I'm probably like a lot of you who have tried lots of crms and inevitably fall back to old patterns, or get so behind on logging notes and activity that I dread going back in. I think I finally solved this forever for me.

I have Claude review my emails and proposals three days per week, then follow some instructions about making recommendations for updates to companies, people, and deals. Then in the morning when the notification comes in I just look through the list, confirm or ask for adjustments, and then let Claude do the updating.

Honestly, I haven't spent much time in the CRM interface in a while! And I'm so happy about it. Because my records and data are spotless, and the grunt-ish work of updating is all handled by Claude. For now that data is becoming more useful because I use it as context for Claude to do more research and other things.

I can't see myself ever going back to manually using a CRM with the exception of some special occasions, like setting up different kinds of lists or workflows for special pushes or new product releases or things like that.

We use Attio and it seems well made for this use case but I think all CRMs will go in this direction very soon if they aren't already there.

With salesforce CPQ reaching end of sale we have been thinking of switching to another solution. This is bc we are not sure how much salesforce will continue inventing in it even though we still have the option to renew our license.

The biggest thing holding is back is how we have already built into our current setup. we have 3 yrs of pricing logic, custom rules, approval workflows, product configs and integrations that our sales team relies on every day.

Moving to another system sounds simple but rebuilding all that could be a much bigger project than we expect. that is why we are trying to understand costs beyond the software license. we want to understand things like migrating data, recreating pricing rules, connecting the systems, training the team and hiring consulatnts.

For those who have gone through salesforce CPQ migration what were the biggest hidden costs and was it worth it?

My sales team pretty much lives inside Salesforce and we found that our old calling setup was becoming a pain in the ass.
Reps would make calls in one app, then just make one of those “mental notes” to enter the outcome into Salesforce later. You can guess how that worked out for us… notes were late, vague, or missing altogether. Not just because people were being careless - it's just that we're all human and when you're working through a long call list, manual admin is one of the first things that are going to slip.

But the problem we wanted to solve was actually pretty simple. We just needed calling to fit into the CRM worklow so useful call information would end up on the right contact, account or opportunity without someone having to remember to copy everything over manually later on.

That made it easier for us to compare providers, given that pretty much every platform these days says, "We have full Salesforce integration, trust me bro." The devil's in the detail. We wanted to know what's being logged, where it goes, and how much work's left. We looked at RingCentral, Dialpad, and Aircall.

RingCentral can create call logs automatically. It also has Activity Sync that can associate calls from RingCentral devices with contacts. You can configure the automatic call logging settings too, which could come in handy if your admins want more control over what's written back.

Dialpad also caught our eye, as it can log calls and messages as Salesforce activities, and then associate them with leads, contacts or accounts. I really liked that you can choose between recording calls as Salesforce tasks, Dialpad call log records, or both. Pretty useful.

We also liked Aircall because it felt close to how our reps already work. It has click-to-dial, can give reps helpful contact context, and it can sync call activity back to the right record. That solved the issue I mentioned before about someone having to remember to update the activity history after every call.

We took a look at the Power Dialer and Voicemail Drop features on the professional plan for our outbound team too. You have to check the plan structure carefully - the full Salesforce integration isn't available on every Aircall plan.

Of course, I wouldn't choose any of these based on a product page or on watching a demo and don't expect you to either. You've got to ask each vendor to connect a test environment and run some of the calls your team actually makes - the whole shebang from completed calls, missed calls, transfers, recordings, and follow-up notes.

That's going to show you pretty quickly what lands in the CRM and what still needs to be handled manually.

Interested to hear what other Salesforce heavy teams are using, and has anyone else found a setup where reps don't have to update records by hand?

Hi All,
I’m looking for a solid option for a WhatsApp bassist CRM but using coexistence since I need to keep my business account in place without disruption.

I also need to be able to integrate a phone service like ringcentral or justcall, since I believe calling from WhatsApp coexistence integration is not possible in the US.

Might also want to connect to claude or chatgpt, so that’s a plus.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

* Sorry, i also posted this in r/marketingautomation but thought it might be more suited to this thread - for now i'm keeping it in both*

I'm debating an offer from a CRM agency (providing CRM services to clients). Think ad agency with some technical CRM people could be doing journey planning, creative development, deployment.

With all the new light weight CRM's and even the new SF MCA platform that has native language prompting for segmentation, email copy etc. - where is the future for these guys?

We run a small wholesale distribution business and have been debating whether adding a CRM would make much difference. Our reps know their customers pretty well and most of the order history is already in our ERP. But it's getting harder to keep track of which accounts need attention and where we're missing sales.

For anyone running a smaller distribution business has adding a CRM made a noticeable difference or is it just another system for reps to keep updated?

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!

We built a system for a homeopathy clinic with three branches in Pune. The first thing we learned is that a treatment is a course of visits, not one sale, so the sales pipeline stops being the useful view.

What the owner actually needed was who is due back this week, who missed it, and what one branch knows about a patient another branch treated.

We ended up with a record per treatment course, a due date on every follow-up, and one patient record shared across branches. The lead-tracking part was the smallest piece.

Has anyone here used or built a CRM for a business where the real revenue is the repeat visit? What did you have to change from the usual sales setup?

I've talked to a lot of small sales teams over the past few months while building a CRM tool.

Almost every one of them had the same problem - not a bad product, not a bad pitch. Just total chaos in the follow-up layer.

Here's what that usually looks like:

• Deal notes in a Google Doc somewhere
• Last email buried in Gmail
• Next steps written on a sticky note or in Slack
• Meeting logged... nowhere

By the time a rep circles back to a warm lead, they've lost the thread. The lead went cold not because they weren't interested - but because the rep couldn't remember where they left off.

Bigger teams solve this with Salesforce. But a 4-person sales team doesn't need Salesforce. They need something that tracks the deal, logs the activity, and reminds them to follow up - without a 6-week implementation.

That's the gap I'm trying to fill with CRMPro. Accounts, deals, contacts, meetings, campaigns - one place, no fluff.

Does this match what you've seen? What's the messiest part of your current sales process?

I built CRMPro after talking to a bunch of small sales teams who were either stuck in spreadsheets or paying for Salesforce and using 10% of it.

They didn't need AI forecasting or enterprise territory mapping. They needed:

• One place to track leads, deals, and accounts
• A way to log calls and meetings without 5 extra clicks
• Basic campaign tools so they could follow up at scale
• A pipeline view that didn't require a 3-hour onboarding call

So that's what I built. No recruitment module. No HR workflows. No bloat. Just CRM.

55 teams are using it now. Most of them told me the same thing: they'd been patching together HubSpot free tier + a spreadsheet + their inbox, and it was costing them deals.

The ones who switched said the biggest win was having deal activity, contact history, and campaign status all in one place. Not because it's fancy - because it's just less chaos.

Curious if anyone else here has dealt with this. What made you finally ditch the spreadsheet (or not)?

I'm the sales lead at a small B2B software company, so I handle most of our demos and a lot of the follow-up myself. A prospect recently asked to speak with an existing customer before we go any further, which would mean asking someone who's already helped us out with these calls.

They've seen the demo, but we haven't really talked pricing yet. I was going to get a bit further before making an introduction, mostly because I don't want to keep asking the same few customers to take calls unless the prospect is actually serious. At the same time, I get why they'd want to hear from someone who isn't selling them the product.

When do you usually agree to these? I don't want to waste a customer's time, but I also don't want to make a reasonable request awkward.

I have a LOT of other issues going on at my work right now but this is the one that is driving me the (most) insane. Our IT Director, who lacks a computer science degree, just replaced our old CRM right before our big holiday season. We work in family entertainment and sell event packages. He cited budget constraints/the old CRM that we loved was "too expensive". (It was not Sales Force). He decided to build his own CRM using Claude that he boasted about creating in "two days." He then set up a “BETA CRM” channel in Microsoft Teams and asked us to post our own individual threads about any issues we come across while also trying to do our usual work which is already demanding, as his exact words the last time I saw him in person were “I haven’t even used it myself yet.” Nothing works. Obviously because it is in beta. He also told me to stop complaining when I said it is now taking us over an hour to build a quote we would normally have done in 5 minutes because our time is spent beta-testing and waiting for him (or Claude) to fix the issue. I do not know much about AI at all but I do not believe it has much of a place in sales or at the very least in this niche. We are a very small company with 3 sales reps (they hired a 4th today for some reason and I found out by accident that their base salary is higher than mine, even though they have no experience in events or sales, while the rest of us do. They just graduated from the same community college and are same age as our very young boss so it raises some eyebrows. My now former coworker who was the top dog for over a decade here just quit because of him and cited potential security concerns as well. I get that companies switch booking systems. I get that they even do it at peak season which is not preferable obviously but this is different.

TLDR - Boss rolled out a CRM using AI in less than a week, wiped our old one while the 3 of us were at lunch (yes this was actually the way it went), gave us no training, and asked us to beta test it for him while we still try to go about business as usual. Obviously no extra compensation for being his guinea pigs.

GITHUB LINK IN COMMENTS

It isn’t fully built, I stopped working on it in pursuit of other projects a while back so I decided to release it.

I moved on to other projects and figured someone might find this useful. It’s called OpenCRM, and it includes a CRM, scheduling app, admin dashboard, and basic marketing website.

The architecture is basically:
React + TypeScript + Vite for the CRM and admin dashboard.

Flutter + Riverpod for the scheduling app.

Firebase for authentication, Firestore, storage, and a shared backend of TypeScript Cloud Functions.

Optional Python services for things like forecasting, sentiment analysis, and route optimization.

The apps share the same backend and business data. Most business-specific records live under businesses/{businessId}, with role-based access for owners, admins, staff, clients, etc.

The clients use repository and service layers to organize data access and business logic.

The main backend lives in the scheduling app’s folder, which is a little awkward now that everything is in one repo. These originally lived in separate repositories, and I kept the folder structure when combining them.

There’s a decent amount implemented around leads, contacts, deals, appointments, staff management, reporting, and workflows.

It’s an unfinished project, some integrations are still stubs, and there’s cleanup and Flutter SDK compatibility work left.

The release uses placeholder configuration, so you’ll need your own Firebase project and provider credentials.

I work at a commercial real estate capital markets firm with approximately 50 employees. We’re currently using Salesforce but have been exploring the idea of building a more customized, AI-driven CRM.

I don’t have a coding background, but I’ve been using Claude Artifacts to build a prototype and have gotten pretty far with it.

Originally, I was considering using Claude Code, GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase to turn the prototype into a full web application with its own database, user accounts, and permissions.

But now I’m wondering if I’m overcomplicating things by trying to build an entire CRM from scratch.

Would it make more sense to keep Salesforce, move to HubSpot, or use another established CRM as the underlying database and build the AI functionality separately?

Some of the features we’re looking to implement:

Automatic email tracking: Connect Outlook to automatically track emails and associate conversations with the correct clients, companies, contacts, and transactions.
AI reminders and follow-ups: Identify when someone needs a follow-up, flag inactive relationships, and generate reminders based on emails, calls, and past interactions.
Deal and client matching: Automatically match active financing or equity requirements with relevant lenders, investors, and companies in our database based on their investment criteria, past activity, and preferences.
AI call preparation: Generate pre-call briefs using previous conversations, transaction history, company information, and recent news.
Call transcription and notes: Automatically summarize calls, identify action items, and update the relevant CRM records.
Market intelligence: Track relevant news, acquisitions, financing activity, loan maturities, and other events, then associate that information with companies and opportunities in our CRM.
AI assistant: Let each employee ask questions about their accounts, relationships, deals, and market activity, with ongoing AI conversation histories.

We would also need individual logins, ownership of relationships/accounts, and different levels of access to confidential information.

Ideally, much of this would run automatically in the background rather than requiring employees to manually update everything.

My main questions:

Is it realistic to build these features externally using Claude’s API and connect everything to Salesforce or HubSpot?
Would it be better to keep the CRM as the source of truth and build a separate AI web app, or integrate the AI features directly into the CRM interface?
For those who’ve done something similar, how difficult is it to maintain synchronization between the CRM, Outlook, and an external AI application?
Are there existing CRM tools or integrations that already handle a significant portion of this?
From a cost, security, scalability, and maintenance standpoint, which approach makes the most sense for approximately 50 users?

I’m comfortable learning the technical fundamentals and using Claude Code to help build the application, but I’m trying to avoid creating a massive infrastructure project that becomes difficult to maintain.

Would really appreciate input from people who’ve built custom AI integrations with existing CRMs or gone down the fully custom route.

What would you do differently if you were starting today?

Hi, I’m Alex, CTO and co-founder of Attio.

I’ve been lurking on r/CRM for a while and the same themes keep coming up: data stuck in one tool, reports you can’t really trust, and what you should expect from your CRM now that agents are in the mix. Historically, software has fallen into two camps: applications that trade speed and scale for a great user experience, and infrastructure that is more complex but provides much better speed and scale. CRM has always sat in the first camp, but the demands of agents mean it now has to be both.

Last week, we launched the next generation of Attio: a hybrid platform that brings together the user experience for humans with the scale, reliability, and complexity of data access for agents. It brings full PostgreSQL-compatible SQL support for Attio workspaces, with no extra steps. Agents, apps and BI tools can now query live CRM data directly, without an ETL tool or data warehouse in between.

A few things I believe about where CRM goes from here:

1. CRMs need to evolve into hybrid platforms

As the shift towards Agentic Revenue begins, we’re going to see agents run at scales that would never have been reached by even the largest human revenue organisations. To support this, CRMs need to evolve from applications that provide UX to humans, into hybrid platforms that also provide the technical infrastructure for agents.

2. Agents should be working from live data

Plenty of agents today read from a data warehouse fed by an ETL tool on a daily or weekly sync, so the data they act on can be a week out of date. Every query on our engine runs against the current state of the CRM with no replication delay. It also means that for the first time, BI tools can point straight at Attio without a warehouse in between.

3. CRMs should speak the native language of agents

Frontier models have been trained on a huge amount of SQL. Our system supports all common PostgreSQL query operators as well as commonly used INFORMATION_SCHEMA and pg_catalog utilities that agents and applications can use to dynamically understand the unique layout of an Attio workspace.

All of this data allows agents running on Attio to answer questions that were previously expensive and unreliable with ease.

I’ll be around over the next few days. Ask me how we built it, or what you’d like to see from us. I’m here to learn as much as I am to share my views, so let me know you’d change about CRM if you could!

[EDIT: The AMA is now finished. Thank you for all the questions!]

we had over five thousand messy contact records last month after imported signups from a recent webinar campaign got mixed directly into our primary mailing list. reps were constantly complaining that half the newly created company profiles were missing key industry details, headcount numbers, and direct phone lines.

we turned on automatic duplicate merging and built-in company enrichment in hubspot so our database would autofill missing fields, so what tactics do other ops managers use to handle messy contact imports when having background data updates clean up our properties saved us dozens of hours of manual spreadsheet scrubbing?

A customer has three tickets open in HubSpot. One for a late delivery, one for a return and another for an account change. They call and say theyre following up from yesterday. Their phone number brings up the contact but the AI still needs to understand which case they mean

Our customer support stack uses Bland for inbound calls and HubSpot for CRM and ticket management. Im working through ticket routing so the AI voice agent attaches call notes to the right case and carries that context into a human handoff

If they’re calling about the return, I want the call summary saved to that ticket. The rep taking over should see what the customer already explained and what still needs doing, ALL on the same record

Hi,

I am searching for a cold calling software. Maybe someone could help with suggestions.
There are many tools on the market, however I couldn’t find a suitable solution.
We run outbound cold calling for clients, setting qualified appointments.

Currently we use a tool that should have been the perfect match, however I think it’s not build properly, has many things not a tool should have in general, isn’t GDPR compliant (e.g. we can’t set DNC lists or contacts, which is needed for Europe, even they are a EU company)
Their list uploading is not good and some other things that should be standard for this kind of tools are not good or missing. Another example is the bad reporting and that they basically don’t have a good overview of set meetings.
I give them so much feedback, currently feeling more like their business development support then a client that can effectively use the tool.

Main use focus we would need:

- Autodailer
- Handle Different Clients/Projects/Lists
- Has a CRM build (just need notes, buttons for meetings, DNC button, not interested and something that I can mark why the lead is not usable)
- must be able to set follow ups and get notifications if the follow is due
- should be able to call the number of the caller even when their number is not in the system, as a callback could happen from a different number
- must be able to import different kind of numbers like direct phone and company phone and be able to sort it for the Autodailer correct
- need to be able to set max. Touchpoints before the leads gets sorted out.
- optional email and sms sending from the system (isn’t a criteria I would to not consider using it)
- need to be able to get phone numbers for UK or US (without having a company there, wich is kind of normal, but the current tool doesn’t even provide that)
- would be nice to have a call flatrate for the country included you have a phone number to make outbound calls.

Maybe someone has similar experience and found a tool that really works. Currently looking into other tools, but thought here are coming up some tools and ideas I haven’t looked into yet.

Hubspot's gross margin last year was 83.8%. Numbers are similar if not higher for other companies like Salesforce! The software costs them almost nothing to run!

It made sense when we lived in a world where you either had to buy or hire a bunch of engineers. But now it's so easy to hop on Claude code and build software; why are people still buying?

I'm building a startup now and one of my customers (a broker at cushman & wakefield) said she built her own literally in a day. It worked better too cause it was just for her exact workflow and she cancelled her Salesforce subscription a week later, saving her $125 a month.

I may be a bit bias, since I have a technical background and was an engineer at xAI earlier this year. But curious what other people's experience has been? Has anyone actually tried building stuff and then went back to just buying software?

i build AI tools that sit on top of CRMs for small businesses: salons, restaurants, clinics, agencies. in the last 5 months we connected 250 clients in 22 countries without spending a cent on ads, so i've seen a lot of whatsapp + CRM setups. no product here, just stuff i wish someone told our clients earlier.
1. whatsapp app ≠ whatsapp API. most small teams run on the business app on one phone. a CRM can't really work with that. you need the official API connection, otherwise "integration" just means copying chats by hand.
2. track the lead source from day one. meta ad, tiktok, referral, walk in. sounds boring, but after a month it tells you where your money actually works. most teams we talk to have no idea.
3. speed beats features. people message 3 businesses at once and go with whoever answers first. the best CRM in the world doesn't help if the lead sits unread until the morning.
4. don't build automations before you know your stages. teams buy a CRM, spend weeks on chatbots, then realize their pipeline is different from what they thought. map your stages on paper first.
5. a small team doesn't need an enterprise CRM. pick something cheap with a solid whatsapp API connection and grow from there.
curious what others here run for whatsapp heavy businesses. what's actually worked for you?