i started a new sales job where we are just using excel sheets. i have adhd and this system is not organized enough for me. i wish sales force and sales loft sold to individuals. any advice??

i need something easy that tells me when i am to follow up with someone. i also want to be able to see the last time i spoke with someone & the notes. i want to be able to search in my list of contacts by organization type. i want to be able to easily be able to pull a list of prospects i can call. it would be super amazing if somehow i could use a system that also creates lists for me and pull prospects in (ik prob not likely) as i am starting fresh with 0 customers.

also i go door to door sometimes so bonus points if there’s anything that can help me with tracking/ planning that

i don’t need to be able to send calls or emails or even keep track of deals. simply just need help organizing my prospects and leads

pls help im trying to not rip my hair out

I’m in the middle of building a pretty robust CRM. We have virtually no CRM that exists right now and any one that we have tried in the past off-line or with consultants just wouldn’t meet our business needs and they didn’t know how to extend to it.

We don’t necessarily have stocked inventory of what we sell because a large portion of what we sell is used equipment. Some of it is on consignment and then some of it is owned. And the inventory is ever changing because of that.

I’ve spent about 150 hours talking with chatgpt and building it on visual code. I have no prior experience with coding outside of engineering school (and that was dated coding for mechanical type systems). However, I have a pretty well built CRM right now that meets our needs.

My only concern at this point is how to hook it into our website and all of the privacy measures I need to take for it so that it can’t be hacked. I’ve created authentication and logins, but I don’t think that meets the bill of needs. Is privacy and security something that you can create yourself or do you need to outsource for that? I really have no idea what I’m talking about on this level except my research into it.

What all should I consider on this front?

AI is being added to almost every CRM these days.

From your experience, has it actually improved your workflow, or has it mostly added more complexity?

Which CRM tasks do you think AI handles well, and which ones are still better left to traditional automation or humans?

We are currently on Sage Evolution, but are finding it very antiquated. Our CEO is very gung-ho on AI integration, and I thought that Salesforce would be the best contender due to it being at the forefront of innovation, due to its funding and popularity.

We are a team of 20, and there are some oldies in the team who are very used to our system and would likely struggle with adapting a bit. Our finance department is also very comfortable and quite attached. The apparent complexity of SF is one thing that deters me.

The finance side of our current CRM works and is fine, but the sales side sucks. It doesn't give us any insights or anything useful aside from reminders that you manually set for each "incident."

We have about 20 years of data on the CRM, and we are currently looking at cleaning it up, creating good metadata, etc. so that we can use an AI system for better insights and workflow.

I've also looked at Pipedrive and HubSpot. It's a small team, but the company makes a lot of money, so money isn't really an issue. It's more about efficiency and our system not becoming redundant with the AI boom. There are lots of competitors and we want to keep our finger on the pulse so as to speak.

Any insight from operations managers would be epic.

I've been looking at AI customer support tools, and I keep hearing the same complaint: integration is a nightmare.

Mid-market companies buy these AI chatbots, but they can't get them to work properly with their existing CRM (Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.).

The AI lives in a silo. It doesn't have access to customer data. Agents end up copying and pasting responses anyway.

Is this a common problem? Has anyone actually made this work? What's the secret?

I'm not selling anything—just trying to understand the gap between the hype and reality.

Is there a way to integrate reddit messages into your CRM? Wether thats just notification and messagin takes action in reddit or the reddit messaging gets overtaken within the CRM just like email, sms and whatsapp?

Been seeing a stat going around that around 95% of IT leaders name data integration as their number one barrier to AI adoption, not the AI models themselves, the plumbing underneath.

That tracks with what I’ve seen anecdotally: a lot of AI pilots (lead scoring, forecasting, customer health scoring) get built on top of a CRM or ERP that has duplicate records, stale fields, or data that’s only half-synced with whatever other system holds the rest of the picture. The AI ends up confidently wrong because the input was never clean or complete in the first place.

Curious if others have seen this play out.

Has an AI pilot at your company stalled or underdelivered because the underlying data wasn’t in good enough shape to feed it? What ended up being the actual blocker: data quality, systems not talking to each other, something else entirely? And did anyone go back and fix the data/integration layer first before trying again, or is that too big an ask when leadership wants an AI win now?

We hooked up with Respond.io because on paper it had everything we needed. WhatsApp business messages, calls, VoIP, SMS, the automations. Turns out the SMS part was more of a suggestion.

You can't send an SMS longer than 153 chars through their API. It doesn't split it for you, it just rejects it. So now I have to chop up my own messages and send each part separately, and the customer gets like 6 texts instead of one.

I thought that we can use their UI instead, as on your side long text still looks like one single SMS. Turns out it's even worse. Underneath they hack it into pieces at completely random points, sometimes mid word, and deliver it as separate messages. The customer gets "Your appointment is confir" and then "med for Tue".

They also don't guarantee the order. Message gets split into 6 parts and the customer receives them as 1, 3, 5, 4, 2, 6. My customers are basically solving a word puzzle to figure out when their appointment is. Makes no fucking sense for a platform with SMS in its literal marketing.

I dug into it and Respond.io uses Telnyx as their SMS provider. Concatenated SMS has been a solved problem since roughly the Nokia 3310, and Telnyx supports it out of the box. Send Telnyx a long message through their API directly and it splits it properly, the phone stitches it back together, customer sees one message, parts = 6. Tested it myself, works exactly as expected.

Respond.io instead chops the message up themselves and sends each chunk to Telnyx as a completely separate standalone SMS. So obviously they arrive as separate messages, in whatever order the network feels like. They took a provider that handles this correctly and built a layer on top that breaks it.

Here's what the Telnyx delivery report looks like for the exact same ~900 char message sent both ways (content swapped for an example, structure is 1:1 with my real log):

Sent directly through Telnyx:

One row. One message. Customer sees one text. Revolutionary stuff.

Same message sent from the Respond.io UI, shown in the order the customer's phone received it:

I'm so done with them at this point. Anyone have personal recommendations for something that actually works with:

1. API
2. WhatsApp Messages + Calls
3. VoIP
4. SMS (that arrives whole, in order)

Would take any suggestions.

I recently built a CRM it has a lot of the features and functions as an enterprise CRM. I was wondering if anyone might be in need of this that is willing to try it out at no cost to help me beta test it and build out more features and custom functions for your specific business. If you're interested please DM me and happy to jump on a call and explain more.

We have multiple SaaS products. Products and delivery are solid, but I'm wondering if hiring full-time AEs is premature.

My idea: offer independent sales operators 20% recurring rev share for the lifetime of each account instead of a salary. But I keep hearing that good closers won't touch commission-only deals.

For those who've done this where did you find these people? What's your experience?

Agency/reseller partners instead of individuals?
LinkedIn outreach?
And what terms actually made someone to commit to this?

Would love to hear what worked (or spectacularly didn't).

I'm looking for that super organized person who's moved a lot to test what I made and give me feedback so I can make it better. I built it, so full bias disclosure up front.

some context. I've always been a little confused why nobody uses CRMs for personal stuff. the need is clearly there... remembering birthdays, your friend's kids names, who just moved where, the interview you promised to ask about. but every CRM is structurally a pipeline. leads, stages, deals

so this year I built a personal CRM. friends and family, not sales. and to be clear about my goal: I'm NOT trying to scale this to everyone. I think there are maybe 1000 people out there who are this intentional about their relationships... the very organized person who wants every detail about their people in one place and to be reminded at the right time. I moved cities four times and that's exactly when your people scatter and the details start slipping. it's extremely niche and I think that's fine. The personal CRMs that came before (Monica, Dex, Clay) all seem to drift toward professional networking eventually because that's where the money is, and then the personal user is orphaned again.

what I did differently... input can be natural language. you type something like: met Jess at happy hour, nurse at NYU, just moved here from Nashville. and the contact builds itself. because no normal human will ever backfill 200 people into forms. (but you can also import your phone contacts as a starting point) the fields are personal life shaped too. pets, food preferences, how we met, check in reminders.

so if that's you... you've moved a bunch and your people are scattered across cities.. I would LOVE for you to try it and tell me what doesn't work. not what's nice about it. what's broken, what's missing, what you expected it to do that it doesn't. that feedback is worth more to me than any amount of signups.

it's called YourPond (YourPond.io) and there is a free version and a paid. and if you actually put it through its paces and come back with real feedback, I'll comp you the paid version as a thank you... I'm one person covering the bills so I can't do that for everyone, but genuine testers, absolutely. I'll be in the comments and I'd seriously love love love thoughts!

With so many small business CRM options, it’s hard to know which one is best for your business needs. Asking for recommendations often leads to people listing the same handful of CRM options, with little to no context about which type of business each CRM is actually most ideal for.

Choosing a simple CRM is usually the best approach for small businesses. But “simple” can mean different things depending on which industry you’re in and how your business operates. For instance, service-based businesses with long-lasting customer relationships would require a very different system from product-based businesses with shorter sales cycles. Team size matters here, too.

Here are a few workflow-related questions to ask when choosing your ideal CRM solution:

• How many people actually need to access customer records? If it’s just two or three people, you’ll likely find you won’t need all of the collaboration features in a bigger CRM.
• How long is your average sales or client cycle? Lightweight pipeline tools are better suited to shorter cycles. You’ll need solid activity logging and follow-up reminders for longer cycles.
• What does your current process look like in a spreadsheet? Noting the different columns you’d track when using a spreadsheet is a great way to determine what your CRM needs to do.

A common mistake small businesses make is evaluating how many features the CRM has instead of what the business really needs the CRM to do. Focusing on feature depth at this stage results in businesses paying for features they’ll never use and makes the CRM seem more complicated than it should be.

It’s best to start by analyzing your own workflow, figuring out the features needed to support that workflow, and then searching for a CRM that ticks those boxes. Remember, the best CRM for your business is the one that is used consistently.

What's been the hardest part of your CRM search so far?

I am particularly interested if someone implemented it at a company with no CRM yet that is just starting to hire sales people. Starting with blank page. But any experience will be helpful.

Can’t decide between.. clickup vs monday vs asana vs jira vs linear. I like simplicity but scalability is a factor too, along with superior ai and such. Built out clickup once a few years back but never moved on with it. What do you use?

Bold statement but, as a sales leader, I don't look at the CRM to get the information I need from my team. Yes, reporting, general forecasting, trends, billing, etc. But when I need to know something about an account, the state of a renewal, update on a pursuit, the CRM is not where I go.

I'm curious.

For people who work with clients and leads:

What was the moment you realized spreadsheets weren't enough anymore?

Was it:

Missing follow-ups?

Losing track of deals?

Too many active clients?

Reporting?

Something else?

I'd love to hear your experience.

Somebody asked a slightly tangential question about 'talking to a CRM' a couple of days ago.

I knew it was possible only by layering something atop MCPs.

So I started exploring Pipedrive’s MCP capabilities. I explored it myself with a use case I had been putting off out of sheer laziness.

I’ve referred quite a few leads to my referral partners over time, and I keep all of them in a dedicated 'referral' pipeline in Pipedrive.

Here’s what I did:

1. Fed Claude context about my pipeline and what I was trying to achieve (re-engaging lost deals with a fresh angle).
2. Asked it to pull the lost leads.
3. Had it review the notes on each deal.
4. Asked it to draft personalized follow-up emails with a different proposition.

Result?

I ended up sending 4 personalized emails to lost leads in one sitting.

The outputs were genuinely good — way better than I expected from a quick session.

I’m still learning the constraints (you have to be very specific about which fields to look at and how to interpret the values), but the potential is clear.

Tomorrow I’m planning to tackle the leads that never even responded to the initial outreach.

Has anyone else been using AI (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) directly with their CRM for lead revival, email drafting, or pipeline cleanup?

Would love to hear what you have tried — use cases, tools, prompts, wins, or gotchas.

Cheers!

What's the one thing that slows you down the most when using your CRM?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been talking to a few solo consultants lately and the consensus seems to be: Salesforce/HubSpot is too much, and Spreadsheets are too little.

I’m a dev building Relix - a lean tool specifically for people who just need to see their unread lead emails, drag a card on a Kanban board, and send a follow-up without leaving the tab.

The "Where I'm At" part:

The core engine is built, but I haven't finished the 6-week Google API verification yet. It’s essentially a "raw" MVP.

I’m looking for 5-10 solo consultants who:

1. Are currently drowning in inbox chaos & forgotten follow-ups.

2. Want a "dumbed down" CRM that just works.

3. Would be willing to look at a 2-minute demo video and tell me if I’m solving a real problem or just wasting my time.

If this sounds like your current headache, let me know in the comments. I’d love to have you in the early birds list.

I’m a CRM/automation builder looking to work with a few small businesses that want a CRM built around their actual workflow.

Instead of selling you a generic CRM with features you’ll never use, I can build something tailored to how you currently manage your leads, customers, sales, and follow-ups.

Some things I can build:

• Lead & customer management
• Sales pipelines
• Follow-up systems
• Task management
• Automated notifications
• Dashboards & reporting
• Custom workflows
• Integrations with the tools you already use

I’m currently looking to take on a few projects at a reasonable introductory rate while I continue building my portfolio.

If you're currently using spreadsheets, Notion, Airtable, or a bunch of different tools to manage your business, feel free to DM me.