r/CRM

i used to hate seeing blank fields in hubspot

company size missing? go check linkedin

job title looks weird? figure out what they actually do

someone writes ""looking for solutions"" on a form? cool, now spend five minutes trying to decide if that means anything

then copy everything back into the crm one field at a time

did this for way too long lol

we eventually started messing with a workflow using hubspot, sales navigator, typeform, slack, and expertise ai to help with some of the enrichment

and the funny part is i've gotten way more comfortable with leaving fields empty

can't confidently tell how big the company is? blank

""exploring options"" could mean literally anything? no intent label

senior sounding title but no clue if they actually own the problem? leave it alone

at first this bothered me because the records looked incomplete

but honestly i'd rather have an empty field than something wrong sitting in hubspot looking official

that's the part i underestimated

once bad data is in the crm, nobody really questions it. a rep sees ""high intent"" or ""mid-market"" and just assumes somebody figured it out

we've got the suggestions going into slack first now and someone reviews them before the important fields get touched

also started locking a bunch of fields once an account is actively owned because i learned pretty quickly that letting a workflow overwrite deal context is a terrible idea

still cleaning up the rules though

curious what fields you guys are actually strict about in your crm

company size? persona? intent? tech stack?

starting to feel like we've spent years collecting data just because the field existed

I am software developer and I think I can make one for any company by knowing there business.

How should I approach and work with them?? .

I am planning on building my simple CRM as I don't need all the heavy lifting of services that get bolted onto all these plans. Plus, I have two companies that have two completely different workflows, so I need a special use case for both and don't want to spend the money for two different accounts or sub-accounts.

What are some things you would tell your younger self after building what you have?

What is the biggest piece of advice you would give someone building their first? There are tons of people doing it in this sub.

Vets that moved back to a proper CRM, why did you end up switching back?

What was the worst bug you ever faced that took you a long time to figure out?

Same as tittle

Same as tittle

I work at a law firm, and we're looking for a better legal case management system.

We've tried a few options, but they all seem to have trade-offs—some are too expensive, some are overly complicated, and others are missing features we actually need.

Our team is looking for something that can handle things like:

• Case tracking
• Client management
• Document storage
• Tasks and deadlines
• Team collaboration

For those of you working in law firms, what are you using, and would you recommend it?

More importantly, what do you like about it, and what are its biggest drawbacks?

We're looking for something our team will use every day.

Location: Ph

Hubspot wants to monetize 'enrichment' feature by selling data you have collected to other companies. A massive red flag for me. I know enrichment tools get their base from somewhere, but the audacity... It is a no go for me, and we are moving elsewhere. Your thoughts?

"As we continue to improve our product and services, we’re making updates to our enrichment features and the choices you can make about your data. You are receiving this email because you have used HubSpot’s enrichment features.

On August 4, 2026, HubSpot is expanding its data discovery and intelligence features to bring more robust and reliable data to our customers. To power these tools, enrichment data such as business contact details, employer information, and email deliverability signals, may be shared with other customers."

I posted a project here some time ago, almost as an afterthought. Didn't think a lot about it. Turns out, one post got 19K+ views and counting, and brought a few inbound conversations with it - a couple of them are now moving towards actual contracts.

We are a group of people who build automation systems for businesses. To date, we have delivered about a dozen projects, each with its own challenges, requirements, and budget. Some projects had strict budgets, but we never compromised the quality of the work. We wrote one of these projects up as a case study and posted it to Reddit, and it received so much more attention than any paid marketing we’ve done.

My takeaway: your budget size doesn’t dictate the quality of what you build or the impact one post can have. One genuine, honest story can snowball more than you'd expect.

I'm happy to answer questions here if anyone's curious about how we approached it.

i keep seeing the same pattern. the company has a CRM. the company also has a google sheet that everyone actually uses.

not because people are bad at using tools but because the sheet does three things really well: it’s fast, it’s flexible, and it doesn’t require a login.

the problem is that it doesn’t remind you to follow up. it doesn’t surface who you haven’t spoken to in two weeks. it doesn’t give you a reason to open it every morning.

so deals slip. not dramatically. just quietly.

curious whether others have actually solved this or whether the google sheet is still winning in your company too. and if you moved away from it, what actually made the difference?

Running about 50k emails per week across client accounts. Instantly's warmup is fine but I'm hitting API limits trying to build custom reports, amd their A/B testing is basically useless support takes days to respond.

Tried Smartlead for the subsequences and webhooks. UI felt clunky and deliverability dropped even with proper warmup. Not sure if it's the tool or my setup.

Also juggling Apollo for data(bounce rates is killing me) and separate Linkedln tool. Too many moving parts.

Someone mentioned warmySender for the peer-to-peer warmup and built-in verification. $15/mo with Linkedln seats as add-ons. Haven't pulled the trigger yet.

What's your stack look like at this volume? Especially if you're managing multiple clientvdomains and need Linkedln running alongside email.

Hello all, currently our team is using jobber and hubspot. For clarity we are a window and kitchen installer/distributor. We use jobber for creating quotes, schedules, jobs, and we get all our financial data through there. We just starting using hubspot as a way to track customer communication because there were gaps from our sales team that needed to be tracked.

The main issue i'm already seeing is multiple entries of clients and redundancy. Currently when customer information comes in we create the client in jobber, create the client as a company in hubspot (even if they are a homeowner) and then create the client again with the same information as a contact and associate it to the company.

Somewhere in this process we create a quote in jobber for the customer and also create a deal in hubspot so we can associate communication through the deal. This is where the issue lies is doing everything twice, I am trying to solve for this problem. Currently it doesn't seem possible to quote through hubspot at least now cost wise, i've been looking into jobbers client communication side of things and can't seem to find if its good or not.

There are also redundancies when it comes to writing out orders and invoicing but that is for another time.

I've spent the last few years building a CRM from the ground up, and one thing that surprised me is how many platforms are really just collections of unrelated modules glued together. What initially started as a CRM essentially became a business operating system.

You'll have customers in one place, scheduling somewhere else, dispatch living in its own world, invoicing in another system, marketing bolted on later, and payroll handled by something completely different. It works...until you start trying to make those pieces communicate with each other.

I eventually stopped thinking about building "features" and started thinking about building a business domain.

A customer shouldn't exist five different times across five different modules. There should be one customer entity. A work order shouldn't be copied into dispatch, invoicing, reporting, and marketing. It should be the same object moving through different stages of the business.

Once I started designing it that way, a lot of things became simpler.

A lead comes in---they become a customer.

A customer schedules a job.

Dispatch assigns the technician.

The technician updates the work order from the field.

Completing the work automatically updates reporting, revenue, payroll, customer history, and marketing because every module is referencing the same business object instead of trying to synchronize duplicate records.

The same philosophy applied to employees.

Most CRMs treat everyone like they're just another user account.

That never made much sense to me.

A road technician has a completely different workflow than a dispatcher. A dispatcher doesn't need the same interface as accounting. Sales shouldn't have payroll permissions.

Instead of one generic user model, I built role-specific workflows backed by RBAC so permissions are enforced on the server, not just hidden in the UI. Technicians authenticate differently than office employees because they're solving different problems.

One thing I learned pretty quickly is that architecture decisions matter a lot more than feature count.

Adding another button is easy.

Designing a data model that can support years of new features without becoming a maintenance nightmare is the hard part.

I'd rather spend an extra week redesigning a database relationship than spend the next three years working around a bad decision. 💯

tired of complexity of salesforce ? well I am building a simple crm where u track your customer , you manually enter and change the status , no fancy emailing or reminding you to call customer .

just a flat fee per user for 30 days

I run an events agency and am struggling to find a CRM that may work for my business. Truthfully I think what I am looking for, doesn't exist. I have tried a few creative specific ones (dubaso, wedola, boda) and some general ones (hubspot, monday & zoho). For the creative specific ones, I struggle as they are created for specific roles e.g. photographers etc. For the general ones, I struggle with the cost per seat as I only need 1 seat most of the year and a 2 seats during peak periods.

I think part of the reason I am struggling is what my perfect CRM is doesn't exist and what I am looking for is very specific. However I am happy to work with a CRM that may not meet everything if I can reduce my reliance on about 4 spreadsheets and am using googledrive for sharing documents with clients.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions , I have noted below my needs/wants.

Needs

- Customer portal where they can view documents. They don't need the ability to edit them but if they can download documents, this would be great

- Lead forms that integrate into the CRM

- Lead Status Tracker

Wants

- Ability to create automations .e.g. follow up emails

- Ability to send customer's messages via the portal and it send them an email with the information. [Bonus points, if they can reply to the email and it appear on the portal.]

- Sales dashboard (ability to pull stats and to also compare against the forecast)

- Ability to add and track contact details for suppliers without adding them as clients.
- Ability to create proposals within the CRM

- Mobile App would be amazing.

In vertical sales teams, old records sit untouched because notes, timing, ownership, and follow-up context are scattered. For teams that actually revive old contacts, what fields or context determine "contact now" versus "leave alone"? What does your CRM fail to show at the moment someone needs to write the follow-up?

I have been going back and forth with this. i thought of starting with generic crm like Salesforce but as per the suggestion from my business friends, i should go with dedicated real estate crm as it already has list stacking, drip campaign and buyer management built for this exact business. what's everyone else running? I am genuinely curious if i am missing something.

Hello Everyone, We are a small team of 6 looking for a CRM that works for both commercial real estate leasing and sales. I have many clients who own multiple properties and most CRMS aren't built for that. I need to be able to Bulk upload as I have over 30k contacts. Also third party integration is important as I have conversational dialers that calls our CRM and live transfer.

We currently use Pipedrive and I like it but its not for commercial real estate and I feel like we need something more. Please give me your reccomendations other than ascendix or buildout. I am considering Ascendix but looking for more reccomendations before I commit to the one year upfront payment. Thank You!

I get why they’ve been around forever being in the field with a rep tells you a lot you’d never see in a CRM. But it’s also a pretty expensive way to learn what happened on one or two conversations. A lot of sales managers are already stretched across too many reps, too many locations, and too many follow-ups. Spending half the day in the car just to catch a small sample of conversations feels harder to justify now. I’ve been seeing Rilla come up more in this conversation. I wanted to know what teams are doing instead, are managers still riding along as much or are more teams moving toward recorded conversations, call reviews and coaching reps after the fact?

Hi All,

We have recently been testing GHL and have found a few limitations and are just now exploring additional options on CRM alternatives based on our current structure.

Core requirements:

• Email conversations with reliable reply threading (this is our current platform's biggest pain point)
• SMS and WhatsApp conversations
• Inbound and outbound calling
• Landing page builder
• Lead capture via webhook/API (from WordPress Gravity Forms and a Live Chat tool)
• Calendar / appointment booking
• Marketing attribution - tracking a lead from first click (paid, organic, social) through to closed sale

Multi-brand / multi-user structure (our key requirement):

We operate 9 distinct brands across 4 regions under one company, each region has one primary brand plus several secondary brands (some owned, some reseller relationships).

We don't need client-facing logins or portals per brand, this is purely internal.

What we do need:

• Reps working across multiple brands in the same session
• Outbound emails/SMS/WhatsApp sent under the correct brand identity and domain automatically, based on which brand the lead belongs to
• Access scoped by team: each regional team covers its own region's brands
• Reporting and attribution split cleanly by brand, not just company-wide

We're currently at 15 users, with room to grow.
Just wondering what people would recommend for this type of setup, or if anyone has anything that has worked quite well / or pitfalls etc

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!