I’m looking for alternative for Salesforce CRM. In my current salesforce org, I had implemented customizations for accounts, opportunity, opportunity product, product, product schedules, price books, price book entry, contacts, leads, 12-15 custom objects

2 custom apps, approval process, flows, triggers, and some lwc component, validation rules were also present.

The org is for about 100+ users.

Any recommended alternatives which will have the similar capabilities to implement all the above features.

I use the Whatsapp API for the "new leads". But whenever I need to transfer the lead to a seller, it's creating a new lead card, duplicate. Is there a way for the seller to send a message from inside the CRM and inside the lead card, only changing the number that they wanna use (a normal number, using whatsapp lite, separate from the API) and the CRM not creating a duplicate card for that person?

we have most of our data in excel spreadsheets (inventory, sales, orders, daily production, manufacture), the only thing we have in a quasi-ERP is only billing (i already paid for a full year licensing but would like to migrate for a full integration after the licensing ends). I would like to be the one implementing and migrating everything to the CRM (I know its a headache but id be open to paying for consulting hours for one-on-one advice to have some help implementing it, and would like to finish in under 3 months). All our processes are pretty simple, and we don't have a lot of ingredients or different suppliers for our products. We don't have a really big budget for it. We have contacted Odoo and have had some meeting but their price for 3 users and the apps we would need is a bit higher than we would like and the consulting hours are also pretty high. We want everything to communicate with everything so we can have real reports with hard data to be able to scale the business as soon as posible.

Any recommendations for different ERP mostly for small business?

Hello, I have started an agency focusing on CRM cleanup, enrichment and scoring. I am looking to do a free service project in return for a logo and testimonial. Would any b2b folks be interested?

CRM founders (people actually running and supporting production platforms), what feature ended up being far more important than you expected?

I've spent a lot of time talking with service businesses, and it's interesting how often the things founders think are important differ from what customers actually use every day.

For example, I originally expected reporting and analytics to be a major selling point.

Instead, I keep hearing more about dispatching, technician communication, appointment management, customer self-service, and simply getting invoices paid faster.

What's surprised me most is that many customers don't seem to care how sophisticated the system is under the hood. They care about whether it removes friction from their day.

I'm specifically interested in hearing from founders, operators, and people responsible for maintaining real-world CRM deployments—not just building demos or prototypes.

What feature ended up driving adoption, retention, or customer satisfaction that you didn't initially think would matter?

And conversely, what feature did you spend months building that customers barely cared about?

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

I am going to take time and build a crm and I need your opinions on what all you think should be added and how it will help business

I will add integration and plugins

Will keep updating you

So this is day 1 of building crm

Please feel free to put out your suggestions

We run a small business with 4 people handling customer inquiries and sales conversations. Most new inquiries come through WhatsApp, and that has started creating a few challenges as volume has increased. Right now, conversations are mostly managed manually, which means customer history is spread across different devices and it is not always easy to see who last spoke with a lead or whether a follow-up has already happened.
We are not looking for a huge enterprise setup. The main goal is simply to keep conversations organized, avoid missed follow-ups, and give everyone on the team visibility into customer interactions.
For those dealing with a similar situation, what are you using? Are you connecting WhatsApp to an existing CRM, using a shared inbox solution, or doing something else entirely?
Interested in hearing what has worked well and what you would avoid.

Looking for honest feedback from sales reps, account executives, and anyone involved in B2B sales.

We have a hypothesis and want to test whether we're thinking about this correctly.

It is our thinking that tools like Apollo for data and Instantly or smartlead are heavily used by lead generation agencies and service businesses that need to identify and contact large volumes of prospects. Their challenge is often finding buyers within a broad ICP and validating thousands of records through outbound campaigns.

But what about companies that has ICP in a few industry For example, businesses that get leads from trade shows, inbound inquiries, referrals, existing networks, distributors, or industry relationships. These companies often know exactly who they want to sell to and don't necessarily need another database of contacts.

Here we are taking businesses like machinery manufacturer, Import-Export trading companies, Industrial services, mid-size equipment makers, textile, leather products makers..In short not technology or software / marketing related but traditional businesses.

Their challenge seems different:

* Long sales cycles

* Multiple follow-ups over months

* Managing notes and context around each account

* Keeping outreach personalized

* Staying top-of-mind without becoming annoying

Most CRMs are great for reporting and pipeline visibility, but time has came outreach first CRMs or outbound tools needed whose main job is sending emails hyper personalization because of small volume this can achieved, phone calls, Research based outreach.

Our question is:

Do you think there is a meaningful gap between CRM software and high-volume outbound tools?

Is there a space for mid volume outbound tool but hyper personalized? If you're in sales, how are you currently handling follow-ups and account-based outreach for prospects that are already known to you or you are sure they have suppliers who are your competitors.

Are we thinking in the right direction, or are we missing something obvious?

Would love to hear real-world experiences.

NOTE: please don't promote any tools here.

Hello,

I NEED ADVICE ON HOW TO PIVOT CAREERS AND GET A JOB QUICKLY

I'm currently an Administrative Assistant, trying to transition careers to work with CRM systems, whether it's a CRM Administrator, or working with RevOps (in the future).

I'm transitioning careers because I was previously interested in data analysis and learned it would be an easier transition from my current admin job to CRM administrator, rather than get an entry level Data Analyst job (to work with SQL). I just have basic SQL knowledge from a previous bootcamp.

I have 2 Associate's Degrees in Business Administration and Economics, I have 1 Bachelor's in Psychology. (it's a long story why I didn't finish my Bachelor's for Economics lol).

My only relevant experience to CRM systems is my current admin job, where I do data entry, write reports after interviewing customers, upload reports into database system.
Right now, I'm trying to get the HubSpot Reporting and Revenue Operations certifications.
Then I'd try to get Salesforce certifications.

My biggest drive behind all this is to try and get a better paying job as soon as possible, because my mom was supposed to retire this year, and I need to help out with bills.

Please, please, give me any advice, on how to get a better paying job soon, or direct me to someone who can. Please DM me if you can give me advice, or even want to mentor me.

Do I still continue to self teach and get certifications? Do I go into grad school? I keep getting advice that I just need to have convincing projects on my portfolio after self teaching.

I just want to help out my family.

Just finished a trial of both for teh past month with my agency. we run about 50k emails per week across diffrent clients.

Instantly is solid for the basics. the warmup pool is huge, inbox rotation works well, and the analytics are clean. but their a/b testing is pretty basic and the api limits can be annoying if your doing anything custom. also their support takes forever to respond sometimes.

Smartlead has better features on paper. the subsequences are nice, better webhook options, and the white label setup works. but man, the ui feels clunky compared to Instantly. and we've had more deliverability issues with Smartlead accounts even with proper warmup.

we were using Apollo for contact finding before but the data quality was hit or miss, lot of bounces that were messing with our sender reputation. been testing Prospeo for the lead enrichment side since both of these cold email tools are weak on building lists. curious what others are using for their full stack?

price wise they're basically the same once you factor in everthing. Instantly's a bit cheaper at scale but Smartlead includes more in the base plan.

we're probably sticking with Instantly for now but might keep Smartlead for specific campaigns that need the advanced sequencing.

I found this CRM called Apex-CRM.com for my small business, it’s like $29 a month.

Currently using redtail and for some reason, only certain clients have a quantified balance, while others display $0 (which isnt true). AUM is also off, I think it has to do with redtail not sourcing the proper data from LPL clientworks? Not sure how to fix.

CRMs are built for managers. Reps end up logging a sanitized version of reality and keeping the real story in their head ("Bob is wobbling on price, Sarah went dark, manager hates this account").

So I built a tool around what the rep does between meetings:

- Voice or text dump after a call on mobile. No fields, no forms.

- The dump turns into CRM-ready reminders in a Chrome extension that sits next to the CRM. One click to copy each into the CRM.

- Every morning, an intel digest per prospect with news, hiring signals, competitor moves.

- A private coaching tab where reps can think out loud about a deal.

Data stays in the browser. By design, the promise only works if the manager doesn't see it. Which raises the real question:

If the manager has no visibility, the company won't fund it. Would a rep pay for this out of their own pocket?

Or is "personal productivity for salespeople" a category that just doesn't exist, because reps are wired to expect the company to provide their tools?

my iphone contacts is basically the same app i had in 2010. name, number, maybe an email or address or birthday, a notes field that I have random notes on people but nothing is structured.

i wanted something where i could filter my people by city, add someone new super quickly, get a reminder when its someones birthday or when i told myself id follow up, and actually own my own data (i'd never sell this data).

so i built one called YourPond and now when I travel somewhere, I can easily filter to see who is there and I get reminded about important events. I have a few people using it now but i was curious from this subreddit if there were other things that people are really looking for in a contact book of the future?

I manage a sales floor for my day job and have spent a lot of time working with leads, follow ups, call lists, pipelines, sales reporting, etc.

A while back I started building my own CRM on the side because I kept running into the same thing: either the system is too basic, or it does everything but takes forever to set up and costs a fortune once you start adding users and features.

It kind of snowballed from there and I ended up building Straton. It has contacts, pipelines, tasks, email/SMS, booking, workflows, landing pages, a dialer, and some other stuff I thought small businesses would actually use.

I’m getting close to launching it, but before I start spending money trying to get customers, I’d rather get some honest opinions from people who actually use CRMs every day.

What would make you take a serious look at a new CRM instead of just sticking with HubSpot, GHL, Pipedrive, Zoho, Salesforce, whatever you are using now?

Also, what is the one thing your current CRM does that you absolutely would not give up, and what is the one thing about it that drives you insane?

I’m not looking for people to blow smoke up my ass. If a new CRM is a hard sell no matter what features it has, tell me that too.

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!

I think a lot of CRM migrations happen for the wrong reason.

The old CRM gets blamed for bad adoption, bad data, poor reporting, messy handoffs, missed follow-ups, weak pipeline hygiene, etc.

Then the company buys a new CRM, recreates the same messy process in a cleaner UI, and six months later the same complaints come back.

Sometimes the CRM really is the problem.

But a lot of the time the bigger issue is that the business has not agreed on the customer process, ownership, required data, stage definitions, or what “good CRM usage” actually means.

So the CRM becomes a very expensive mirror.

For people who have done CRM migrations: how often did the new tool actually fix the problem, vs just expose the same process issues again?

We thought this year’s giving campaign would be pretty straightforward since we reused a lot from last year. Somehow it still turned into nonstop manual work between emails, donor tracking, reporting, and fixing little issues as they came up. Starting to feel like our systems are the real problem, not the campaign itself. Has anyone else hit that point?

We're a small SaaS in the property/hospitality space, team of 8 with around 4-5 of us split between sales and customer onboarding/support. The goal is to run the whole customer lifecycle in one place and make the experience cohesive and holistic end to end. We're scaling quite fast so ideally we want it to be scalable and future proof as we GTM.

We previously looked at Zoho but found it a bit too clunky to use. Attio is nice but there's no ticketing/helpdesk. Hubspot looks good and cohesive but is too expensive for us right now. Our setup is currently spreadsheets and a vibe coded frontend form that stores in a basic database made from Claude Code in ~2 hours or so haha

What we are looking for:

- A pipeline that drives the process/SOP. Our VAs shouldn't be able to skip stages or move a deal forward until the required steps are done. Mandatory fields, gated stage transitions, that sort of thing (nice to have but not essential)

- A support desk / ticketing built in. Would really rather not pay for and babysit a separate help desk if the CRM can handle it. Ideally this is included and any bugs discovered from the support desk can be integrated and forwarded to Linear so our Engineering team can work on it

- Workflow automation. Follow-up reminders, auto-creating tasks, a nudge when a deal's gone quiet. Time-based alerts (e.g. no contact in 14 days, remind team to message them), auto-created tasks etc

- Some way to track onboarding tasks/checklists per customer.

- Decent integrations, or at least a proper API. We use Calendly, Stripe, Slack, WhatsApp for notifications, Linear (devs live in there). We'd also want to push our own product usage data into the CRM via API. Also APIs to hook and ingest external webforms into our CRM - we use Claude Code quite a lot and right now we have a vibe coded front end webform which we use to track our client leads

- Our main communications will be between email and WhatsApp. If the CRM can cover these and gather context from both and store to the same customer that would be amazing too. Currently looking at unified inbox solutions which includes those two above and also linkedin, instagram etc. to manage our customer funnels

On budget: we're small, so Salesforce-Enterprise pricing or a $30k implementation is a hard no. Hoping it can be kept under $250 a month or so!

So really, the question is whether there's an all-in-one that does deals pipeline + onboarding support + automation + Helpdesk without costing a fortune, or whether everyone just ends up running a CRM plus a separate help desk and gluing them together anyway. Keen to hear what you're actually running, and just as useful, what you'd tell me to stay away from.

Bit of a big spiel so thank you for anyone that has the time to reply to this! 😄