Coming off UNBOUND im increasingly convinced that HubSpot’s not long for this world. Particularly when it comes to early stage startups. Its ability to justify its price is becoming harder and harder.

Clearly they know this and it’s part of an effort to move up market (might succeed, but I’m doubtful). So I’m curious, what gins be the next defacto CRM for the Series A and Series B folks?

Pipedrive seems like a nightmare. Not sure what else is out there that’s well built and truly scales.

-consultant that makes most of their money on HubSpot and early stage startups

"I think we renew in November, but procurement handles the notice period." That's the kind of answer I'm trying to find a place for in our CRM. I handle discovery calls, and a comment like that leaves me without a confirmed renewal date or a deadline for giving notice. The day and year aren't specified either. I'd need more information before using it to assess when our deal might close.

My inclination is to keep the quote in the call note and set a task for myself to confirm the renewal date and notice deadline with the buyer. An approved call recording could go through Vomo AI for transcription; I'd check the passage against the audio before copying it into the note. The note would identify who said it and when. I would leave the renewal date field empty until confirmed, and assess our expected close date separately.

The snag is finding these deals again. If the tentative month only lives in notes, a report filtered on renewal dates won't pick it up. Do you use a separate text field for an estimated renewal window and a confirmation status, or rely on tasks until you have an exact date? I don't want to enter November 1 just to satisfy a date field and have that placeholder show up as a customer deadline in someone else's report.

A few things I've noticed help small agencies/solo businesses once deals start slipping through the cracks:

Keep company info, contact info, and the deal itself linked not spread across a spreadsheet, your email, and your notes app

Have one view that shows every deal's stage at a glance, so nothing needs "checking in on" from memory

Track deal value somewhere, even roughly knowing your pipeline's worth changes how you prioritize your week

If you're a solo owner and a paid CRM tool is just out of budget right now, I build Notion CRMs and I'm happy to send mine over free genuinely, no strings, just comment or DM if that's useful to you

I am a one man band outfit. I dont need multiple apps and addons...what I need is the following all built-in

• A work email (I have the domain) and interface that looks or mimics outlook in functionality
• Email sequencing
• An outbound/inbound phone system to mainly call US and UK
• CRM/ATS functionality.

Please suggest some very low cost all in one options.

We are a 2 person companies. Doing lots of outreach and also public tenders offers. I am technical the other founder is non technical.
I saw twenty seems like a great CRM. Will I be able to self-host on my linux computer and send over access credentials so that my cofounder can use it too. So that we can have access to the same dashboard and work together on it. He uses a Mac.

Spreadsheets, WhatsApp, sticky notes—what do you keep going back to, and what makes it work better for you?

I'm an accountant, and I noticed that those big CRMs like Karbon, Financial Cents, and others aren't caring for the customers that much. They only improve their software if they believe it's needed, but I feel like they're not in the accounting day to day to know all the issues. So I built my own CRM.

After trying to get firms to use it, every conversation went the same way. They'd say it looks good, come back when you have some clients using it, then we'll talk. Which is funny because how am I supposed to get clients if nobody's willing to be the first one.

All I want is feedback so the software can be improved with real data. If you're a firm that wants to have this in exchange for feedback, I'd appreciate it. Not seeking anything here, just trying to get a firm other than me to use it.

Please DM me if you're interested.

I make Boring CRM for solo property agents. Here's a small test I'd use for any mobile CRM, including mine.

Create a fictional buyer using your own number. Give them one awkward requirement: “Ground floor only. Call next month, after the move.”

Then test four things:

1. Close the app. Reopen it and find that requirement without digging through unrelated notes.
2. Set a test reminder for a few minutes ahead. Enable notifications, lock the phone and check what actually appears.
3. If you need access between viewings, turn on airplane mode and try reading the saved details.
4. Export or back up the test record. Check whether the notes and dates survive, and whether the file is useful outside that app. A contact list and a restorable backup solve different problems.

One fake buyer won't prove a CRM scales. It can expose a daily annoyance before your real contacts depend on it.

Which has caused you the most trouble: finding context, reminders, offline access or getting data out?

we have been using hubspot crm for small business operations for about six months now and it has been great for keeping our pipeline organized.

the clean contact timelines, native email tracking, and simple layout made onboarding our team smooth. it saved us a lot of manual data entry right away.

for other small teams using it, what specific features, dashboards, or integrations gave your team the biggest efficiency boost?

I have been working in the BDC department for a year, this is my very first dealer/BDC job. I have a coworker who has been here for around 3 months now and i noticed that she has been messing with the vinsolution CRM. one of the things being her messing with the advanced settings putting her name on all of the sticky round robin, giving her a BIG advantage on our leads even when she is not there. I just want to see if there is anything else I should be on the look out for or any advice. she did mention her previous manager was teaching her some advantages on the web, but now i’m starting to think there is more to it

Is there some other "basic" plan/feature I can subscribe to that will accomplish the following:

• Contact list (CRM)
• Marketing Emails (manual)
• A few automated Workflows
• Meta ad integration

I don't need Ticketing (anymore), Deals, Tasks, AEO, Websites, Blogs, Prospecting, Revenue, Sales features.

Hubspot is getting to be too complex & overpriced.

Recently, our IT team rolled out an AI CRM, but adoption has been slower than we had anticipated. All departments within the business have different needs. Sales hopes to use the tool for predictive analytics, customer service wants automated reports, the management team is looking for forecasting upgrades, and the department responsible for compliance wants assurance that the customers' private data is being handled in the right way.

The technology itself was not the biggest challenge. We had more problems than expected with synchronizing the governance scheme, security, quality of the data, and users' expectations from different departments. Several senior managers are worried that it makes no sense to proceed with the rollout. If you have implemented AI CRM before, what worked in your case?

The sales department is looking to change its CRM, and I can see from watching the demos that the platforms available would enhance the way they work. My main worry is what happens to the processes and departments connected to the CRM. At the moment customer data goes through finance, customer service, marketing, data warehouse and some internal systems. I have a bad feeling that we are going to repeat the mistakes of the past once again.

To those who have recently implemented sales management systems, what integrations were essential for you? I can guess the features are going to include identity, email/calendar, accounting/billing, marketing technology and BI, but I am also interested to know about unexpected dependencies that occurred during implementation process. Moreover, did you make the CRM system the system of record for the customer data, or do you store it somewhere else?

One thing we’ve run into quite a few times during CRM cleanup projects is a field that nobody really knows the purpose of anymore.

Someone created it for a specific reason a few years ago. Then a workflow started using it. Later, a report depended on it. Eventually nobody remembers why it was there, but deleting it feels risky.

We’ve had cases where a field looked completely unused until we traced the workflows, reports and integrations connected to it.

So when we clean up a CRM, we don’t start by deleting everything that looks old. We first check where the field is being used and what depends on it. Some things can be removed safely; others just need to be replaced properly first.

It’s a small thing, but it has saved us from breaking parts of a CRM that looked unrelated to the cleanup.

What’s the most unexpected dependency you’ve found while cleaning up a CRM?

we've had the same linkedin extension for sales for like 2 years now and its starting to fell clunky. the UI hasnt been updated in forever and it crashes on every other profile. right now im using sales nativator + LeadIQ for contact finding but LeadIQ is getting expensive for what it does.

but im wondering what else is out there. what linkedin chrome extension are you all running these days? looking for something that:

• doesnt crash every 5 minutes
• finds verified emails (not just guesses)
• ideally has mobile numbers too
• plays nice with Salesforce

im in SaaS, team of 8 SDRs, doung about 200 prospects per day across the team. price isnt a huge issue if the data quality is there. my manager keeps asking why our bounce rates are so high and honestly i think its the tools and not us lol

Is there one (or a few) CRMs that are best for realtors in the US, in 2026?

I'm looking for one and wondering which ones are most recommended, and why.

Is there a particular CRM that has been a game changer for you, as a realtor?

I run a small freight forwarding company. Our customer history was a mailbox: who asked for 700 pallets, where a thread went quiet, which company bought three times and has not written since spring. Every CRM I tried wanted me to type all of that in by hand, so none of them lasted a month.

So I spent the last months building one that reads the mailbox instead. It connects over IMAP, Gmail or Microsoft 365, reads the history once, keeps it in sync, and remembers what each thread was about: deals closed, inquiries left open, quantities, products. From that it builds one list of companies worth another try.

On my own install: 13,688 conversations read, 181 companies enriched, 178 people with a real reason to call again.

Some notes for this sub specifically:

Everything runs on your machine. Postgres, the API, the app and the agent, four containers, one command to start. About 430 MB to pull, amd64 and arm64, runs fine on a 4 GB VPS.

The AI part is optional and it is yours. You paste an OpenRouter, OpenAI or Anthropic key, or you paste nothing and keep a normal CRM without summaries. Without a key nothing leaves the machine.

License is AGPL-3.0. Docs are at reloopcrm. com/docs, install is documented, and there is a rollback path in there too.

What it is not: it is early, I am the main user, there is no mobile app, no import from another CRM yet, and the win-back ranking is my own scoring, not something proven on other businesses.

Repo: github. com/reloopcrm/reloop

If you self-host something with a mailbox in it, I would like to hear where this breaks for you.

I just got asked to "do" CRM setup. I worked with the founder previously and they want me to come on to do something I honestly haven't done. They know this and said "just give it a try" lol.

The company has like 4 pieces of software that different teams are using to manage their departments (apartment renting software (pipedrive), some vacation rentals (cloudbeds), gym software (trybe), cafe software (sevenrooms), conference room booking, and events), it's a luxury apartment compex. I have set up a customer support CRM in the past and sales CRM in salesforce, but I am just lost. Nothing reliably feeds into their central CRM except the conference room bookings, but it's one way.

Would anyone lend me their time or advice on how to set this up? I can chat whenever, if you can warn me of pitfalls lmk.

Basically we have a TON of data in the cafe about the persona and each person bc they research people and tag them, so that's an interesting piece.

Right now I am making sure

1. All the tags / classifications are uniform across the systems
2. All the tags have a home in hubspot and are organized
3. The de-duping is working in the CDP (customer data platform)
4. And most of all, our CRM is midway through an integration sevenrooms (cafe) and trybe (gym), but management is getting impatient. Should I try to build something with Zapier...? Or just leave it and upload manually in the meantime to make sure my framework makes sense...?

The conference room data and events has no integration slated

I just got asked to "do" CRM setup. I worked with the founder previously and they want me to come on to do something I honestly haven't done. They know this and said "just give it a try" lol.

The company has like 4 pieces of software that different teams are using to manage their departments (apartment renting software (pipedrive), some vacation rentals (cloudbeds), gym software (trybe), cafe software (sevenrooms), conference room booking, and events), it's a luxury apartment compex. I have set up a customer support CRM in the past and sales CRM in salesforce, but I am just lost. Nothing reliably feeds into their central CRM except the conference room bookings, but it's one way.

Would anyone lend me their time or advice on how to set this up? I can chat whenever, if you can warn me of pitfalls lmk.

Basically we have a TON of data in the cafe about the persona and each person bc they research people and tag them, so that's an interesting piece.

Right now I am making sure

1) All the tags / classifications are uniform across the systems

2) All the tags have a home in hubspot and are organized

3) The de-duping is working in the CDP (customer data platform)

4) And most of all, our CRM is midway through an integration sevenrooms (cafe) and trybe (gym), but management is getting impatient. Should I try to build something with Zapier...? Or just leave it and upload manually in the meantime to make sure my framework makes sense...?

The conference room data and events has no integration slated

Hi everyone,

If you're looking for something straightforward and easy to use for cold calling and cold mailing without dealing with bloated, pricey cloud software, you might want to take a look at Prospect Legend (a tool I’ve been building, currently in beta).

I used to work at a call center a while back, and when I searched for a simple solution for my own prospecting needs, I found most tools are either too expensive for my needs or packed with unnecessary features. I relied on Excel sheets for a while, but tracking data over time can get a bit messy.

So, I built a no-nonsense tool that is 100% local for Windows, designed to avoid heavy setups or account creations, for solopreneurs or very small teams :

• Direct Excel/CSV Integration: It reads and updates your local .xlsx files directly, featuring file locking and automatic backups.
• Streamlined Workflow: Includes an integrated auto-dialer, quick status logging (No answer, Subscribed, Refused), an appointment planner, and handles 4 email templates to pre-fill follow-up pipelines in one click.
• Native Protocols: Launches actions directly from your default phoning and mailing apps.
• Gamified Sessions: Features a gamified system (XP points, combos) to keep morale going during calling sessions.

FULL DISCLOSURE:

• The interface is currently in French

  (English version coming very soon)

• . Obviously, if there is enough interest from this community, I'll probably translate the whole thing into English!

• No Cloud Sync: It operates using structured local .xlsx file rather than live native syncs with tools like Salesforce or HubSpot.

I’m looking for a few people (8 – 12 ppl) to test out the beta.

If you're open to testing it during a 30-day free trial period and sharing some much-appreciated feedback, DM me and I'll send over the link to the beta test recruitment page.

Have a great day, and thanks for reading!