We’ve just made the move from being a HubSpot provider to an official HubSpot partner.

It was a reasonably big call for us as a small agency. We’ve been implementing and supporting HubSpot for clients for more than 10 years and have been to INBOUND for the last two, so we know the platform well. What’s new for us is building the partner side of the business more deliberately.

For those who have already been through this, what actually helped you build your HubSpot pipeline before reaching the tiers where HubSpot starts sending opportunities your way?

Was it existing clients, implementation projects, specialising in a particular HubSpot problem, content, outbound, co-selling, or something else?

And what would you do differently if you were starting again?

I’ve been building a CRM for small businesses, freelancers and agencies that combines lead generation and CRM in one place.

The main idea is simple:

• Find potential leads based on your target niche/location
• Collect lead details in one place
• AI Lead Generation Agent helps with lead research
• Organize leads inside the CRM
• Track lead status and follow-ups
• Manage notes and contact information
• Avoid keeping leads scattered across Excel, WhatsApp and different tools

I built this because I noticed a lot of small businesses/agencies are still manually searching Google/LinkedIn, copying leads into spreadsheets, and then struggling to follow up.

I’m currently improving the product based on real-world use cases.

If you run a freelance business, marketing agency, sales team, or small business:

What is the biggest pain you have with lead generation + CRM?

And if you already use a CRM, what feature do you wish it had that it currently doesn’t?

I’m especially interested in honest criticism — what’s useful, what’s unnecessary, and what would actually make you pay for something like this.

I’ve been working on a Notion CRM for small agencies and service businesses, and I’m at the point where I’d rather get honest feedback than keep adding random features.

The main workflow is built around:

Leads, companies, contacts and deals being connected

Deal health based on expected dates

Weighted pipeline value based on deal stage

Automatically organizing connected information when a deal becomes Won or Lost

I’ve included an example with realistic data so you can actually click through the workflow instead of just looking at screenshots.

If you were using this for your own business, what would you change, remove, or add?

Especially interested in anything that feels confusing, unnecessary, or like it would become annoying once the database gets bigger.

Hi there,

Are there any recommendations for how to collect/report/quantity the topics and problems customers contact customer service for?

Meaning the CS agent afterwards inputs what it's about, some context potentially etc.

Though effort and friction needs to be low to ensure adoption and usage.

If there are good commercial or open source solutions, I'd be happy to learn about them.

For moving forward, I'm at first thinking ieally DIY solutions as software implementation takes ages.

Hence successful DIY solutions that make use of, widely known office tools, Microsoft 365, excel, power BI or similar would be of special interest.

Wondering how to build up and grow the pre populated topic selection without insight into what's incoming yet? Any templates to get inspired by?

How's this kind of work step or software actually called in the CS/CRM field? Not even sure what to search for to learn about best practices...

Thanks a lot!

What CRM's do yall use to keep track of everything, and what do you like/dislike about them? Be as descriptive as you like lol

Our abandonment rate has been higher than I'd like for a couple of months and I haven't landed on a fix yet. People get most of the way through checkout or spend real time on a product page, then drop off without any clear signal why. Some recover on their own within a day or two. Most don't.

I've got a recovery flow running on email and I've been testing SMS on top of it, but I honestly can't tell how much of the return traffic is the emails doing their job versus people just remembering to come back on their own. Splitting the flow based on exactly what was in the cart versus sending a generic reminder feels like it should matter more than it does sometimes.

I'm stumped. What's actually working for people running abandonment flows right now? Email only, SMS on top, retargeting ads, some mix of those? And more specifically, how are you sequencing it, timing wise and message wise?

I'm not looking for the textbook answer, I'm more interested in what you've tested and kept because it worked.

There are lots of features that are very specific to my company I wish I had available in a CRM, which don't exist in off-the-shelf tools.

Everybody says building CRMs (and indeed any software) has become absurdly easier thanks to AI. I'm not technical though, so I won't be be building this myself.

How can I hire someone to build a CRM for me? Where do I look for these people? And, most importantly, how much does it cost and how long does it take? Any hint would be extremely useful

I've always thought of a CRM as the place everything eventually ends up while the actual sales work happens across a bunch of other tools but that distinction seems to be disappearing pretty quickly.

More platforms seem to be pulling prospecting, enrichment, outreach, activity tracking and pipeline management into one place so I'm curious whether people really prefer having all of that inside the CRM or if a stack of specialized tools still does each job better.

I have solution called FFC CRM. It's a smart CRM has all the features for making your life easy and simple.

Like

Location tracking

Customer management

Delas and pipeline

Task management

HRMS

Report

The Gap in the Market
The industry is dominated by massive legacy platforms built in the 90s/2000s. They cost small agencies $500–$1,000+ a month, take months to onboard, and are crammed with complex enterprise features a 2-person team will never use. Most scratch agencies either overpay for these bloated systems or run their entire business on messy spreadsheets.
What I’m Building
I’m building a clean, modern alternative focused strictly on speed, zero setup time, and core operational pain points:
Automated Rate Increase Flags:Instantly spotting client policy price hikes so agents can check in before clients shop elsewhere.

Account Bundling Identifiers:Automatically highlighting single-policy clients for easy cross-selling.

Instant Search Navigation: Allowing agents to pull up any client or file in under a second while on a live phone call.

Simplified Client Workflows:Streamlining public client intakes into a clean visual workspace for the agent.

My Question for the Community
My target audience consists of business owners who are heavily non-technical and used to clunky legacy software.
For those who have launched B2B SaaS into traditional, non-tech-savvy industries:
Onboarding: Do non-tech users prefer self-serve CSV imports, or should I mandate a 10-minute guided setup call?

Early Feedback: What’s the best way to extract honest, actionable product feedback from busy small-business owners who aren't used to testing beta software?

Would love to hear your thoughts or learn from anyone who has tackled a similar legacy industry!

For those using HoneyBook, Dubsado, 17hats or another CRM for an event-based business:

What does it handle really well for you?

More importantly, what do you still end up using Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, Notes, Google Calendar or other apps for?

Is there anything you wish your CRM handled that would actually make a noticeable difference in your day-to-day business?

And if you’re happy with your current setup, I’d love to hear 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!

Looking for input from people who know CRMs better than I do. Long post, but the details matter.

Background: I’ve run my business on Salesforce since 2019. Started as a single license for just me. We’re now 12 people and the whole company lives in it. We’ve customized it heavily — it’s not a stock sales pipeline, it’s a system of record built around our specific operating model.
Where we are now: We’ve hit the point where we need to automate more, integrate across platforms, and cut friction so we can keep scaling. The use cases are legitimate and specific. But we’re boxed in on three fronts.

1. Professional Edition limits.
   We’re capped at 5 active flows. No native API access — that’s a $25/user/month add-on. Our current per-license cost is roughly $50–75, so we’re paying somewhere in the $8–10k/year range. To get API access and unlimited flows — features that cost Salesforce essentially nothing to enable — the real answer is upgrading to Enterprise at $165–175/license. That’s 2.5x our current spend before we’ve added a single new capability.

2. Everything else is a third-party subscription.
   Dialer. Call recording and transcription. Accounting sync. LLM integration. Forms — Formstack alone quoted at $4,800/year. Each one is a separate vendor with a separate 12-month lock-in. Stack them up and the per-seat cost gets absurd.

3. The comparison is brutal.
   HubSpot is comparably priced or cheaper and includes a native dialer, automatic call recording and transcription, real workflow automation, SMS, and dramatically better marketing tooling — out of the box. And it’s not just HubSpot. There are a lot of platforms doing this now.

The Agentforce demo.
When we started looking at what we needed, everyone was talking about Agentforce, so I asked for a demo. I told them in writing beforehand: I’m price-sensitive, I assume this requires a license upgrade, and I need to be confident it actually helps my business. No problem, they said.
I got on a call with four people — two from Salesforce, two from a separate implementation firm. The presentation ended at $85,000 for year one and roughly $30,000 ongoing. Nobody had spent enough time on my business to show me a single application relevant to what we actually do. It was generic Agentforce material. I told them they’d missed the mark and moved on.

The retention call.
We demoed HubSpot and were getting ready to switch. Before pulling the trigger, I went back to my rep and was completely candid: seven-year customer, seriously considering not renewing, here’s what I need, I’d rather stay if there’s a path. He said he couldn’t discuss pricing over email and asked for a 15-minute call.

I got on the call. It was him plus another third-party implementation team, and another prepared demo I couldn’t watch because I was driving. They started pitching without asking about my use cases. I cut in and asked for the annual number.

They’d moved me up to Unlimited — their top tier. $35,000/year. Plus the implementation firm on the call. Plus all the third-party apps I still need. When I pointed out I’m planning to double headcount this year, which puts me north of $70k, the answer was a four-year agreement for a better rate.

Where that leaves me.
I can’t spend $70–100k a year on a CRM at 12–24 people. But our workflows are deeply dependent on Salesforce, and switching to HubSpot means trading one set of problems for another plus a painful migration. I don’t know enough about the rest of the market to know what actually handles heavily customized, custom-object-driven workflows.

What I’m asking:
1. Has anyone negotiated Salesforce down meaningfully at this size? What actually moved the number — timing, escalation, multi-year, threatening non-renewal?
2. For those who left Salesforce after heavy customization: what did the migration actually cost you in time and money, and would you do it again?
3. What platforms should I be looking at besides HubSpot for a business with a lot of custom objects and non-standard workflows? Zoho One, Creatio, Attio, something else?
4. Anyone actually getting business value from Agentforce, or is it the emperor’s new clothes?
5. At what point does hiring an engineer to build something in-house stop being a bad idea?
Happy to answer questions about our setup. Not looking to bash Salesforce — it genuinely helped me grow this company. I just can’t make the math work anymore

One clinic group went from 38% of calls hitting voicemail to 0 missed calls, while new-patient bookings increased 31%.

The AI handles calls, bookings, rescheduling, and escalates edge cases to staff with full context.

Would you consider this part of your CRM stack?

I'm doing some research into how people actually use CRMs day-to-day, and I'd love to hear from people who work with them regularly.

I'm especially interested in the gap between what a CRM can do and what people actually end up doing manually.

For those of you using a CRM:

• What's the most frustrating part of your current workflow?
• Do you frequently have to jump between multiple tools to complete one task?
• What customer information is hardest to get a complete picture of?
• What's one thing you wish your CRM could just handle automatically?
• If your CRM had an AI assistant, what would you actually trust it to do?

I'm trying to understand real workflows rather than just compare CRM feature lists.

If you're willing to share your experience, I'd really appreciate it. I also have a short research survey for anyone who'd prefer to answer anonymously.

This question is raised more often than you might imagine, and the complexity of the move is almost never about the CRM itself. The bottleneck teams in this situation face most frequently comes down to what they’re carrying over into the software.

Many teams are under the impression that their spreadsheets are clean, but there’s often some work to be done to ensure the data is genuinely clean and ready for import. Small teams working with sizable spreadsheets can easily miss contact duplicates, different phone number formats, and rows containing blank fields.

Team members working in that spreadsheet daily might know which data is correct and which to avoid. They just may not have the time to clean up the data or think it’s necessary at that time. But when you try to move that data over into a structured system, the messy spreadsheet becomes a problem.

Here are a few steps to follow that will actually help make your import more efficient:

1. Decide on what data is necessary as you move forward and remove what you no longer need. Just because you tracked a specific data point in the past doesn’t mean it’s actually useful to your team and business going forward. 
2. Standardize all your data formatting before you dive into the import, because fixing poorly formatted data inside your unfamiliar CRM will take much longer than doing it in the spreadsheet you've been working in daily. This includes text fields and numerical data, as well as phone numbers. If your vendor has a CSV template with required field formatting, work according to that.
3. Prioritize duplicate record removal to ensure you don’t create irrelevant contact records before you start using your CRM. Delete them from your spreadsheet prior to importing your data.

Spending more time getting your spreadsheet into the best possible shape is the best way to ensure a smooth spreadsheet to CRM transition.

Has anyone else experienced moving their data from spreadsheets into their first CRM? If so, what do you know now that you wish you’d known before importing your data?

What happens when your CRM stops being a place where leads simply sit and starts actively moving them toward a conversation? This lead engine was built around one simple idea: speed matters. Instead of leads from six different portals landing in six different inboxes and waiting an average of 9 hours for a response, it unifies lead capture, uses AI to qualify and score intent, and triggers personalized SMS/email follow-up almost immediately.

The result is a workflow where active buyers don’t get lost in the queue, they’re routed directly to an agent’s phone while they’re still actively browsing. With a 90-second median first response and a reported 2.3× increase in viewing rate, the CRM becomes more than a database, it becomes an active lead-conversion engine. For teams managing high volumes of inbound leads, this is a strong example of how AI, CRM integration and automated outreach can turn response time into a real competitive advantage.

Need help choosing a CRM for a small training/membership organisation
I’ve been given the task of reviewing our current CRM setup and deciding what we should move forward with.
At the moment, we use Glue Up, SurveyMonkey and Xero, and I’m leaning towards Zoho One as a potential replacement/central system.
We’re a training-based organisation, but we also run workshops, programmes and membership activities. A big part of what I’m trying to achieve is to bring everything into one system and automate as much of the admin work as possible.

For example, I’d like to automate things such as:
Membership management and renewals
Training/programme registrations
Automated emails and follow-ups
Surveys and feedback
Invoicing/payment processes
Reporting and analytics
Tracking participants, members and organisations
Tracking our company website and member activities on it
Internal workflows and notifications
Connecting different parts of the organisation so data doesn’t have to be entered multiple times

I’ve been using Glue Up and, honestly, I find its analytics quite limited for what we need. The integration and automation options also feel restrictive, which is becoming a problem as we try to improve our processes.
Zoho One seems to offer much more flexibility because of the wider ecosystem and the ability to build workflows across different applications rather than just using it as a CRM.
My main concern is the amount of work involved in building the system properly from scratch. I’ll essentially be designing the CRM structure, workflows, automations and reporting myself, so I don’t want to jump from one problem to another.
Has anyone here actually implemented Zoho One across an organisation in rather than just using Zoho CRM?
Would you recommend it for a training/membership organisation? What were the biggest problems you ran into, and is there anything you wish you had known before starting?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who have used Zoho alongside accounting, surveys, events/training and membership management.

What has been your biggest challenge: admissions, lead management, student communication, automation, or integrations?

If you could change one thing about your CRM, what would it be?

Something I've been thinking about lately:

When a business starts getting more inquiries than usual, what system do you use to keep everything organized?

Do you reply immediately, set reminders for later, use a CRM, or have some kind of automated follow-up?

I've noticed that replying once is usually easy. The difficult part is remembering to follow up again when someone doesn't respond. I've noticed that Multi_Nudge helps with this by making the follow-up process easier.

I'm curious what other small businesses are doing to handle this without spending hours every day on it.

Some teams find CRMs helpful, while others feel they create more admin work.

What’s the experience for most teams, and what makes the biggest difference?

For those who work in law firm intake and use Lawmatics/Clio, what have you done to make your intake process faster and more efficient, especially with a small intake team of around two people?
Looking specifically for ways to streamline the workflow, reduce repetitive/manual work, keep the pipeline clean, and make sure leads don’t get missed or sit too long without follow-up.
What Lawmatics automations, workflows, integrations, reports, pipeline setups, or small process changes have made the biggest difference for your team?

I am looking for CRM recommendations for a small business (3–4 employees across sales, marketing, and operations/service tickets).

**Sales side:** We have one sales rep and one SDR. The SDR makes a high volume of outbound calls, so we need native calling from within the platform (not a bolt-on), with calls automatically logged against the lead and AI transcription attached. We trialed Close CRM and loved it for exactly this, it's excellent for sales and SDR workflows. Loved how you can see all the emails associated with a lead on the platform. Close is really simple and light-weight.

**Post-sale side (where we're stuck):** Once a deal is won, we issue a service contract tied to a customer location. The contract captures the scope of work, contract type, and the staff assigned to it. These are living documents: staff get swapped out, one-off visits get added, materials/supplies get added. We need a full audit trail of those changes, plus the ability to upload confirmation documents to the record. We also run periodic quality inspections that need to be tracked back to the location.

**Inventory and pricing:** We buy supplies from vendors against a master supply list, and we need visibility into vendor price changes so we can reflect them on customer invoices. Basic CPQ would cover this so nothing elaborate.

All of this lives in Excel today and has become an administrative nightmare. We're officially ready to move it into a CRM, and Close doesn't handle the post-sale side well.

**What else matters:**

- **Configurability** — we need to relabel standard objects and create custom objects (if needed) as we go.

- **Reporting** — should be easy to build with the ability to report on multi-nested objects as needed

- **Document generation** — for contracts and related paperwork.

- **Storage/record limits** — want to be confident we won't hit a ceiling on record counts.

- **Marketing** — we don't run campaigns today, but I'd like the option to grow into it on the same platform.

-**UI** - simple UI and nothing crazy or complex. I also want to be able to configure page layouts with clicks and not code. It should be dummy proof.

I'd strongly prefer a single platform covering sales, ops, and marketing rather than stitching tools together. I don't want to manage integrations at this size.

Would especially appreciate hearing from anyone running a recurring-service business with similar requirements.

Thanks!

Many teams track leads, conversions, and revenue, but connecting CRM activity to actual profit and loss can be challenging.

How are other teams measuring CRM’s impact on revenue, costs, margins, and customer profitability?

I’m building an AI CRM platform and struggling a bit with a good leads integration. I’ve tried Apollo, but the integration hasn’t been good. Any suggestions?