tried hubspot, leadsquared, zoho crm, asana(as a hack) before I gave up. Like even using basic filters and sort feature is paywalled!

Knowing that selecting a CRM is going to be a one time activity, I really don't want to pick a CRM and later realise that some stupid feature requires $10 to unlock.

At this point I’m seriously considering building a simple CRM for myself that just includes all of this without locking random useful features behind higher plans. I strongly believe for small business a proper functional CRM should be free of such bs. If you have less than 1000 leads to manage, happy to onboard you if interested (free of cost ofc).