Hello everyone, I launched my CRM. I am now struggling of getting my first sale. I reach out to contractors on Facebook Marketplace. They reject. What do I do? What are your tricks/techniques? Put me onto it.

Curious if anyone else is starting to see this. I’m finding myself using the actual CRM UI less now. But weirdly the CRM is becoming more useful.

With both ChatGPT and Claude connecting into CRM, I've started using my chats to just ask questions instead of clicking through reports, views, dashboards etc. Things like what deals need attention, who havent we talked to in a while, what changed this week etc.

I also wonder if this starts fixing some of the old CRM problems. Sales teams hate updating CRM. Sales ops ends up stitching data together from multiple places. Leadership waits for someone to build a report.

Now some of that can happen through AI as the interaction layer. So I’m using the CRM less, but getting more value from the data in it.

Anyone else seeing this yet?

We’re looking at conversational AI platforms for inbound customer conversations, mostly coming through WhatsApp and Instagram. The main thing we need is something that can handle common questions, qualify a lead and then pass the conversation to a human without losing all the context.MoAnyone using something like this? What’s worked well?

we're reviewing our support stack and i've narrowed it down to hubspot service hub vs zendesk. the part i'm struggling with is that this isn't just a support decision. our sales and customer data already lives in a crm, so i'm trying to figure out whether having support tightly connected to that data is actually useful in practice or just sounds good on paper.

for teams that evaluated both:

• what was the biggest reason you picked one over the other?
• did crm integration end up changing how your support team worked?
• how useful were the reporting and customer history features?
• was onboarding straightforward or more work than expected?
• at what company size did the differences start to matter?

i'm less interested in feature lists and more interested in what actually affected day to day operations after the rollout.

what would you choose today and why?

I’m in the process of building a CRM/ATS aimed primarily at the UK recruitment market, at least initially. I already supply some software to a few UK recruitment companies, so it felt like a fairly natural direction to explore.

I’ve tried platforms such as Bullhorn, JobAdder, RecruitCRM etc. They obviously do a lot, but I’ve always felt that some of them are quite dated in places and, particularly when it comes to integrations, can feel overly modular. With some platforms, relatively straightforward functionality ends up requiring another product, another account, another implementation and another monthly bill.

I’ve been building mine for a little while now and I’m pretty happy with where it’s getting to. However, recruitment itself isn’t my day-to-day role, and none of the other software I currently supply is a traditional CRM/ATS, so I wanted to get some feedback from people who actually use these systems every day.
So far, I’ve covered things including:

Custom attributes across the main data objects: candidates, contacts, companies/leads, jobs, placements etc.

Configurable document management, including custom folder/file structures and document storage.

Customisable hiring pipelines, with reusable pipeline templates.

Tasks and reminders, including assigning tasks to other users.

Departments and teams, with configurable structures and permissions.

Sequences, allowing multistage outreach/workflows across channels such as email, SMS and internal tasks.

Automations, allowing actions to be triggered against candidates, contacts, jobs, placements and other records.

Email sync with Outlook and Gmail.

Two-way SMS and messaging.

In-app telephony, with a choice of VoIP providers for outbound and inbound calls.

I’ve also built the integration side more as a marketplace rather than forcing everyone down one particular route. At the moment this includes:

- Multiple VoIP/telephony providers
- SMS providers
- Outlook and Gmail
- Various AI meeting/note-taking platforms
- Data enrichment providers, alongside some native company-data enrichment
- Background screening, including digital ID and DBS checks
- Pay & bill/back-office software
- E-signature providers such as DocuSign

I have also built a number of AI driven features too that support with insights, reports, writing, analysis etc.

The intention isn’t necessarily to reinvent absolutely everything. It’s more to make the core CRM/ATS genuinely pleasant to use and cheaper to get going with, while making integrations feel like part of the product rather than something that requires a consultancy project every time you want to connect another service.

For those of you actually working in recruitment: what are the things your current CRM/ATS does badly, or things you constantly wish it could do?

I’m particularly interested in the small day-to-day frustrations that probably don’t make it onto a software company’s feature comparison page but make a big difference when you’re using the system for 8 hours a day.

Also interested in anything you think I’m obviously missing from the list above. I will eventually speak to some existing clients and get their feedback, but it would be nice to approach them with a solid first effort.

Thanks in advance for any advice/feedback/input offered👍

I’m building FloForge, a CRM/workflow automation application for small businesses. I’m currently working on the backend of the automation engine and would appreciate feedback from people who have built workflow systems, CRMs, or event-driven applications. The current system supports: Event-based triggers — lead created, deal won, status changed, etc. Conditions attached to triggers Actions such as creating tasks and recording activities Automation activation/deactivation Automation run history Linking actions to the record that triggered the automation For example: Lead created → automation triggers → follow-up task is created and linked to the lead → run is recorded I'm now focusing on making this reliable enough for real-world use. The areas I'm specifically concerned about are: Idempotency: preventing duplicate automation runs/actions when the same event is processed more than once Failure handling: properly recording failed actions and deciding whether subsequent actions should continue Observability: useful run history, statuses, timestamps, errors, and action-level results Record relationships: ensuring actions remain correctly associated with the record that triggered them Conditions: making sure conditions are evaluated consistently before actions execute Concurrency: preventing race conditions when multiple events arrive at roughly the same time Retries: handling temporary failures without accidentally performing an action twice Execution architecture: whether the current event → automation → action approach will scale reasonably I'm not looking for compliments on the UI. I'd rather have people point out what's wrong with the architecture or what I'm overlooking. If you've built an automation engine, CRM, workflow system, job queue, or similar event-driven application, what would you consider essential for a production-grade implementation? Repository: Json-error9/FloForge-Automations-website-v3.0-launch Screenshots of the current automation UI are attached for context.