We’re replacing a CRM that technically works, but nobody trusts the data inside it. Sales updates things late, marketing blames sales, reporting is always “close enough,” and management wants better forecasting without changing behavior.
I’ve been comparing platforms through SelectHub and it’s been a good way to separate actual fit from nice-looking sales pages.
Starting to think the best CRM is the one your team will actually keep updated without needing constant reminders.

I Built a Notion CRM template for freelancers, it's live on Notion's marketplace now. Would genuinely love honest feedback from people who've used similar tools.

It has Companies, Contacts, and Deals as main databases, plus a Reports database with its own dashboard page.

Features:

Deals automatically move between Active, Won, or Lost views just change one status and everything connected (companies, contacts, reports) moves with it automatically

Active is your main working view

Inbox view for quick additions you want to edit later without cluttering active work

Health check formula shows if a deal is on track, closing soon, late, or done based on expected date

Weighted value formula calculates expected revenue based on deal stage

Its mostly for small businesses

Everywhere I look I see references to GHL and HubSpot and SalesForce etc. Are you guys using all these features that are offered? It seems they have a feature for every edge case. I have a CRM targeted at tradespeople and small business owners currently and its discouraging to think I may have pigeonholed myself. I am not including a link on purpose to avoid sounding spammy but my CRM is deliberately lean and simple.

Leads, Deal, Contact, Notes, Calendar. It has the essentials like per-contact notes and such. Supports webhooks in to fill entries. Has a little AI agent to ask questions about the database. It doesn't require an instruction PDF or clicking through six menus to add a contact and it looks basic but deliberate and refined. It is not a CRM clone of the week. I am not going to add tons of features to try and compete but are there some non-negotiables that pretty much everyone needs these days?

For the techies I run a single binary written in a compiled language. No mult-tenant. One client per VM. One client per DB. Takes 150MB RAM to serve 60000 leads. No node/react/postgres/javascript etc. It loads instantly no matter what, the only thing that impacts the speed is the network connection of the client. Users are allowed to register via email whitelist and there are no special user privileges.

What are your thoughts on simple CRMs? I don't want to occupy a niche where people would rather use GHL or a spreadsheet than me. For those of you in defined sectors like real estate do you prefer "real estate CRMs" or do some of you use generic CRMs for specialized work? Is automation a requirement for most of you?

A lot of small businesses seem to have the same problem: clients contact them directly on WhatsApp, conversations happen there, groups are created, follow-ups are discussed, but none of that data really ends up anywhere useful.

Then after a few months, you have customer history, leads, names, group members, and conversations sitting inside WhatsApp, but nothing structured to analyze, back up, or move into a CRM.

I built a Chrome extension for WhatsApp Web to help export this kind of data into files, mostly for teams that use WhatsApp as a messy pre-CRM layer.

The idea is not to replace a CRM, but to make sure the data is not trapped inside chats forever.

Curious how others here deal with this. Do you manually copy WhatsApp leads into your CRM, use a shared inbox, export periodically, or just leave everything inside WhatsApp?

I’ll add the link in the comments in case anyone wants to try it.

Howdy all! I am working on a custom CRM project right now for a client and this is actually my first CRM build. I have a decent amount of experience using CRMs over the years and have really tried my best to incorporate as many helpful features as possible.

I am obviously not completely at liberty to add whatever I want since this is something I am coding for someone else, but I do have quite a bit of control and sway as far as my input, just because the client's themselves are unfamiliar with exactly what finer details they want and need. I wanted to inquire here if anyone has any must-have CRM features they love that might be a positive addition to this project that I am not aware of. Currently we having the following functionality:

• Lead management
• Public lead intake plus manual lead creation
• Lead statuses: New, Scheduled, In Progress, Canceled with broader internal mappings including follow-up/completed
• Lead search, filters, archived vs active views
• Lead fields for service, device, preferred date/time, visit type, requester type, issue, summary, notes
• Tech assignment and workload visibility
• Lead notes/history
• Dashboard and operations visibility
• Lead volume/activity graph
• Pipeline overview by status
• New customer overview
• Technician workload summary
• Embedded calendar view
• Customer CRM
• Customer profiles separate from leads
• Contact info, address, preferred contact method
• Membership tracking: active membership, plan, start date, renewal date, membership notes
• Customer status tracking: Active, Follow Up, Completed, Inactive
• Customer notes with visibility controls for techs vs admin-only
• Ticket history attached to each customer
• Archive customer flow
• Ticket/case management
• Dedicated tickets section
• Ticket numbers/case references
• Ticket status, priority, assigned tech, schedule, device, issue, outcome/resolution
• Search/filter tickets across customers
• Billing and payments
• Outstanding balance tracking
• Missed payment / billing follow-up flags
• Payment status and method tracking
• Run card in CRM via Stripe
• Invoice generation
• Billing document area for invoices and receipts
• Payment audit ledger
• Staff/ops management
• Staff directory
• Roles and permissions
• Branch / territory / manager hierarchy
• Dispatch/reporting access flags
• Tech-specific performance exports
• Security / compliance / control
• Role-based access for owner, admin, developer, regional manager, territory manager, tech
• Notifications drawer/activity alerts
• Audit log for profile changes, lead updates, note actions, payment changes, deletes
• CSV exports
• Password management
• Cleanup/admin tools for deleting records and clearing audit history

I am curious, is there anything you guys could suggest adding to this project? Please feel free to ask anything you like and I would be happy to elaborate on it.

There are 10,000 AI CRMs startups - have you found a reliable one? I am looking for one which lets me keep track of my follow ups, and where leads are in my funnel across the following channels:

- reddit

- whatsapp

- imessage

- email

Claude often misses emails, making it unreliable.

imessage and whatsapp can be done via beeper.

Why is it impossible to find one that reliably works?

Please help.

Has anyone found a CRM that can predict when a deal is going cold? I’m head of sales at a 30-person B2B SaaS startup and I’m getting frustrated because we keep losing warm leads just because no one is paying attention to how long it’s been since we’ve communicated with them.

What I want is something that will automatically flag when a prospect we’ve flagged as “strong” in our system has gone quiet for 1-2 weeks.

If I absolutely have to, I guess I could build something manually to serve as a reminder system. But I feel like this must be a common enough issue that surely somebody’s What tool would you recommend that can help with this?

Build a tool for my sales team for telecalling..

After every single call, they'd spend another minute or two filling out the CRM. Things like whether the lead was interested, call outcome, feedback, follow-up, and a bunch of other fields.

It doesn't sound like much, but after hundreds of calls a day, that's a lot of time spent typing instead of actually talking to people.

So I built a small tool for them.

Now, as soon as a call ends, it fills in all the required CRM fields automatically based on the call. They can just move on to the next call instead of stopping to update everything manually.

This is a follow up post from my original post where am looking for CRM for my small business and I need help on picking one without getting scammed of hidden fees.

Someone asked me to post what features I want for my CRM so I have listed here some of them and open to any others that you recommend.

Customer data management
Lead management
Online enquiry forms
Automated follow up
Integration to website, phone number, email and social medias with instant automated follow up
Schedule social media posting
Quote and invoice management
Email Marketing, promotions, discounts
Scheduling and task management
Booking management

Hi,
I have a small cleaning business. We already have a website and we are looking for CRM.
Which one do you guys recommend? For a small cleaning business?
What are the setup cost?
And are there any hidden cost?
I have been researching around but they always trying to sale themselves as the best.
Just wanted to know what we should know before choosing.

Thanks you

I spent the last few months building a custom CRM for a fresh-produce wholesaler that supplies dozens of restaurants daily. Wanted to share what it does, because I think a lot of distribution/wholesale businesses are sitting on the exact same problem and don't realize software can fix it.

The "before": every order came in over WhatsApp, some typed, some as voice notes, some as a photo of a handwritten pad. Employees read all of it and hand-typed everything into a stack of spreadsheets. If that person was sick, the business was blind. No real-time view of anything. not scalable at all.

What I built: an end-to-end CRM where WhatsApp is the order channel and AI does the reading and typing.

Here's the flow now:

- A customer sends a WhatsApp, typed text, a voice note (even in mixed local language), or a photo of a handwritten order. Integration done through WhatsApp Business API from Meta

- The system transcribes the voice (Whisper), reads the handwriting (GPT-4o vision), and parses the text then matches it against that customer's actual product catalog, including nicknames and local units, so it becomes a real, structured order. No guessing, actually fetched/stored in backend/database

- It sends the customer a clean itemized summary with native Confirm / Cancel buttons right in WhatsApp. They can also just reply "make it 20 not 30" and the AI edits the order.

- The confirmed order drops straight into the Web CRM dashboard. Zero manual data entry.

On top of the order engine:

- Customer master, product catalog, standing/recurring orders, activity log, roles & permissions ; the full CRM experience, not just a chatbot.

Live dashboard - the owner finally sees every order, message, and voice note in one place, in real time, no refresh needed. The one-person bottleneck is gone.

- Auto-purchasing: it consolidates every confirmed order into a single supplier purchase sheet (exact Excel format their buyer already uses) and sends it over WhatsApp on request. It only ever includes new orders, so nothing gets double-bought.

- Analytics

- Accounting sync (QuickBooks) + local tax-compliant invoice formats — sales, cost-of-goods, and receivables flow to the books automatically. they literally laid off few people after I automated their workflow

- Doubles as an AI assistant: customers can ask about pricing/availability in the WhatsApp and get a real answer from an AI enriched with the context of the whole business.

Sales & customer relationships (what every CRM must nail)

- Leads & pipeline — track prospects from first contact to first order, with stages, owners, and follow-up reminders so nothing slips.

- Customer health scoring : automatic flags when a regular's order volume drops or they've gone quiet, so you win them back before they churn instead of after.

- Relationship & follow-up engine: scheduled check-ins, "last ordered 12 days ago" nudges, re-order prompts, the CRM chases retention for you.

- Customer self-service B2B portal: customers browse the catalog, re-order in one tap, track their delivery live, and see their own balance & statements. Fewer "where's my order" calls.

Inventory & supply

- Warehouse / pack-house stock, batches & FEFO (first-expiry-first-out): the right stock goes out first, waste drops.
- Procurement & vendor scorecards: rate every supplier on quality, price, and reliability; buy smarter.

- Spoilage & waste analytics: see exactly where money is rotting.

the "Intel Center"

The owner's command dashboard: gross profit per single order, vendor scorecards, receivables aging, market/price trend tracking, and spoilage analysis the numbers an owner has never been able to see in real time

- Reports & exports across every module.

Biggest lesson: for non-technical, older, mixed-literacy users, meeting them where they already are (WhatsApp) beats any app you could build. Nobody had to learn new software. They just kept sending WhatsApps; the software got smarter, they didn't have to.

Happy to answer anything on the architecture, the AI parsing accuracy, or the WhatsApp Business API side, that part has some gotchas. If you run a distribution/wholesale/B2B-ordering business drowning in manual order entry, feel free to drop a comment; I'm always down to talk shop

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Reps on my team treat CRM hygiene as optional and I mean I get it, it's 20 minutes of soul-crushing data entry after every call. I want the notes, the fields, the next steps, the follow-up to basically happen on their own after a meeting, cleanly, without wrecking the CRM structure. What are you using in 2026 to automate the post-meeting CRM work that doesn't create a straight up nightmare?

Start from level 1 in The New Acquisition Game:

Client acquisition isn't just cold emails anymore.

It's now "Omnipresence + Automation".

Reframe getting clients as a game, and you'll become addicted to levelling up.

Level 1: Get Your First Wins

→ Launch a simple lead magnet that solves one problem
→ Send 50 personalized cold messages daily
→ Document your process in case studies
→ Build basic systems to handle inbound inquiries

Level 2: Build Visible Authority

→ Post your frameworks and lessons learned daily
→ Share client wins and transformations publicly
→ Teach what you know while building credibility
→ Give away valuable insights to prove expertise

Level 3: Scale Your Outbound

→ Use AI to research and personalize at volume
→ Test multiple channels: email, LinkedIn, video DMs
→ Create sequences that feel human, not robotic
→ Track what converts and double down

Level 4: Engineer Inbound

→ Create content that ranks and attracts your ICP
→ Build lead magnets that convert browsers to leads
→ Deploy nurture systems working while you sleep
→ Set up referral mechanisms that self-replicate

Level 5: Become Unavoidable

→ Your name appears when prospects research solutions
→ Content drives qualified leads without paid ads
→ Cold prospects already know who you are
→ Outbound becomes easier because of inbound authority

Level 6: Pure Inbound Mode

→ Prospects seek you out, not the other way around
→ Waitlists and application funnels filter clients
→ Community and partners feed you opportunities
→ Outbound is optional, not survival

Beat the game?

You're playing the long game now.

Early levels: Hustle meets strategy.
Final levels: Authority meets automation.

Anyway, If outbound is part of your work, this might be worth a look: verbatune.com

I'm an account manager in sales. I do a lot of cold calling, prospecting and customer meetings and honestly my setup is held together with tape.

For tracking my calls and prospecting I use a plain spreadsheet. For meeting notes I'm in Word and save then on some customer folder. I used OneNote for a while before that. And on top of all of it I still have to update Salesforce so my manager has his reports.

So the actual stuff I need to remember about an account, the real objection, who actually decides, what I promised last time, ends up spread across three places and half of it lives in my head.

And Salesforce isn't really built for that side of it. Something as simple as "just show me the last few meeting notes for this account" before I hop on a call isn't there, or it's buried. It's built for reporting up, not for helping me walk into the next conversation.

The funny thing is I looked around and all my colleagues are more or less in the same boat. Everyone has their own patchwork. One's in Notes, one's in a notebook, one's in a huge spreadsheet, nobody's really using the same thing. So it's clearly not just me.

I want to know what other people are doing, because I can't be the only one:

• What do you use for meeting notes and call tracking?
• What's the one feature you use the most?
• What's the feature you wish existed but doesn't?
• What made you drop a tool you used to like?

Trying to get a real picture here, not sell anything. I'm thinking of a simple solution for myself and I'd rather build around what people actually need than guess.

Appreciate any and all answers.

Been thinking about this a lot lately and I'm curious how other teams handle it. For those of you running a self hosted or highly configurable CRM (something like SuiteCRM, EspoCRM, Odoo, Vtiger, or even a heavily customized setup), who actually owns the thing?

What I mean is, is there one person whose job is to sit down and decide how the funnels should be structured, what the workflows and automations look like, how the internal processes map onto the system, and which integrations get built or added? Or does it just sort of happen organically, where sales tweaks one thing, marketing tweaks another, and ops adds a field here and there until nobody really knows why it's set up the way it is?

My base:

Here's the part I keep coming back to though. A lot of the classic CRM complaints seem like they might trace back to this exact gap. Think about the usual ones. You end up with fifty overlapping workflows that nobody remembers building. Half the team refuses to actually use the CRM because it's clunky or doesn't match how they work. Data is a mess because there's no standard for how things get entered. Integrations break and nobody notices for weeks. Reports don't mean anything because the pipeline stages were never properly defined.

So my real question is, how much of that chaos is just a symptom of not having one person who owns the system and thinks about it end to end? Is it possible that the too many workflows problem and the nobody uses it problem and the data is garbage problem are all basically the same problem wearing different clothes, which is just an absence of dedicated ownership?

Or am I overstating it? Maybe there are teams out there with no dedicated CRM person that run perfectly clean setups, and teams with a full time expert that are still a disaster. Curious if that matches what you've seen.

A few specific things I'm wondering:

A. Do you have someone dedicated to this, or is it spread across a few people? If you don't have anyone, have you noticed the kind of issues I described creeping in? And for those who do have a dedicated owner, did bringing that person in actually clean things up, or were the problems already too baked in by then?

B. Also curious whether the person who owns it tends to be technical or more on the business and ops side, especially with CRMs we unlock not just organizational system but also revenue planning, cohort building, ICP definitions etc.

Not selling anything, just genuinely trying to understand how common this role is and whether the lack of it really is the root cause behind so many CRM headaches. Might wanna open CRM consulting firm later, but for now it's just a curiousity. Appreciate any perspective!

I’m helping a family member grow their local service business and reach more nearby customers, so I’ve been looking into ways to build more targeted local business lead lists.

I started by searching manually through Google Maps, company websites, and local directories, but it quickly became too slow once I wanted to cover multiple areas and service categories.

Ideally, I’m trying to find a workflow or tool that can help collect business details like the company name, website, location, and, where publicly available, the owner or decision-maker’s email and phone number.

I’ve seen a few platforms that offer Google Maps scraping, business data extraction, and enrichment, but I haven’t properly tested any yet.

For anyone who’s built local business lead lists before, what tools or processes have worked best for finding accurate contact details for owners or decision-makers without spending a fortune?

I used to round everything to .25 hours because that's what my invoicing tool required. Thought I was being professional. Turns out I was leaving like $400/month on the table because I'd consistently round down instead of logging the actual 8 or 12 minutes.

Started tracking exact time and holy shit, those little 10-minute client calls and quick revisions actually add up. I'm not saying nickel-and-dime your clients, but if you worked it, log it. I built a timer that just floats on my screen so I never forget to start it, and my invoices went up 15% without changing my rates at all.

Anyone else been undercharging themselves like this or am I just bad at math?

Your data is not encrypted! They can see it!

Tired of manually copying businesses one by one from Google Maps into your spreadsheet, or from lead generators that give you poor-quality data?

I’ve created a simple but very effective tool.

1. Draw the search area on the map
2. Enter your search parameters: business type, whether you want businesses with or without a website, and the minimum rating you’re looking for
3. Choose the number of leads you want
4. Get a list of leads with the data that really matters
5. You can manage them with the built-in mini CRM or export them to CSV

It's free to try (free leads included when you sign up, no credit card required). I'm still actively improving it, so I'd really appreciate any honest feedback.