Been looking at tools for in person sales coaching and Rilla keeps coming up. From what I can tell it records customer conversations then gives managers transcripts scorecards and coaching insights instead of relying on ride alongs alone. For anyone using it day to day how has it been, has it actually helped managers coach better and helped reps improve?

I’ve been talking to 5 Sales Ops Managers this week, and something surprised me. A lot of people still seem to be setting up commission plans in Excel.

Not because software tools don't exist, they do. But they tell me that implementing them takes 3-6 months normally, requires consultants, and on top of that, they are extremely expensive.

If you set up commissions, let me know in the comments or via DM. I’m building a small benchmark and would love your perspective.

our growth team is reviewing software expenses for next quarter, we love having marketing automation and crm features under one roof, but as our contact list and team headcount grow, the tier upgrade costs are getting super hard to justify. we are trying to figure out if it makes sense to stay put for the convenience or if building a modular stack with separate tools saves real money without causing technical headaches.

for anyone running sales or revops at early to mid stage saas companies, what alternative tools are you actually using right now? or is it even worth it to switch?

Not on price. Not on product.

On follow-ups that got lost between WhatsApp, Excel, email, and a notebook.

The buyer was interested. Someone forgot to reply. Two weeks later they'd gone quiet and we never knew why.

That memory is the reason I built this.

This is the CRM inside GlobalReach.AI. Every account, every conversation, every deal in one workspace. But it does something a contact list never could: it scores the health of each relationship and tracks where every buyer sits in your pipeline, so nothing important slips quietly away.

It's one piece of a bigger idea I can't stop building toward: giving every business an AI workforce teammates that handle the repetitive sales work, while you stay in control of the decisions that actually close deals.

I'm a solo founder. I designed and built this end to end — and it's live right now in Raj Shamani's contest on Emergent.

(Link in the first comment 👇)

Founders and exporters honest question: how many separate tools are you running your sales on right now? I genuinely want to know if it was just us.

we noticed something during a deal review a few months ago. asked one of our reps how her call went. she said it went fine but she'd spent the entire morning prepping for it. not building a custom deck, not practicing the pitch, just manually looking up the company on linkedin, checking crunchbase for funding stage, trying to figure out who the actual decision maker was.

asked another rep about a different call. same story.

every single lead that came in, someone on our team was spending 20-30 minutes manually reconstructing who that company is before they'd pick up the phone. makes sense individually, you want context before a call, nobody wants to sound clueless. but across every lead, every day, it was eating 5+ hours per week per rep in pure research time.

the information wasn't hard to find. it was just slow, repetitive, and had to be done fresh every time because nobody remembers what they looked up for the last lead.

so we built a Research Agent into Surface that runs automatically the moment a lead enters the system. it pulls company background, funding stage, employee count, tech stack, recent news, and structures it all directly in the lead record before a rep ever opens it. by the time they see the lead, the research is already done.

the result: reps walk into calls already knowing the basics. the 5+ hours a week they were spending on manual research shifted to actual selling time. and the quality of first calls went up because reps weren't scrambling to read a linkedin page 2 minutes before the meeting.

for anyone running a sales team: how are your reps handling pre-call research right now? fully manual, partially automated, or have you found something that works?

Hello all, I'm struggling to find the good VIP tool because whenever I try to subscribe to the service, there is a lot of due diligence, or there is a minimum number of seats, either two or three. It's so annoying. It makes things so expensive for a solo entrepreneur. I used Just Call for the trial, and it was working perfectly fine, but I need something that offers only one seat. Doesn't make sense to me to pay $80 for two licenses, even though I am just one person?

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I’ve visited this client exactly twice. We’re not close at all.

My boss just dropped this on me: “Go get their procurement list.” No intro, no backup, no context. Just… go do it.

How is this even possible?

Isn’t this task completely unreasonable?

Should I even be losing sleep over this?

SalesProblems #BadManagement #ClientRelations #WorkRant

running a small b2b company here, around 18 people, 6 on sales and 3 on customer success. We are at that weird stage where deals are slipping because no one logs anything properly then CS is fighting fires in email and slack threads and i keep hearing about AI for sales and CS but what we actually have is a bunch of random chatgpt tabs and one rep who claims their AI follow up system is a sticky note on their monitor.

The pain point that pushed me over the edge was a renewal we flat out lost because nobody realized the account owner left three months ago. Their usage started dropping, support tickets spiked, and nobody put those dots together. We only noticed when they emailed me we are moving to another vendor and I had to pretend I was not learning about this for the first time.

So i started looking at tools that do real AI recommendations for sales and customer success teams. Not just auto writing emails but stuff like:

• spotting accounts that are quietly going dark.
• telling reps who to call today and what to talk about.
• flagging customers who are likely to expand vs likely to churn.

What i am hoping some can do is go beyond simple pipeline tracking and actually help teams act on customer signals. Ideally it would flag at risk accounts each morning based on factors like product usage, support activity and ignored emails rather than just deal stage. It could also identify upsell opportunities by spotting customers who reach usage limits, add new users or repeatedly ask about features that are already available as paid add ons. Another benefit would be surfacing next best actions directly within the tools reps already use, reducing the need to switch between platforms and most importantly it could connect what sales promised during the buying process with what customer success sees during onboarding, helping prevent misalignment and unpleasant surprises later on.

I am not trying to automate the relationship part i just need something in the background that catches the stuff we are currently dropping. Right now it feels like we are too small for a full blown revops team but too big to keep running on vibes and spreadsheets. AI recommendations sound like the bridge some sites look like they might be the brain for that but i genuinely do not know if this is the moment to pull the trigger or if i am just distracted by another shiny tool.

We're fine on individual deal objections, it's the thematic stuff that falls apart.

The same pushback shows up call after call and that signal just sits in recordings and scattered Slack threads until it fades, and since we don't have a PMM or a research seat to pull it together it comes up once in a QBR and dies there (same story every time).

We already run Gong for the calls, and lately I've been feeding the transcripts into BuildBetter to cluster the repeat objections and push them into our backlog, so they finally go somewhere instead of dying in someone's notes.

That said, the tooling part's basically handled now.

It's getting product to care enough to move on the themes that's still the fight, so how do you get yours to bite?

Something I've been chewing on and want to know if it's just us.

A typical deal for us touches email, LinkedIn DMs, a couple of phone calls, and lately a lot of WhatsApp (we sell in markets where buyers basically live there). The CRM captures the emails, mostly. Everything else exists in screenshots, half-written notes, and inside the rep's head.

We're on HubSpot. I know Salesforce shops have Einstein and activity capture, HubSpot has its own conversation tools, and there's a graveyard of Chrome extensions that promise to sync LinkedIn. Curious what's real vs demo-ware.

Looking for advice from folks who've cracked any of these:

1. Dormant deals: when an old account shows fresh intent (funding, hiring, champion moved), does anything in your stack flag it and say "reactivate this one now"? Or is resurrection just rep memory?
2. Mid-deal help: does anything actually guide your reps using past deal patterns, like "deals stuck at this stage with this objection got unstuck by X"? Or is it still manager gut in a 15-min 1:1?
3. Closed-lost mining: which competitors beat you, which objections kill deals, what pricing feedback repeats, which segments you quietly win in. That's next year's strategy sitting in the data. Anyone actually extracting it without a week of manual export hell?
4. Leadership view: beyond activity dashboards, anything that tells you which reps are good at which stage, which segments are heating up or rotting?

Salesforce folks: does Einstein do any of this in production? HubSpot people, same question. And if you duct-taped it with exports + Claude/GPT, tell me how do we store the context for a really long time and make this agentic in near future?

If something did all four well, would that be real budget for you or a nice-to-have?

Genuinely curious what sales people are struggling with the most with their CRMS,

Is it account visibility across reps?

Is it actually helping you prioritize which deal to work today?

Is it better notes/context before a call?

or is it Less manual data entry?

Curious what's the biggest bottleneck for sales people day to day.

My sales performance has been dropping enough that I can no longer ignore it.

The weird part is that nothing dramatic happened i just started noticing all the little places where time disappears. Rewriting the same follow up. Looking up the same company info twice. Forgetting to circle back. Taking notes i never use again. By the end of the day i feel busy and still behind.

I keep seeing people say AI can help with sales but most examples online feel fake or overhyped. That is not what i need. I need something boring and useful.

What are people actually using it for that makes a difference?

I would love to hear what helped with prospecting, call prep, note taking, lead scoring, follow up, pipeline cleanup, or anything else that made your week less chaotic. Also curious about what did not help at all because I have definitely wasted time on shiny tools before.

If there is a setup that helps someone sell better without turning the whole process into a science project, that is probably what i need right now.

Have you worked as a freelancer Salesman with little friction with the founder?

So i'm a BDR and i reach out to start ups or founder led sales businesses offering leads research, outreach, and meetings booking.

Some founders ask for frictionless sales as in "go get me clients". In my experience, that's not doable, i'd need to have a strategy and a process that's been tested to follow especially for comission based roles, or i design it and see which angle resonates.

But what about a business that has no strategy and looking for a GTM (go to market engineer), how do you plan that? Is this doable on commission bases? I don't want to over promise/under deliver, especially that i have no idea if this product has market fit or not.

Clay is doing the job for us but the seat pricing is getting expensive now that we're past the build-it-once phase and pushing waterfall enrichment across multiple workflows daily.

We support outbound and CS for a B2B fintech, pushing around 60k contact lookups a month through a waterfall on a mix of US and EU prospects, and the value Clay added in the early days was the orchestration plus the table UI.

Now that the playbooks are stable, I'm wondering if there's a leaner waterfall tool that does the multi-source lookup without the workflow-builder overhead and the per-seat cost.

Seen FullEnrich and Datagma float in similar threads here as the bigger names on the pure-lookup side, and starting to think going with one of them feels safer than staying with a full workflow suite we don't need.

So what are you all using instead of Clay?

I'm trying to get a proper deal room setup for our bigger prospects and i feel dumb at this point.

Everyone i asked keeps saying just spin up a deal room like it's this obvious thing but then there are stuff as sales wants one place for decks and pricing, legal wants their own folder structure, product wants access to feedback and the buyer keeps forwarding random emails to their team anyway. What tool should i use for deal rooms that doesn't make me take care of twenty links and permissions every time a new stakeholder appears?

I believe there should be a simple answer here but i am not aware of it. Feel free to share your experiences or anything relevant to this.

This is the post I wish I had found when we were building this out.

We started enriching inbound leads about 18 months ago. leads come in with a name and email, we append company data, job title, industry, firmographics, and sales gets context before the first touch. straightforward in theory.

The first problem was coverage being unevenly distributed across our ICP. We serve US tech and some international markets. enrichment on US tech was solid. The moment we got into APAC or southern Europe, match rates fell off. We didn't catch it for a while because we were looking at blended averages. By the time we sliced by segment, roughly 30% of our enriched international records had mostly blank or stale fields going to sales marked as "enriched."

The second was job title drift. titles pulled six months ago were still sitting in Salesforce as current. no refresh cadence, no staleness flag. A few reps reached out to people who had changed companies months earlier.

The third one is boring but it mattered most operationally. we had no visibility into enrichment failures. If an API call returned empty the record just stayed as-is with no flag. no reliable way to know which records were enriched, which failed silently, and which hadn't been processed yet.

Fixing all three took longer than building the original setup. refresh cadence, failure logging, and segment-level coverage are the three things I'd lead every vendor conversation with now.

Our outbound motion had gotten pretty mechanical. High-volume sequences to ICP accounts, low reply rates, reps increasingly skeptical of list quality. I knew it needed a rethink but wasn't sure where to start.

Sat through a demo with Tapistro and it focused on warm outreach automation and the first thing they did was pull accounts from our segment that had shown signal activity in the past 30 days. Not new accounts, accounts already in our CRM that we'd tagged as low priority or stopped outreach on.

Three of the first five had job changes in the buying committee. One had been on the pricing page twice. Another had G2 activity in our category from two contacts. We had none of that surfaced anywhere in our stack. Those weren't cold accounts. We just had no visibility into what they'd been doing.

I’ve heard a lot of things about this course. A lot of people say it’s very expensive and that you should only consider it if you are serious about a career in sales. I wonder how you get the most from the course. What are your suggestions for getting value from the course

Had a moment this week that summed it up. A new ops hire asked me how she'd get a small internal dashboard built and I realised I didn't have a good answer for her.

A year ago the answer was a two week wait for engineering. Now it's three months, because everything ops needs goes in the same queue as customer-facing product and our loses every time.

We do it by hand with approvals in a spreadsheet, status in a slack thread. Data was moved between two systems by someone copy-pasting.

I've been trying to reduce engineering dependency so my team can build the small stuff itself. Every option is either too technical for us or too flimsy to trust with real data.

Don't get me wrong, product should come first. I just don't think ops was meant to be this stuck behind a queue it never reaches the front of.

Every year we get new AI sales tools.

Yet most sales teams still spend hours doing manual work.

What task still feels surprisingly manual?

What have you tried?

Why didn't it solve the problem?

Most teams rely on usage dashboards to spot churn. But by the time logins drop, the decision is usually already made. The earliest signs of churn almost always show up in conversations first.

Here is what I look for in shared channels: 1. The ghosted question: a customer asks a minor question and the thread sits open for days without them following up. 2. Post-onboarding silence: a channel goes completely quiet right after a bumpy rollout. 3. The silent stakeholder: the main champion stops replying to check-ins, even if their team is still using the tool.

If you only look at product data, you miss the silent frustration. Catching these gaps early gives you a head start on saving the account.

Is anyone else tracking conversation health alongside usage?

We have just launched a project with an outside consultant to overhaul Salesforce and integrate the numerous spreadsheet reports, etc. The discovery phase including multiple stakeholder interviews was just completed and as we are about to move into the first phase, our CEO ran into a former colleague who told him they ditched Salesforce and built their own CRM using AI and he wants us to now look into hiring a company/consultant to build our own.

Has anyone out there looked into doing something similar? Did you choose to not move forward in that direction? If so, why not and what did you learn in your research?

If you have built your own CRM using AI what has been your experience so far? Did you use an outside consultant and or company? how long did it take to build and how long have you been using it?