Myself and my team recently decided to consider newer CRM options to speed up our outreach/tracking process. We're a small advisory firm, maybe 6 or 7 or so of us who'd actually be in the system day to day.

We work project by project. For each advisory project we build a list of people who might be interested in that particular transaction, and then we reach out to them. So it's not selling a product to customers one at a time, it's more like, here's a mandate, who are the right people to talk to about it, and then we work that list. Each project ends up being something like 200-ish people, and we've got several of these projects running at the same time.

The way we want it to work: we've already got a big pile of contacts we've been in touch with over the years, and we want the CRM to hold those and enrich as we go. So we'd drop in a list of companies (an Excel sheet), and for the ones we've already dealt with, the CRM would pull up the contact we already have there (which would be imported from our Outlook system). For the companies where we don't have anyone yet, we use a separate tool to go find new contacts. Between the two we end up with a full outreach list for each project.

There’s an important issue that we want to address. Since we run a separate pipeline per project, the same person often shows up in more than one of them. Say we reach out to a guy named Zack at Company ABC about one project, and a while later we're also reaching out to Zack about a completely different project. We need the CRM to get that Zack is on two different outreach lists and to keep the email tracking straight between them, so it knows which emails belong to which project and tracks them separately. A couple of tools we tried just dump everything onto the contact and blur the two projects together, which does not work for us.

We also want that tracking to be automatic. We don't want to manually mark each email so it gets logged, that defeats the point, we want it to pick up the outreach and file it under the right project on its own.

And we're not trying to auto send anything. We send our emails ourselves because most of them need proper review before they go out. But it'd be great if the system could at least draft a rough first version by pulling from the info in our spreadsheet, so we can review it, fix it, and then send it ourselves.

The rest of the wishlist: we're a Microsoft/Outlook shop so Outlook syncing that runs in the background without us babysitting it is preferable. Being able to auto sync most email but keep certain confidential threads out of the system entirely would be great. Some decent internal dashboards plus reports we can export and send to clients. Dedupe and a shared contact history so we can tell if anyone here has been in touch with a person before. And it has to stay internal, no client logins or portals, and we're small so we're not looking to spend enterprise money.

So, what are you all running, how big is your team, and what do you like/hate about it? Would really love to hear from anyone doing deal or project-based work rather than high volume Saas sales. Thanks! 😊

Hi everyone,

I've been researching the CRM migration industry before building anything and I'm trying to understand how consultants actually run these projects. If you've ever worked on CRM/data migrations (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, etc.) I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Some questions I have:
- What are some parts of the process that really manual?
- What is your least favorite part of the process?
- What tools do you currently use?

If anyone knows anyone who has experience or knowledge in the field please let me know as well.

Thanks for the help!

What tools or software are you using that have helped your emails look better and function better? We use Hubspot and it is limited in the emails. Obviously I can custom code emails, but wondering if people have tools they like that do this more easily.

I’ve been using clickup for quite some time but that doesn’t have accounting and HR, for that I am using different softwares…. Literally a software for one work… aren’t there any software which gives the entire suite?

Do anyone know?

Most teams know what they pay for their CRM.

But when you look closer, the real costs often come from everything around it:

• Dialers and telephony
• Call recording and storage
• Integrations and middleware
• Data providers
• SMS platforms
• Reporting and analytics tools
• Admin time spent managing multiple systems

Sometimes the software itself isn't the biggest expense it's the extra tools, usage fees, and operational overhead that add up over time.

What's been the biggest hidden cost in your sales stack?

Has there been a tool, integration, or process that ended up costing far more than you expected?

This is a weekly post for you to let out about something which happened this week for you in CRM that mattered: features, client requests that were either great or awful this week, and just generally chat CRM / CRM consulting chatter.

No self promo, just a place to share tales from the front-line of CRM!

One of the most annoying things with outreach-heavy orgs is when the contact data lives in one system, the segment logic lives somewhere else, and the actual messaging happens in a third place. Then everyone wonders why reporting is fuzzy and follow-up gets inconsistent.

I’ve mostly seen this in campaign and advocacy setups, but honestly it applies to a lot of teams. If the workflow is messy, the outreach gets messy too.

I was reading through platform options and RumbleUp caught my attention because it seemed to be discussed less like a pure bulk SMS tool and more like something teams use when actual organizing is involved. Curious what people here think is the cleanest way to handle data + text outreach without building a Frankenstein process.

I've been obsessing over cold LinkedIn outreach for a while now. partly for my own pipeline, partly because I kept seeing people around me send completely reasonable messages and get nothing back.

So I started saving every opener that actually worked. Ones that turned into real conversations, not just a polite thumbs up or "thank you". Eventually I had about 50 of them across six industries.

Once I had enough I went back through all of them looking for patterns. Here's what almost every single one had in common:

1. Every message that worked ended with exactly one question. Not "thoughts on this? Also are you open to a call? I can also send a deck". Cutting the second ask is harder than it sounds but it's the difference between a message that gets answered and one that gets skimmed.

2. No pitch in the first message: Out of 50 messages, zero of them pitched anything in the opener. The only job of message one is to earn message two. That's it.

3. Signal-based beats evergreen every time: About 7 out of 10 of the messages that worked referenced something the other person did in the last week or two (a post, a hire, a product update, a comment they left somewhere.) The freshest openers consistently outperformed the generic reusable ones by a wide margin.

4. Specificity over cleverness: "Saw you hired three SDRs in Q3" will always outperform the wittiest line ever written. Not one of these 50 openers is clever in the LinkedIn influencer sense. Every single one references something real.

5. Peer framing, not target framing: The messages that converted treated the other person as an operator with an interesting problem, not as a budget to unlock. Ironically that framing tends to unlock more budget than any direct pitch ever could.

6. Always keep it short: Average length across all 50 is around 50 words. Nothing needed to be long to work. If a message needs three paragraphs to make its point, the point probably isn't sharp enough yet.

I ended up turning the whole collection into a proper doc organized by industry with a breakdown of why each one worked because the template is useless without understanding the reasoning behind it. The moment you paste one of these word for word to someone who didn't actually do the thing it references, it becomes spam like everything else in their inbox.

Happy to share the full doc in the comments if anyone wants it. It's free, no email wall or anything. just figured it's more useful out in the world than sitting in my notes.

We are trying to connect our sales process with project delivery and the handoff is where things start breaking down.

Customer information lives in the crm but once a deal closes, the project team needs context without copying everything manually