I've designed software to protect you from dialing or texting people outside of the tcpa calling hours. I'm really trying to show some comparisons between it and any other programs or crms that have similar features. Usually that's a dialer. If any of you are curious and willing to try the experiment, then the tests are simple:

Make a test lead and use a dummy phone number like (areacode) 555 0157. That range of numbers are not given to real people so they can be used in movies etc.... The area code you choose shouldn't matter since the service should go by state/zip with people moving around.

Set the state for RI zip code 02901 and try to call it after 6 pm EST. Your system should block you.

Set the state for FL zip code 32003 during the day and try to call it 4 times. It should block you on the 4th try.

Set the state for AL zip code 35004 and try to call it on Sunday. Your system should block you.

If any one of those goes through, then your system isn't blocking correctly. If all of them go through, then your system probably doesn't block calls based on state rules at all. 23 states are more restrictive than the federal guidelines. If you can call or text earlier than 8 am or later than 9 pm, then your system doesn't block Federal law either.

Please post the results here or send me a DM. I'll give you a free subscription to my software for a year for testing, but I don't need too many people to test each one so first come first served.

I'm throwing this out there as my team uses GHL but I hate the CRM and its clunky to use.

So I went down the path of using API's from it to custom build a layer that allows me to send notes back to GHL, search, and create daily call lists so much faster than GHL.

All of this was done with Claude Code.

If you're CRM has API's just build something custom that is tailored to your workflow and setup.

I am frustrated with every CRM marketing to me that they will save me time and increase productivity but as soon as I sign up I have to relearn their whole system and create workflows by their rules. What CRM frustrations do you have?

I can't be the only one who is fed up. Am I crazy?

Bill McDermott was pretty blunt on ServiceNow's results call. His pitch is that the old CRM was built for sales teams, and that service is where the customer relationship actually lives. He's openly talking about rip and replace, and says deployment times are now 30 or 60 days for a serious company at serious scale.

There are some numbers behind it. CRM showed up in 13 of ServiceNow's top 20 deals last quarter and CRM AI net new ACV tripled. HPE signed up for its Cloud and AI support services, and Stagwell is consolidating four legacy service desks across more than 70 agencies.

I'm sceptical of the 30 day bit. Data migration and integrations are what kill CRM projects, not the software.

Has anyone here moved service off Salesforce or Dynamics onto ServiceNow? How long did it really take?

So many CRMs list Google Calendar as a supported integration. But “integrates with Google Calendar” can actually mean very different things in practice.

For some tools, it means that events added to Google Calendar show up in the CRM. For others, it means that changes sync in both directions. And the difference between these only really surfaces the first time a rep moves a meeting in one of the apps, and the update doesn’t happen in the other app. It still shows the old meeting time.

Teams often evaluate the integration by whether it connects at all, rather than how the tools communicate changes between each other. But connecting is the easy part. The rest is where the real test is.

Consider, for instance, if a meeting is rescheduled, an invitation is declined, someone cancels at the last minute, or a rep edits the meeting details from their phone instead of at their desk. The test then is whether the other system finds out quickly and whether it attaches the change to the correct contact record.

What tends to happen when it doesn't is that reps start losing trust in one of the two tools. Typically, they’ll continue to check the calendar for the real schedule and treat the CRM as something they update later, if at all. When that habit sets in, the data in the CRM falls behind, and nobody can say exactly when it all began to fall apart.

So, if you're evaluating CRMs for a team on Google Workspace, what's the one thing you'd test before you call the Calendar integration good enough? And has anyone been burned by one that looked fine in the demo?

Launching Make My Shop: An Open-Source Telegram E-Commerce & CRM Platform
I’m excited to share Make My Shop — an open-source Telegram e-commerce platform and lightweight CRM designed to launch fully functional online stores directly within Telegram in minutes.
While Telegram is becoming a primary sales channel for many businesses, managing orders, catalogs, and customer communication manually often creates unnecessary friction. Make My Shop solves this by providing a complete automated storefront out of the box.
Core Capabilities
Product Catalog & Search: Category-based navigation, real-time product search, rich media cards, and direct manager communication routing.
Interactive Shopping Cart: Live cart item counter, structured multi-step checkout, shipping address capture, and automated order total calculation.
Payment Verification: Streamlined customer receipt uploading (photo/text) paired with real-time admin payment confirmation workflows.
Embedded Order Chat: Isolated 1-on-1 messaging thread embedded directly within each order detail card for seamless customer-manager clarification.
Merchant Control Panel: Complete CRUD interface for product catalog management, order status tracking, and instant new order event notifications.
Native Localization: On-the-fly, edit-in-place interface switching across English, Spanish, and Russian.
Technical Architecture
Backend & Framework: Python 3.12, aiogram 3.x, Pydantic v2
Persistence & Database: Async SQLAlchemy 2.0 (PostgreSQL / SQLite), Alembic schema migrations
Execution Model: Fully non-blocking background task execution (asyncio), structured service layer, and comprehensive integration testing.
The project is completely open-source, lightweight, and ready for self-hosting.

I recently learned that some agencies work directly inside their clients’ CRMs, and it got me wondering how data confidentiality works in practice. You’re basically handling customer information, sales records, and other business data that don’t belong to you.
For those who do this, what safeguards do you typically have in place? Do clients set specific rules around access, data handling, governance and confidentiality, or is it mostly handled informally, especially with smaller businesses? What scale of businesses even do this mostly?

Sometimes switching is the right call. Some tools really do fit how modern teams work better. But the most common mistake I see is migrating the same messy structure into a new tool and getting the same result.

A migration is a great opportunity to fix how your CRM is set up. These are some of the issues I see most that stop AI and automations from working consistently:

1. One pipeline for everything or one too many pipelines when a custom field for filtering would suffice.
2. Free-text fields that lead to inconsistent data that is hard to build automations around and surface reports.
3. Duplicate records.
4. The important stuff is in notes so it's impossible for an automation to act on it.

AI can help with messy data if you ask it to, but if you want to build automations that run without you and actually work consistently you need a strong foundation in place.

Whether you’re staying put or moving, fixing these makes your AI tools, automations and reports noticeably more useful. If you’re migrating, it’s much easier to do it on the way over than after.m

Link to a free session if you want to go deeper on any of this.

Anyone here switched CRMs and found the same problems followed them?

Hey everyone,

I’ve worked as a copywriter and content marketer for a few years. With AI changing so much on the writing side, I’m trying to move toward the more digital, technical side of marketing.

I was already writing a lot of emails back then, and I’d also done HubSpot’s free certifications, so lifecycle marketing felt like a natural fit. Over the last three months I freelanced in Mailchimp (the project is finished now), and I built my own automations in Brevo for a personal project.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next to become a stronger candidate for jobs, and honestly I feel a bit lost:

• What kind of roles should I be aiming for at this stage (e.g. email marketing specialist, CRM executive, lifecycle associate, marketing automation), and which ones have more opportunities right now?
• Should I go deeper into email marketing specifically, or broaden into CRM in general, like learning other CRM platforms?
• What skills or experience actually make someone stand out when hiring for lifecycle/CRM roles?
• Are there any guides, courses or certifications you’d recommend?

I’ve also put together a portfolio of what I’ve done so far and would love feedback on it. Happy to share the link in the comments if that’s allowed here.

Would really appreciate any advice from people who’ve made a similar move or who hire for these roles.

Thanks!

I handle sales at a small B2B software company, and we're trying to get a better handle on our pilot process before it gets too messy. We sell reporting software, and prospects usually want to test it with their own data before committing. The tricky part is that it's not really a self-serve trial. Someone from our team often has to help with the import, get the first report working, and follow up when they run into issues.

We're tracking deals in our CRM, but it's hard to get a clear picture of how much time we're spending on pilots and which ones actually turn into customers. Some leads move through setup quickly, others go quiet halfway through, and sometimes we only realize how much work went into a pilot when we're looking back at the deal.

I'm considering setting up a more structured process to track each pilot's stage, setup tasks, blockers, and outcome. We might also start charging for pilots that require a lot of hands-on work, but I'd want to understand our conversion rates first.

For those running B2B sales through a CRM, how do you track pilots from the initial request through setup and conversion without creating a ton of admin?

Reach out if you want a custom built CRM

Hi guys, just looking for a few tips here. Our business uses old legacy software and has a lot of flaws, I come from teck background and my skills are being overlooked as I am new to the company. What's the best way to propose it? It can make the work we do so much quicker. I am thinking of a presentation and demo, but I also want to include factors like time management and extracting reports and stuff.

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?