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.