Hi everyone. I created a minimalist CRM that I've named OWN._

This CRM is designed for small businesses, freelancers, training centers and sales professionals.

What set it apart from other CRMs is it's ease of use, the absence of unnecessary AI, and the option to choose a perpetual license so you can retain full control over your data.

You can connect your email account to track email exchanges with your prospects. You can create tasks and sets reminders so you never miss an opportunity again. The CRM can be easily installed on your phone, tablet or computer.

It's easy to import your data from other CRMs, an Excel file, a CSV file or Microsoft Access.

For those who are interested, I will set up access for you so you can try it out and give me feedback on the CRM. I really want to offer a product that makes sense 🙏

we are at the stage where the lightweight setup we have been running is no longer cutting it. seven people on the revenue side, mix of inbound and outbound, and we need something that gives us real pipeline visibility and does not require a full time admin to keep it running cleanly.

been narrowing it down to HubSpot and Pipedrive and keep going in circles. Pipedrive feels cleaner and more focused for pure sales but HubSpot seems to make more sense if we want marketing and sales data in the same place eventually.

the thing i cannot get a clear answer on is how the two compare once you start scaling past 10 or 15 people. Pipedrive seems built for sales simplicity which is appealing now but i wonder if we hit a ceiling sooner. HubSpot feels like it has more runway but also more complexity to set up properly.

for teams that have used both what was the deciding factor and would you make the same call again at our stage?

I run a physical B2B food services operation and am looking for recommendations for an affordable help desk and CRM.
I am specifically looking for tools that:
Help manage a mix of support calls and email inquiries efficiently.
Integrate well with automated workplace tools (Google Workspace/Excel-based workflows).
Are suited for a B2B model rather than high-volume consumer apps.
Would appreciate any advice on software that balances cost-effectiveness with a professional, minimalist interface.

The process of vetting CRMs these days seems to heavily lean towards features, and how slick, clean, and user friendly. However there is more the UI, than just features, and when working with most clients, features are important, but not as important as the following:

1. Who has to use it daily, and will they?
Most CRM's claim their user friendly UI will fit into your teams workflow. And in some cases, it does, but no matter what it will always make more work for your team. Your sales team should be the driving force behind the CRM, not the CRM demanding sales to use it. It's like the tail wagging the dog vs the dog wagging its tail. So start by auditing your sales team, ask then to show you, how they manage new contacts, look up data on past accounts. Do they instantly go into a CRM, or are they using their own method. This is a chance to incorporate triable knowledge into one system. If a behavior change is required, then you will most likely have low adoption, you can increase it with proper onboarding, but your making a change, that will directly impact your bottom line.

2. How easy is it to get data out of your CRM?
99% of all demos I have sat in, show how easy it is to put data into the CRM. Click here, add in these 5 fields, and a new record is created. Or click, import, field match to your excel document, and hit the import button. Getting data into a CRM is never the problem! It's getting data out. Most companies gate keep data export, because it a sign that the client is looking to churn. If you are exporting for reporting reasons, they double down on in platform reporting tools. So asking how do you export data, should be one of your first 5 questions asked, right after you ask how does data get imported.

3. What level of automation is supported?
At this point, with AI, we all know speed to lead, is the #1 CRM automation, a company can implement. The real question is whether it supports conditional logic, multi-step sequences, and integration with the other tools you're already using. If you have to use 3rd party tools it can add significant costs to your implementation. I want to state, I have yet to come across a CRM, that handles 100% of a clients need. And if you are focused to heavily on features, you will miss if your core need is answered.

4. How does it handle dirty data?
This is the #1 thing most vetting CRMs forget to ask. How does the CRM handle dirty data. By dirty data I mean, duplicates, stalled data that has not moved in months, data from reps that are no longer with your company. Data that is missing and incomplete. A CRM demo will show you how you can easily merge contacts/ profiles, but its a manual process, and often times, confusing to determine the correct information. If the tool has deep automation capabilities, ask during your demo if you can create an automation that checks stagnant data regularly to help Identify dirty data.

5. What's the actual support model when something breaks?
I see this mostly with "vibe coded" CRM products. The CRM looks amazing, and then when you sign up, and you get stuck or something breaks, the customer support team is MIA. Often times you put in a ticket, and wait. And wait, and wait, or in some cases you get stuck in an AI chat bot loop from hell. Larger CRM platforms have a designated CS team, that will be there to help in usually a 24 hour period. And when you are in the sales call, a telling sign is if the company is mature enough, they have a CS rep on the call with sales. If you find yourself on a call without a CS rep, that might be a sign that maybe they are not mature enough as a product to understand customer needs. With a CRM being central to a business revenue, customer support after the close of the sale is critical.

The truth is, so many companies are out there, saying here are the features that we offer, and here is our product compared to to others, and they price their tiers accordingly. When vetting a CRM, ask for an enterprise sales demo that is extended for 30 days, 2 week demos, just don't cut it, and you get overwhelmed with features. Have a team vet the tool, not just one person. Don't fall for CRM features, look deeper. Ask your team, what they used at previous companies, what they loved, and what they hated. Take those answers into consideration. As it will make the difference and prevent you from spending thousands of dollars on features that you don't need but seemed awesome during the demo.

Hey everyone,

Like a lot of agency owners here, I got incredibly sick of my monthly software bill. Between paying for a CRM/dialer, a white-label client portal, a heat map tracker, and separate SEO auditing tools, I was getting absolutely bled to death by point-solutions.

Worse than the cost was the workflow. My appointment setters would be on a live cold call, scrambling across three browser tabs trying to pull data to pitch a prospect on their local SEO weak spots.

So, I decided to build my own platform to integrate everything we do into one clean dashboard.

Here’s how the workflow looks now:

The CRM & Built-in Dialer: Agents call straight out of the system.

Instant Live Audits: While on a live discovery or cold call, the agent can click one button to pull a live SEO audit and competitor analysis for the business on the phone. No jumping tabs, no waiting.

Built-in Heat Maps: Tracks real user behavior on the site natively.

Dedicated Client Portals: Instead of sending ugly monthly PDFs, clients get a clean portal they can log into 24/7 to see their live heat maps, competitor tracking, and campaign progress.

We’ve been running our own SEO campaigns through it, but I’m ready to open it up to other agencies, freelancers, and outbound teams.

Because we are just launching and want raw feedback, I’m pricing this aggressively to start. Packages start at just $35/month for solo users/freelancers, and scale up depending on how many agent seats or white-label client portals you need.

I’m looking for a few agency owners or high-volume appointment setters who want to streamline their stack, slash their bills, and test this out.

Hello,

I created my own (free) ERP system that integrates a "complete" CRM. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert in this field and I would appreciate expert feedback on my CRM module. It's available in French, English, German, and Spanish.

Anyone available?

Free-text fields feel flexible until reporting depends on them.

Industry, lead source, lifecycle stage, lost reason, company size, region, product interest, and priority all become messy if every rep writes their own version.

Which CRM field caused the most pain because it was not standardized early?

I ran sales teams for about 15 years before I started building my own systems, and the metric that fooled me longest was days-since-last-contact. It looks like the safe one. A lead you touched three days ago reads as alive. One you haven't touched in three weeks reads as dying. So you chase the three-week one.

The trouble is the counter measures your activity, not theirs. I ran a marketplace with over 300 merchants, and I used to go through accounts by hand because I did not trust an automatic flag to tell me what was actually dead. It worked at first, but it ate hours, and past a certain number you simply cannot keep checking all of them properly. The ones I had touched recently looked fine, so I skipped them. Some were already gone. I just could not see it under all the manual checking.

What I do now is track two clocks instead of one. Days since I reached out, and days since they last responded. When the second number runs much longer than the first, the deal is gone no matter how busy the activity log looks. A formula flags that gap on its own, the part I used to do by hand, but the call on what counts as a real reply stays manual. A calendar reply and a "leave me alone" reply look identical to a formula.

This is a monthly megathread where you can all clamour for CRM attention without being banned for spamming this forum. Share your CRM, or consultancy service to your hearts content, (just keep your dignity!) The idea here is to keep the rest of r_crm less spammy, so don't be surprised if your regurgitated chatGPT output and link don't ever get approved elsewhere on this sub.

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When replying, please use the following format:

Put [ASK] at the start of your comment if you're asking/looking for something.

... we'll assume the rest are people recommending without being asked :D

As always, please disclose your relation to what you're posting.

I've been using folk for a while now and just recently discovered they have an MCP in beta. Wondering what other CRMs people are using that have MCPs and what interesting workflows people have been able to do with AI agents + CRM MCP

We're a team of 8 running campaigns for SaaS and fintech clients. Been evaluating b2b data providers for the last month since our Apollo contract is up for renewal.

Apollo has solid filters and the chrome extension is handy, but we're seeing maybe 60-70% accuracy on emails lately. Mobile numbers are basically non-existent unless you pay for their premium tier. Plus they just bumped pricing again.

We tested Seamless .AI for a week. Significantly better mobile coverage but the UI feels like 2015. Data quality was hit or miss - one client list had like 40% bounces which killed our sender rep.

Been comparing costs across Apollo, Seamless .AI, and Prospeo. Apollo wants something like 150/user/month for what we need (mobile access + intent data). Prospeo looks noticeably cheaper for similar features. Still testing b2b data quality but initial results look promising.

What b2b database are you all using for lead generation? Specifically need decent mobile coverage since our clients want to add cold calling to their mix.

Looking for honest feedback before I spend more time building this.

I've spoken with several SMB sales teams (5–25 reps), and a common issue keeps coming up: sales reps spend a lot of time updating the CRM after calls and emails. Even then, important details often get missed or never make it into the system.

Enterprise tools like Gong and Chorus solve part of this problem, but they're often priced and designed for much larger organizations.

I'm building a tool that connects to your CRM and email, reads meeting transcripts or recordings, and extracts key details such as:

• Deal stage
• Budget
• Objections
• Next steps
• Action items

and automatically updates the CRM.

One important detail: the tool works from existing meeting recordings or transcripts. It doesn't join or monitor calls directly. If you're already recording or transcribing Zoom or Google Meet calls, it can use that data.

I'd love some honest feedback:

1. Is keeping CRM records up to date a major pain point for your team?
2. Do you already record or transcribe sales calls? If not, would that be a blocker?
3. Would you trust AI to create CRM notes and updates, or would you want human review first?
4. What are you using today to capture call notes and CRM updates?
5. What would make you switch to a solution like this?

I'm not sharing a link here because I want validation, not promotion. Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Hey guys, for context I've been running a solo lawn care business for the past year. Never really used any CRMs as I couldn't be bothered (just noted everything in self messages lol). Anyways, recently I've expanded and added 2 ppl to form a small crew for myself. I'd rather them not follow what I do so I'm looking for proper CRMs for the lawn care business now.

I checked out this sub and most people have suggested Jobber, but it seemed to have a little too many features for a crew as small as this. So maybe some lighter and simpler options would be nice? Although I'm completely new to CRMs so I'm open to anything.

Thanks!

I kept seeing people talk about MCP servers everywhere.

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Every day a new MCP project was popping up.

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But when I started building AI-powered sales workflows, I ran into a surprisingly annoying problem:

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Finding MCP servers for sales use cases was a mess.

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I had bookmarks everywhere.

Random GitHub repos.

Scattered X posts.

Notes in Notion.

Saved Reddit comments.

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After wasting way too much time searching for the same things over and over, I decided to spend a weekend organizing everything into one place.

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Now it has categories like:

• LinkedIn outreach

• CRM integrations

• Lead generation

• Email automation

• Sales workflows

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What started as a personal reference has slowly turned into something other builders are contributing to as well.

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Curious:

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Are you using MCP servers for sales or business automation yet?

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And what's the most useful MCP server you've found so far?

Quick version for the impatient (full detail in first comment 👇).

Small B2B team (5 users, ~€9/user/mo on Pipedrive). We sell direct, but a reseller channel is about to scale fast and I want to size the tooling right before the CRM gets big and migration hurts.

The hard part: two audiences in one system.

• Customers → normal CRM (contacts, opportunities, deals).
• Partners → resellers with a tier driven by a points system (points from performance, training/certification, and marketing). Tier unlocks benefits.

A single opportunity has to count for both the customer and the partner who sourced it. I also want a partner portal(self-service training, deal registration, points tracking) and two-way API sync with our in-house ERP.

Pipedrive feels too light, no real PRM. Salesforce was an over-engineered machine for us. Tried Impartner in previous work experience as channel account exec, probably only scratched the surface.

Has anyone run a real PRM on top of Pipedrive or did you move to an all-in-one (HubSpot + custom objects? Zoho? something else)?
What broke, and what's the real all-in cost? Simpler = better; trying to avoid €000s integration quotes.

Stack: Pipedrive + Lusha. ERP in dev (API). No PRM yet. Thanks 🙏

for about four months our reply rate sat at 0.3%. not a typo. zero point three percent. on roughly 11k sends per month thats like 33 replies, and half of those were "remove me" or "not interested" so we were looking at maybe 15 actual conversations a month. from 11,000 emails.

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our CRO started asking whether we should just kill outbound entirely and reallocate the budget to paid. my VP of sales was getting pressure from the board about pipeline and i could feel the walls closing in. the two of us on the SDR team were basically on a countdown and didnt even know it until i overheard a conversation i probably wasnt supposed to hear.

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the first thing id tell myself if i could go back 20 months is that your data is lying to you way before your metrics show it. we were pulling lists from Sales Navigator, running them through Prospeo for email enrichment, verifying with ZeroBounce, then loading into Saleshandy. the process looked clean on paper. bounce rate was around 2.1% which seemed fine. open rates were 47-52% which seemed fine. but reply rate was in the toilet and nobody could figure out why.

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turns out we were emailing the right companies but the wrong people. for months i was convinced that director level was our sweet spot because thats what marketing told us and thats what our closed won data from inbound showed. but inbound leads self select. they already have the problem and theyre looking for a solution. outbound is completely different. directors at our ICP companies ($15M-$80M revenue B2B SaaS) almost never have budget authority for a $39k ACV tool. they can champion it but they cant sign off. so we were getting ignored by people who literally couldnt say yes even if they wanted to.

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when we shifted to VP and C level the reply rate jumped to 1.8% within 6 weeks. same copy. same sequences. same everything except the titles we were targeting. 1.8% still isnt amazing but going from 33 replies to roughly 198 replies per month on the same volume... that changed everything for us.

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the other thing i got completely wrong was sequence length. we were running 7 step sequences over 21 days because some blog post i read said longer sequences convert better. and maybe they do in some contexts but for us steps 5 through 7 were generating almost zero replies and were actively hurting our domain reputation. i didnt realize this until i actually pulled the data by step and saw that 89% of our positive replies came in steps 1 through 3, with step 2 being the highest at like 41% of all positive replies. steps 5-7 combined were responsible for 2% of positive replies and probably 30% of our spam complaints based on the timing.

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we cut to 4 steps over 14 days. reply rate went from 1.8% to 2.4%. not because we were getting more replies per se but because we stopped burning contacts who wouldve replied on the next campaign if we hadnt annoyed them into blocking us.

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nobody warned me about inbox infrastructure either. for the first year we were sending from 4 google workspace accounts on our primary domain. just... our actual company domain. sending 2,750 emails per account per month. i look back at that and cringe. we were one bad week away from torching our entire domain reputation and taking our regular business email down with it.

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we moved to Maildoso for dedicated outbound inboxes, set up 12 accounts across 4 secondary domains, and kept each one under 35 sends per day with a 14 day warmup before any cold sends. bounce rate dropped from 2.1% to 0.8% and our inbox placement (we started testing with a seed list) went from around 61% to 83%. that 61% number means almost 40% of our emails were going to spam or promotions. for months. thousands of emails just disappearing.

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the last thing and honestly this cost us more than anything else was not having a feedback loop between outbound and our CRM. we use Pipedrive and for the longest time outbound lived in Saleshandy and closed won data lived in Pipedrive and nobody was connecting them. so when i said "directors are our ICP" that was based on vibes and a spreadsheet someone made 8 months before i joined. once we actually tagged outbound sourced deals and tracked them through to close we found that VP of Ops and VP of Engineering converted at 3.2x the rate of directors. the data was there the whole time, we just never looked.

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our current flow is Sales Navigator for list building, Prospeo handles the email finding step, ZeroBounce for verification, then into Saleshandy with sequences capped at 4 steps. nothing fancy. the fancy part is just actually paying attention to what the numbers are telling you instead of assuming your process is fine because one metric looks ok.

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current numbers as of last month: 2.4% reply rate, 0.7% bounce rate, 14 qualified meetings booked, 4 moved to demo stage. on 11k sends thats roughly $2,800 per qualified meeting when you factor in tooling costs which run us about $1,100/mo total across everything. not where i want to be yet but my CRO stopped talking about killing outbound so thats something

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anyway if your reply rate is bad and your opens and bounces look normal, look at WHO youre emailing before you rewrite a single word of copy. took me way too long to figure that out

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We are searching for a CRM for our medium-sized arts non-profit.

We were on Spektrix prior, but it was too robust for our organization.

We are currently on Neon, but the Arts People & Neon event UX is limiting (or really terrible), and a majority of our revenue comes from ticketed performances.

The ideal CRM would:

• Allow moves management of donations/donors
• Tracking of sponsorships
• Membership management
• Retail to sell gallery prints & exhibition sales
• Seat maps for ticketed events
• Reserved seating + add-on ticket features (for reserved parking or VIP events)
• Capability to do series or "pick 4" passes for performances and series passes for our summer camps
• Ability to refund to gift cards or original payment methods
• Email campaign management
• Volunteer management is a plus, but not needed

Hello Fellow CRM Community,

I am a University student in Canada studying commerce, and have been interested in the whole CRM side of businesses. I'm to start a freelancing gig to have some extra money to pay for rent and necessity's.

I'm fairly new to this and have read all sort of things online. So far, I set up a couple automation scenarios such as SMS messages to owners on new clients, Quote follow ups etc...

With that being said, I am curious as to what and how I should start getting clients - do I cold call, go in person, send emails, post ads. Another thing being is should I tailor my automations towards certain businesses needs to maximize the amount of clients I can reach or do I create these fixed services that I implement in their business. I want to hear what people have done and see what works best.

Any feedback or knowledge would be great whether that be on any context relating to this field.

Thank you!

Hello Fellow CRM Community,

I am a University student in Canada studying commerce, and have been interested in the whole CRM side of businesses. I'm to start a freelancing gig to have some extra money to pay for rent and necessity's.

I'm fairly new to this and have read all sort of things online. So far, I set up a couple automation scenarios such as SMS messages to owners on new clients, Quote follow ups etc...

With that being said, I am curious as to what and how I should start getting clients - do I cold call, go in person, send emails, post ads. Another thing being is should I tailor my automations towards certain businesses needs to maximize the amount of clients I can reach or do I create these fixed services that I implement in their business. I want to hear what people have done and see what works best.

Any feedback or knowledge would be great whether that be on any context relating to this field.

Thank you!

I've been building systems for small teams for a while, and I've noticed this pattern many times

A team spends weeks evaluating CRMs,

Comparing pricing pages, Watching demo videos

, Debating features.

Then they finally pick one, set it up, create a few stages — Lead, Contacted, Proposal Sent, Closed — and call it done.

The pipeline probably took 20 minutes to setup

But Six months later, they're wondering why the CRM isn't helping.

What I've noticed is that people treat CRM selection as the hard part.

But the software is usually the easy part.

The hard part is defining how a deal actually moves through the business.

•What makes a lead qualified?

•When should a deal move to the next stage?

•What happens after a proposal is sent?

•Why do deals usually go cold?

Most CRMs can handle a well-defined process.

What they can't do is define the process for you.

Somebody has to define the process

I've seen teams switch CRMs two or three times looking for something better.

But the real problem was never the tool.

Nobody had clearly defined how a deal moves from first contact to closed.

The CRM was simply reflecting that confusion.

Has your team ever switched CRMs only to run into the same problems with the new one?