r/CRMSoftware

We moved our sales team to Zoho CRM about 14 months ago, so I figured I'd share where I've landed with it.

I own a commercial pest control company in Georgia. We have 8 people using the CRM between sales, account management and admin.

Before Zoho, our ""CRM"" was basically spreadsheets, Outlook and everyone remembering their own follow-ups. So almost anything was going to be an improvement

And to be fair, Zoho has been.

Having our leads, customers, deals, emails and follow-ups in one place has made it much easier for me to see what the team is doing. We've also built a few automations that have saved us from chasing things manually.

But here's my issue.

Zoho gives you so much room to customise things that it's very easy to build yourself into a mess.

We did most of the setup ourselves at the beginning. Added fields we thought we'd need, created workflows, changed layouts, played with reports.

A year later, there are fields nobody uses and automations I've forgotten the reason for creating.

That's probably the biggest point I'd put in my Zoho CRM review. The flexibility is both the thing I like about it and the thing that can make it frustrating.

I'm now wondering whether we would've had a better first year if we'd paid someone to set it up properly and kept the system much simpler from day one.

I don't regret choosing it, but if I were starting again, I'd spend far more time deciding what the team genuinely needs before touching all the customisation options.

Curious if other long-term Zoho users went through the same phase.

Did your setup become simpler as you learned the system, or did you eventually bring someone in to clean everything up?

Could it be that I am looking for the wrong type of software? Because every CRM I test wants me to create a deal. Why is that?

That's not what I need at this point.

My business is all about supplying commercial cleaning products through distributors. We are currently in three states. The distributors handle the orders and sales side. Our job is maintaining relationships with the facilities that use the products.

We've got just over 1,300 locations in our database: offices, schools, medical facilities, gyms, etc.

One person on my team spends a good chunk of her week checking in with them.

• How's stock looking?

• Any complaints about the products?

• Are staff having problems using anything?

• Did they switch to another product?

• Is there something our distributor needs to sort out?

She'll then pass relevant feedback to our marketing team or the distributor responsible for that account.

We've been recording all of this in spreadsheets, and we've reached the point where finding the history of one location feels like archaeology.

All I want from a CRM client system is a timeline.

Something like this:

Open ABC Medical Centre and show me that Sarah called them in March, they complained about Product X, we spoke to the distributor, the issue was resolved in April, and nobody has checked in with them for 90 days.

Then remind Sarah that it's probably time to call them again.

That's basically it.

We are not looking for any revenue forecasts or any "opportunity won."

I'd like notes, call/email history, tags, follow-up reminders and maybe a dashboard showing which clients haven't been contacted recently.

Surely there's something built for this without paying for a massive sales CRM and ignoring 80% of it?

What would you use?

We run two fitness studios in North Carolina and email is starting to feel like shouting into the void.

We have around 2,600 customers and leads in our database, including a decent number who've opted in to receive texts from us.

I'd like to start using SMS more for things like membership offers, class promotions, bringing old members back and the occasional last-minute opening.

I don’t intend to do anything crazy. Maybe 2–4 campaigns a month.

Where I'm getting stuck is whether I should be looking for a CRM SMS marketing platform that handles everything or keep the CRM and texting separate.

I'd like to segment people before sending anything. Someone who hasn't visited in six months shouldn't get the same message as someone who came in yesterday.

Same with active members, trial members and people who enquired but never joined.

Being able to see replies inside the CRM would be useful too. If someone responds to a promotion asking about membership, I want one of the team to pick up that conversation rather than the reply disappearing into some separate SMS dashboard.

I've looked at email marketing platforms that have added texting, and I've looked at CRMs that offer SMS through integrations. I'm not sure which direction makes more sense once your list starts growing.

What setup are you using?

I'd rather pay for something simple that works than stitch together four different tools just to send a text and know who replied.

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We’d love to understand the problem and see if we can build a solution around it.

I've been thinking about this while working with open-source CRMs like Vtiger, SuiteCRM, Odoo and Dolibarr.

Adding AI + smart notifications directly into each CRM can get complicated pretty fast.

Different versions, servers, APIs, custom installations, hosting limitations, etc.

So maybe instead of putting everything inside the CRM, part of the intelligence could live on the user's phone.

The CRM provides the data, while the mobile app handles things like smart/local notifications, follow-up detection, location/geofencing, nearby customers, calendar context, and eventually local AI.

For example:

"These 3 leads probably need your attention today."

Or:

"You're near a customer you haven't visited in 2 months."

The interesting part for me is that this approach could potentially work across different open-source CRMs without heavily modifying each CRM installation.

Basically:

CRM = business data
Mobile = proactive + AI layer

I'm already experimenting with the mobile/local-notification side of this idea with OpenCRMApp for Vtiger crm and odoo , if anyone wants to see a concrete example:

https://opencrmapp.com/ , link app direclty :Play store (try demo)

I'm not saying mobile should replace crm open source server-side AI. I'm more curious about where the line should be.

Also, if you're an open-source CRM developer working with Vtiger, SuiteCRM, Odoo, Dolibarr or another project and you find this idea interesting, I'd be happy to discuss it and experiment together.

We're looking at moving our online education business to Course Creator 360 and I'm trying to get past the honeymoon reviews most people do.

We sell certification courses and workshops for healthcare professionals. Our email list is sitting at around 38,000 contacts right now, with a mix of paying students, old customers, webinar leads and people still sitting in nurture sequences.

The appeal of Course Creator 360 is obvious. If we can bring the CRM, email, automations, funnels and course side closer together, we'd be able to retire a few subscriptions and stop passing data between different platforms.

My concern is what happens once you're several months in and everything is running through it.

How well does the CRM hold up when you have tens of thousands of contacts, lots of tags and several automations firing at the same time?

I'm also curious about reporting and segmentation. We send different campaigns based on what someone bought, which webinars they've attended and where they are in our funnel, so being able to pull the right audience without second-guessing the data matters a lot.

The demos I've seen cover the feature list well. I'm more interested in the boring day-to-day stuff that you only discover after living with software for six months.

What started getting on your nerves?

Anything you thought would be great but barely use? Any issues with email, automations, CRM organisation or managing a larger database?

We're not opposed to paying for it. I just don't want to move 38,000 contacts and rebuild a load of workflows only to discover the limitations afterwards.

I'm comparing a few B2B data providers for our outbound team and I've heard the phrase "proprietary data" so many times this week that I'm starting to tune it out.

We sell commercial security systems in Illinois and have 5 people doing outbound. We're mainly trying to get better contact information for operations directors, facility managers and other decision-makers at companies we want to target.

One vendor told me their biggest advantage is that they have proprietary data rather than relying heavily on shared databases.

Another basically said that doesn't mean much and what matters is how often the information gets verified.

Then a third salesperson told me their database is stronger because they combine several sources.

So now I'm sitting here wondering what I'm even supposed to care about.

If two platforms give me the same person's name, company, job title, email and phone number, does it matter that one says the information came from proprietary sources?

Is the difference mainly accuracy? How fresh the contacts are? Whether every other sales team has access to the same people?

I'm not against paying more for better data. I just don't want to pay a premium because "proprietary" sounds impressive in a demo.

When you're evaluating a B2B data provider, how do you tell whether their proprietary data is giving you a real advantage versus being another marketing line?

I’m currently the primary caregiver for someone with glioblastoma. I’m looking for a patient facing “CRM” that would help me track multiple opportunities (clinical) trials. Organizations and contacts are related to the research entities that are performing clinical trials.

Interactions are primarily with emails, but voice and especially meeting transcription are extremely important to document inclusion, exclusion, or follow-ups for required testing.

The goal is not increasing sales, but extending life.

Any thoughts to something that might fit the bill, or is this something that I need to vibe code using Claude?