Hi! We have to build a database for users/members and different organizations of a network. That database will be the core of a big non profit project that is very important to us. At first we were thinking on designing the database and developing its interfaces from scratch, but we are now considering using a CRM. It has to be open source (we are considering suiteCRM, CiviCRM, Odoo, ERPNext/FrappeCRM, EspoCRM, Krayin/LaravelCRM, and Dolibarr, but we have yet to study them).

The thing is that we would then use the database of the CRM to hold the members/clients of the network, so we would need a very flexible database, and it being easily connectable via API to different other web services. I know this should be feasible, but would you recommend doing something like that?

The other way would be to make our own database and connect it via API with a CRM so the CRM database stays in sync with our core client/member database.

For you guys experienced in this CRM lands... does any of the proposals sound more practical than the other? or a third idea?

thanks!

Hello,

Can you share your platform and the annual costs and set up.

Having a nightmare with salesmen ATM hounding me for 45 mins calls just to get a rough idea of costs.

Thanks

I've spent quite a few years working with CRM and business software, and one thing keeps bothering me.

The software itself is often not even the expensive part.

It's everything around it.

Consultants. Implementation projects. Workshops. Custom configuration. Data migration. Training. Then months later you're still adapting your company to the software you bought.

I always wanted something much simpler:

sign up, bring the data you already have, answer a few questions about how your company works, review what the system proposes, and start.

No consultancy just to get started.
No custom code for every company.
No €50k implementation before you know whether the product even helps you.

And I also don't really want 15 separate SaaS tools anymore.

My ideal model is one platform with a small number of apps, like Sales, Support and Operations, sharing the same customers, work, automation and context underneath.

AI should mostly remove setup and admin friction. Not be another chatbot bolted onto the side.

So I've been building around a few principles:

• onboarding should take minutes, not weeks
• importing existing data should be normal
• software should adapt to the company
• configuration should replace customer-specific code
• you should be able to start small and add more later
• AI should prepare and configure work, while people stay in control

I'm not really looking for feedback on a feature list. More interested in whether this underlying idea matches how other people experience business software.

If you could replace your CRM / business software tomorrow, what would stop you?

The price?
Migration?
Implementation effort?
Losing your current processes?
Getting the team to adopt another system?

Curious which one is actually the biggest blocker.

I own a contractor business, and I have been with Jobber for approximately 2 years now. I noticed that for the last few months, I was being overcharged because they upgraded me to a plan I never asked for, and when I contacted them, threatening that I would file a chargeback, they deactivated my account and will not allow me to access my customer information. I am honestly sick of these guys. I keep trying to reach them, they say someone will get back to me and no one does, I read other reviews, and this doesn't seem as uncommon as I thought. They do a bunch of other scams. You'd think that because they're big in this field, you can trust them, but it seems to be the opposite.

At this point, I accepted that all my data would be lost, and I just want to migrate to something else that's reliable. Any recommendations you guys have will be appreciated. A couple of options I'm seeing on reddit is housecallpro, clientility and joist. I'm conflicted and don't want to find myself in a mess like this again. It has been stressful and disappointing dealing with this after being a loyal customer for 2 years.

I’m researching how this works in real companies, specifically teams using HubSpot + QuickBooks.

I’ve heard a few examples of the two systems agreeing initially, then getting out of sync later after things like partial payments, refunds, reversals, credit memos, or an invoice being changed.

But I don’t want to assume that’s common based on a handful of cases.

If you’ve actually dealt with this at your company, what happened the last time the two systems disagreed?

How did someone notice?

Who ended up fixing it, sales, finance, RevOps, an outside consultant, someone else?

And what did fixing it actually involve?

Especially interested in firsthand examples rather than what the integration is supposed to do.

Nowadays, whenever I open Reddit, everyone is building something. A CRM that can do anything.
Unified inbox
commitment tracking
stakeholder mapping
deal health and score
sentiment analysis

My question is: do sales reps need these kinds of tools, or are they happy to fill them out and do their work individually on Excel sheets without the help of any crm

I’m working on a SaaS product where our customers receive leads from multiple lead-capture platforms. Some of these platforms, including Google Pay-Per-Click and various home-service lead sources, send the lead details via email rather than through an API/webhook.
For example, a customer has:
[email protected]
and receives an email containing:
New Lead
Name: Dave Smith
Phone: xxx
Email: [email protected]
Address: xxx
Service: AC repair
What I want is for the SaaS product to automatically pick up those lead emails from the customer’s mailbox, extract the lead details, and create a lead in the CRM—without the customer having to manually copy the information from the email.
I’m curious how other CRMs handle this.
Has anyone built or seen a system like this? How do CRMs typically tackle leads coming into a customer’s Gmail/Outlook mailbox?
Do they connect directly to the mailbox, use forwarding addresses, email parsing services, or something else?
I’d especially love to hear about real-world implementations or examples of CRMs/products that already do this.
Any ideas or experiences would be appreciated.

I m an SDR at a mid size b2b saas company and our account list is getting ridiculous. There are hundreds of accounts in the crm and I can't tell if I'm spending time on the right ones.

Right now I mostly sort by company size, industry, and whether they opened an email before. It feels pretty weak though. Some accounts look like a great fit but never respond, while smaller ones sometimes have several people checking the site or looking at pricing.

Our team has started looking at buyer intent and technographic data, but I'm still not sure how much weight to give those signals. A single page visit doesn't seem like enough, but repeated activity from different people at the same company feels worth paying attention to. I guess the timing matters too, since old activity can make the account look hotter than it is.

How are people here ranking accounts each day? Do you have an account score or a set of signals that tells reps who to contact first? I'm trying to make the list less random and stop wasting good prospecting time, thanks in advance

Estoy desarrollando un SaaS para gestionar conversaciones con clientes donde pueden participar tanto IA como agentes humanos.

La idea es que la IA pueda resolver parte de la conversación, pero cuando sea necesario una persona pueda tomarla, darle seguimiento y continuar sin perder el contexto.

Actualmente estoy trabajando en una vista general, donde intento concentrar cosas como:

• Conversaciones abiertas y pendientes.
• Clientes esperando respuesta.
• Conversaciones sin agente asignado.
• Seguimientos vencidos.
• Participación IA vs. agentes humanos.
• Tiempo de primera respuesta.
• Volumen de mensajes.
• Conversaciones atendidas solamente por IA, solamente por humanos o de forma mixta.

Pero antes de seguir agregando funcionalidades quiero evitar caer en el clásico problema de construir 200 cosas que nadie utiliza 😅.

Me interesaría especialmente la opinión de quienes hayan utilizado herramientas como Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgias, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Crisp o similares.

¿Qué información o función considerarían indispensable en una plataforma así?

Por ejemplo:

1. ¿Qué debería mostrar el dashboard para saber rápidamente si la operación está funcionando bien?
2. ¿Qué esperan que suceda cuando una conversación pasa de IA → humano?
3. ¿Qué tareas debería poder hacer automáticamente la IA además de responder preguntas?
4. ¿Qué les molesta de los sistemas de atención que utilizan actualmente?
5. ¿Qué funcionalidad haría que realmente utilizaran una plataforma así todos los días?

No estoy buscando promocionar el producto ni poner enlaces; principalmente quiero validar qué necesita realmente alguien que administra atención, ventas o soporte antes de seguir desarrollando

I handle marketing/ops for a small events company in Lisbon (boat cruises, private and corporate events), roughly 500 enquiries a month. Upfront honesty: I come from a marketing background and have never properly set up or run a CRM before, so I'm a bit out of my depth here and any help is genuinely welcome, including the obvious stuff I might be missing.

When someone engages with us, my colleagues reply personally, real one-to-one emails, not automation.

Right now our pipeline lives inside Brevo, which is really a marketing platform with a CRM bolted on. Two things bug me about using it for the human side:

- I'm fairly sure that anything sent through Brevo's infrastructure carries a List-Unsubscribe header. A personal reply to a client that shows an "unsubscribe" button looks absurd and unprofessional.

- The conversation history is scattered. Replies happen in people's Gmail, and someone has to remember to drag the pipeline card along manually. The tool and the actual inbox are two separate worlds.

What I want on the human side is simple: replies that go out through our normal Gmail (so they're just normal emails, no marketing headers), the full thread automatically attached to the contact, and a lightweight pipeline the team actually keeps updated. Automation and campaigns I can keep elsewhere, this is purely about the "a human is talking to a client" part.

Questions for people running small teams:

- How do you keep client email threads tied to a CRM without replies going out looking like marketing? Is native Gmail two-way sync the thing to look for, or is there a better pattern?

- For a team this size, is a dedicated CRM even worth it over just living in a shared Gmail with labels and being disciplined about it?

- Anyone moved off an all-in-one marketing suite onto a proper CRM for exactly this reason, and was it worth the switch?

Since I'm new to the CRM side, I'd rather learn the right approach than jump to the wrong tool. Our pipeline is barely used today, so switching cost is low. All input appreciated, even the "you're overthinking this" kind.

I’m doing product research on how RevOps teams find problems that don’t trigger an obvious failure.

A routing rule stops assigning some leads, a lifecycle stage quits updating, or billing and the CRM slowly drift apart. Every system still appears to be working, so nobody gets alerted. Usually, someone notices later because a dashboard looks strange, a rep complains, or Finance finds that the numbers don’t match. Then someone has to work backward through the CRM, warehouse, billing system, automations, and spreadsheets to find where the problem started and what it affected.

I’m trying to understand how common this actually is. I’m not selling anything.

What was the last issue that broke quietly in your revenue stack? How did you notice it, and how long did it take to find the cause?

If this rarely happens because your monitoring is already good, I’d genuinely like to hear how you set it up.

I kept running into the same problem with small-business software like zoho and pipedrive:

- The CRM ends when the deal is won.

- Then invoicing happens somewhere else.

- Purchasing turns into spreadsheets, email threads, approvals, and a lot of “where are we on this?”

So I built PipelineIQ.eu around one continuous workflow logic of win the deal → send the invoice → manage what the business needs to buy

Right now it includes:

- CRM, deals, follow-ups, and revenue forecasting

- Invoice drafts and Stripe payments

- Automation when a deal is won

- Purchase requests, approvals, supplier quotes, purchase orders, and supplier tracking

- A pipeline assistant that flags stale deals, missing close dates, and missing next steps

The revenue forcasting i built has a margin of error of 1-2% which I have tested numerous time and I am open to others proving me wrong

I’m at the point where I’d rather have people actually use it than keep building more features. So I’m looking for a few small businesses, agencies, consultancies, and service companies willing to try it and tell me: Its called pipelineiq.eu. So tell me, what feels confusing or what breaks and what actually saves time and eventually what you’d never use.

I've been thinking about how much information a small business actually needs from a CRM on a daily basis.

For me, the essentials seem to be:

Who is the lead?

Where did they come from?

What stage are they in?

What's the next action?

When should I follow up?

Everything beyond that feels secondary until these are clear.

Curious how other people approach this: what information do you personally check most often in your CRM?

A company decides it needs a CRM. The first meeting is about tools: HubSpot vs Salesforce vs Dynamics vs Zoho vs Pipedrive. Demos get booked, comparison sheets get built, and someone says "Salesforce is the industry standard, let's just go with that."

Six months later, the CRM is live and nobody really uses it. Reps keep their real pipeline in Excel. Managers still ask for reports by email. The company blames the software and starts looking at a different one.

In most of these cases the tool wasn't the problem. Nobody had agreed on what the CRM was supposed to do.

Before I talk about software with anyone, I ask questions like these:

1. How do leads actually reach you today? Web form, email, phone, events, referrals? Where do they land first?
2. What happens after a lead is qualified? Who takes it, and by when? What does "qualified" actually mean?
3. How do you track opportunities? What are your real stages, not the ones from a template?
4. What do managers need to see every Monday morning? If you can't name the reports, you can't design the CRM.
5. What eats the most manual time? That's usually where automation pays off first.
6. Who owns the customer data? Who can edit it, and who's responsible when it's wrong?

Once you have answers, the decision gets much clearer, and it's not always "pick a big brand":

• Off-the-shelf works great when your process is fairly standard. You get a mature product, integrations, and a community. The trade-off is that you'll adapt your process to the tool, and per-seat licensing adds up as you grow.
• Heavily customized off-the-shelf is where a lot of projects get expensive. If you're paying for endless workarounds, custom fields, and add-ons just to force the tool to fit, you're often halfway to a custom build without the benefits.
• A custom CRM makes sense when your sales process is genuinely unusual, when the CRM has to plug deeply into your own product or internal systems, or when you'd otherwise pay for a hundred features to use ten. The trade-off is that you own the maintenance, and it's a bad idea if your requirements are still vague.

That last point is the catch. Custom is the most requirement-dependent option of all. If you can't describe your process clearly, you'll build the wrong thing, just with more code.

So the order matters: process first, requirements second, tool (or custom build) third. I always start with a discovery phase and only then decide whether an existing platform or a custom build fits.

Curious what others have experienced. If you've been through a CRM rollout, did you define requirements first or pick the tool and figure it out later? Has anyone gone custom and regretted it, or been glad they did?

Happy to answer questions in the comments if you're in the middle of an evaluation.

I’ve been thinking about how CRM problems usually don’t become obvious when a company first starts using one.

Things like duplicate customer data, missed follow-ups, poor pipeline visibility, disconnected sales and support data, or workflows that nobody actually uses can become much harder to fix later.

For people who have worked with CRM systems, what problem caused the biggest headache after the company had already grown?

Was it data quality, user adoption, automation, reporting, integrations, or something else?

I'm a CRM Functional Consultant.
Over the last few years I've worked with businesses that wanted to implement a CRM and almost every project started the same way: "Which CRM should we choose? HubSpot? Salesforce? Dynamics? Zoho? Pipedrive?”
But after a while I realized that most companies were asking the wrong question.

The real problem wasn't choosing the CRM.
The real problem was that they had never defined, their sales process, their reporting needs, who owns customer data, what should be automated, what success would look like after implementation.
I've seen companies spend thousands on CRM projects only to discover later that nobody had agreed on the requirements.
That's why I recently put together a structured CRM discovery process.
Instead of starting with software, I start with questions like:
How do leads arrive today?
What happens after a lead is qualified?
How are opportunities tracked?
What reports do managers need?
Which activities consume the most manual effort?
What information should every salesperson see?
The output is a CRM Discovery Report and an implementation roadmap that helps companies understand what they actually need before investing in software or implementation.

If you're currently evaluating a CRM, planning an implementation project or simply want to better understand what your business actually needs before investing in software, feel free to reach out.
I'm happy to discuss your situation and share how the CRM Discovery Report process works.
Leave a comment below or send me a private message.

I’m doing a bit research on how RevOps teams handle this problem today.

Let’s suppose something breaks somewhere in the revenue stack:
- a Salesforce/HubSpot workflow stops working
- attribution data starts drifting
- leads stop routing correctly
- billing and CRM data stop matching
- pipeline data becomes inaccurate

The issue might sit there for hours or days before someone notices it through a dashboard, a rep complaining, or a number suddenly looking wrong.
How do you catch these problems before they actually start affecting pipeline or revenue?

Do you already have something that tells you which operational issues are becoming financially important, or is it mostly dashboards, alerts, manual checks, and people noticing something looks off?

Trying to understand whether this is a real problem before building anything around it. Would especially like to hear from RevOps, SalesOps, Revenue Systems, or Revenue Engineering people who deal with this regularly.

we've been using a spreadsheet since the beginning and honestly it wasnt a problem until recently. now we're getting more leads, more follow ups and more people touching the same accounts, so things are getting a little chaotic. someone will update a deal in the spreadsheet but forget to mention something important from the latest call, or a follow up gets buried in someone's calendar. nothing disastrous, just a lot of little things that are starting to add up. we're looking at hubspot, was there a specific number of leads, sales reps or some other problem that made you pull the trigger?

We’ve been looking at how sales teams actually use their CRM day to day, and one thing I keep noticing is that the problem isn’t always lack of automation.

Sometimes there are too many workflows, reminders and sequences running at once, and reps eventually stop paying attention to them.

For people managing active sales pipelines:

Where do you draw the line between useful automation and automation that just creates more noise?

Especially curious about follow-ups — do you prefer the CRM to automatically handle most of them, or should reps still decide when and how each lead gets contacted?

Long time lurker, first real post. It's a long one so bear with me.

I've been building custom CRM / ERP type systems for small businesses since late 2022. Mostly companies that have outgrown their spreadsheets but are nowhere near the size where a Salesforce partner would even pick up the phone.

The client I still think about

There's one client I still think about a lot. A wholesale book distributor. Honestly the most excited person I've ever built anything for. He wanted everything in one place, sales, customers, prospects, inventory, deliveries, an online store, all of it, and he wanted it to work the way his team already worked and not the other way round. So that's what we built. Deployed it, it ran fine, he was happy, I was happy, project done.

A few months later they needed some new features and they didn't call us. They went to a local agency.

I am still not very sure why. My guess is they wanted it quick and cheap and we probably weren't that, which, fine. But the agency kept bolting things on and bit by bit the whole thing got worse. Slower, buggier, more confusing to use. And when something broke nobody on his team could even tell where the problem was, so they'd wait for the agency, pay, wait again. He told me later it just became too much. Nobody inside the company could own it, and honestly why would they, they sell products, they're not a software shop.

So they gave up and moved to Shopify. Which as far as I can tell wasn't because it fit them better. It was just the only option where nobody had to be on call for it.

It's not just him

That one bugged me for a long time. And since then I've seen more or less the same thing happen a few more times. Custom software fits perfectly on day one and then the fit slowly rots, because keeping it alive costs more than anyone planned for.

The part that surprised me though is that the clients who gave up and went to some big SaaS aren't happy either. When I catch up with them it's the same complaints every time. The app feels bloated, half the screens are stuff they'll never touch. It doesn't quite do what they need so they've got workarounds all over the place. The software calls things one name and their team calls them another, so there's this constant translating going on in people's heads. And their data is actually messier than before, because when the tool doesn't have a proper place for something people just shove it wherever it fits.

So you end up choosing between two bad options I guess. Custom fits great but it's expensive to keep alive, SaaS is cheap to keep alive but never really fits. The Odoo / Salesforce partner route is supposed to be the middle, but for a 10 person company that's a lot of money and months of onboarding before you see anything at all.

What I've been trying instead

I've been chewing on this for about a year and a half now. The question I kept coming back to was, what if the part that breaks and needs maintaining was shared across everyone, and the bit that's actually specific to your business was really small. Like, tiny.

That's more or less what I've been building. One core engine that I maintain, and then each business gets a thin layer on top that speaks their language, their workflow, their terms, nothing they didn't ask for. I've moved four of my old clients onto it so far. A hardware store that does retail and wholesale, an electrical goods wholesaler (wires, switches, fans, that sort of thing), a company that installs solar for homes and offices, and a hostel with a canteen across a few locations. Pretty different businesses, and that was kind of deliberate, I wanted to see if the same core could bend to all of them. So far it's going better than I expected. But these are four people who already trusted me, so I know it doesn't really prove anything.

What I actually want to understand is whether people even want software to work like this.

The way I've started thinking about it, and I'm not sure this is the right way to put it, most business software is sold a bit like a supplement. Here's 200 features, here's what's good to have, here's the "right" way to run your pipeline, and you sort of bend yourself around it. What I'm trying to do feels closer to medicine, if that makes sense. You come in with a specific pain, the thing that jams up your week, and the system is built around getting rid of that one thing and then staying out of your way. Less "here's how you should work", more "what's stuck, let's unstick it". I don't know. I keep going back and forth on whether that's a real distinction or just something that sounds nice.

So, honestly asking you guys

And maybe in reality everyone wants the 200 features anyway. So:

1. What's the one bottleneck in your day that your current software makes worse instead of better? Not a missing feature, I mean the actual thing that slows you down.
2. What's the workaround you've done so many times you stopped noticing it's a workaround?
3. If a tool just removed that one thing and did nothing else fancy, would that be enough for you? Or would you need the whole feature list before you'd trust it?
4. And has anyone ever tried to get a vendor to fix a real bottleneck instead of adding another feature? How did that go?

I'm not trying to sell anything here, I'm genuinely still working out whether I'm right about this. Happy to be told I'm not.

And if your situation is messier than a comment can hold, my DMs are open. No pitch, just curious what's getting in your way.

TL;DR: built custom CRMs for small businesses for 4 years, kept watching them get abandoned because nobody could maintain them, and the ones who fled to big SaaS aren't happy either. Now building something in between and want to know what your actual bottleneck is, not what features you want.