Hello, I work at The Home Depot and I’d like to keep track of my accounts and their jobs respectively. For example, I will give you a scenario. I have a customer doing the framing for 123 Main Ave, I know I sold him $15,000 for framing last week, but this week I gotta follow up on him and see if I can start selling him drywall materials. Once he’s done, I want a system that lets me add all these details and I can keep track of all the spending along with other jobs that will arise. I want everything organized in a way that I can go on my phone and be like “Gotta call John today because he told me he’d get his permits soon” the. John tells me he’s got another job lined up next month and while I’m working with him on the current one, I already have a reminder to check with him in a month for the other job. Remember, I’m a single user, this is for me to justify my following up and not forgetting anything so I don’t miss out on sales. Thanks.

Do sales reps and their managers actually have issues with using and integrating ai in their crms or is it just that they don't know how to properly use it or is it that ai is not that accurate and advanced yet.

If there are some issues I would love to know about them and how have you approached those issues?

If you could add one feature to your CRM today, what would it be? Curious to know what's frustrating people the most.

This is a monthly megathread where you can all clamour for CRM attention without being banned for spamming this forum. Share your CRM, or consultancy service to your hearts content, (just keep your dignity!) The idea here is to keep the rest of r_crm less spammy, so don't be surprised if your regurgitated chatGPT output and link don't ever get approved elsewhere on this sub.

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Put [ASK] at the start of your comment if you're asking/looking for something.

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hey there sales people, I'm researching about how sales teams use crm.

I'm curious about what is the most frustrating/annoying part of using the mobile app?

• following up with leads?

• creating activities

• notifications?

• working offline?

• updating records after customer visits or calls?

• anything that I missed ?

Tell me your insights on the comment.

Hey everyone,

​I’m looking to get into CRM systems, but I’m starting completely from scratch with zero prior experience. My goal is to build new skills for my career but the sheer number of platforms and learning paths is a bit overwhelming.

​For those who have been in my shoes or work with CRMs daily, I’d love to get your advice on a few things:

​Where should I start? Which platform offers the best learning curve for a beginner (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho)?

​Theory vs. Practice: Is it better to learn general sales/CRM processes first, or just jump straight into hands-on tools like HubSpot Academy or Salesforce Trailhead?

​Practice Projects: What kind of small "sandbox" or mock projects can a beginner build to get actual practical experience without real company data?

​Certifications: Are there any free certificates that actually hold value on a resume or LinkedIn?

​Looking back: If you had to start learning CRMs all over again today, what would you do differently?

​Any recommendations for courses, YouTube channels, or general tips would be hugely appreciated!

Recommend a CRM to me for a 1-2 person business that operates vending machines. Needs to be designed for tracking 1-3 month sales pipeline not focused on reporting to management that doesn’t exist in this business.

Needs to track:
-Cold Calls (in-person)
-Cold Calls (phone)
-Website generated inbound leads
-Manage contract/agreements
-Manage Customer Support requests

Other needs:
-Affordable for a 1-2 person business
-User Friendly for inexperienced salesman
-Scalable up to a 20 person business.

Over the past year, I noticed a pattern with small businesses.

They use:

• A CRM for leads
• WhatsApp for communication
• Calendly for bookings
• Google Sheets for tracking
• Mailchimp for campaigns
• AI tools for content
• Zapier/n8n for automation
• Separate dashboards for reports

Nothing actually works together.

So instead of building another generic CRM, I'm experimenting with a modular AI operating system where businesses only install the features they need.

Some of the modules I'm working on:

• 📍 Google Maps Lead Scraper
• 🤖 AI Workforce
• 💬 WhatsApp AI Agent (Official Cloud API)
• 👥 CRM
• 📅 Smart Appointments
• 💳 Sales & Billing
• 📦 Inventory
• 🎥 Teleconsultation
• 🎙️ AI Voice Calling
• 📈 Analytics
• 🌐 Website/Landing Page Builder
• ...and custom modules businesses can add later.

The idea is that a dental clinic, travel agency, gym, real estate company, or law firm shouldn't all be forced to use the same CRM. They should start with a base platform and enable only the modules relevant to them.

The biggest challenge isn't building features—it's making AI reliable enough to perform real business actions while keeping everything auditable, recoverable, and easy for non-technical teams.

Here's the current module selection screen from the prototype.

I'm looking for honest feedback.

If you run a business:

• What's the one module you'd install first?
• What's one feature you think every CRM still gets wrong?

My connection request acceptance rate is okay but once people accept no one replies to my follow up messages. I have tried changing the wording but it still sounds like I'm guessing.

I want to see the data on each step of my sequence to know exactly where people are dropping off. Does anyone know a tool that gives you these details without being overly complex?

I've been working on a CRM in Notion and I'd love some honest feedback from people who actually use CRMs.

My goal was to keep things simple while covering the basics:

Contacts

Companies

Deals

Follow-ups

Revenue tracking

If you were looking for a Notion CRM, what would make you choose one template over another?

Been noticing something and want to know if it’s just me or everyone.

Every team I’ve talked to that runs reporting off their CRM seems to keep a second version of the truth somewhere. A spreadsheet, usually. The CRM report says one thing, but when it actually matters: board meeting, forecast, leadership review, someone rebuilds the numbers by hand because nobody fully trusts what comes out of the system

which is kind of strange when you think about it. You’re paying for the CRM to be the source of truth and then maintaining a shadow copy anyway

For anyone living in this: what’s the thing that actually kills your trust in the number: dupes, stale data, stages nobody updates? And has anyone here gotten to where the CRM number is the one they trust, without rebuilding it on the side?

not looking for tool recommendations, more curious whether this shadow-spreadsheet thing is universal or if I’ve just been talking to the wrong people.

Hey everyone,

I've been researching the CRM migration industry before building anything. Recently I made a post asking everyone what some of their biggest pain points are and most manual parts of the process. So far from the responses I found that the actual data movement has been largely solved. The most consistent complaints have been field mapping, data cleanup and pre-migration decision making. From what I've read it seems pre-migration is the most underserved phase.

Some new questions I have:
-which roles or teams suffer from these problems the most and how frequently?
-how much time, money or project risk is created from these problems?
-Are there any workarounds or tools people use to make these problems manageable?

I really appreciate all the help and support I've gotten from this community. Thank you for all the responses and everything!

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.

Hi everyone,

I'm researching how sales teams use CRM Mobile.

I'm curious:

What is the most frustrating part of using the mobile app?

• Following up with leads?
• Creating activities?
• Notifications?
• Working offline?
• Updating records after customer visits?
• Something else?

I'd love to hear your experience. #vtigercrm

Hi! I am an independent rep for a huge manufacturing company and my sole job is recruiting clientele and partners.

I run meta ads and 90% of my conversions come from them.
I've got the ads down. But the system stumps me. Training new marketers to use it is completely impossible with where I am currently at.

I use privyr as a current CRM but I need a way to TRAIN newbies, have them receive their own leads and directly pay for their own leads. That way I can create the lead gen, and they can benefit from it..

I've looked at Go High Level- but I am not 100% sure.

If anyone has any expertise I would be all ears.

Client’s HubSpot workflow hit the marketing email quota. Their instinct: “let’s just upgrade the plan.”

I asked one question instead: “Who actually needs this email?”

Turned out “Enroll all associated contacts” was ON. So one workflow was blasting every contact linked to a company — 120 people per company — instead of just the one department that mattered.

Client’s answer when I asked who should get it: “Only Billing.”

Fixed the enrollment logic to target the Primary/Billing contact only.

Result:

**•** Recipients per send: 432 → 17  
**•** No plan upgrade needed  
**•** Cleaner automation, fewer confused replies from random contacts

Moral: before paying more for software, spend 5 minutes checking why you’re hitting the limit. Sometimes it’s not growth — it’s just bad workflow logic quietly emailing people who never needed to be in it.

Anyone else caught a “quota problem” that was actually a “workflow problem”?

Has AI actually saved you time in your CRM, or is it mostly hype? What features do you use regularly?

I have seen people use apps like Word, OneNote, Excel and other note taking apps for taking notes outside of the CRM. What's your use case and why aren't you doing it inside the CRM? Is the CRM software lacking a notes section?

I build an AI-native CRM for Swiss and DACH SMEs, firms that have run the same accounting software for fifteen years. After a year of selling into this market, here's the uncomfortable GTM summary: almost nothing from the standard SaaS playbook works.

Product-led growth assumes people try things. Our buyers don't try things. Cold outreach assumes people respond to strangers. Our buyers, almost by definition, don't buy from strangers. Virality assumes users share tools. Nobody here has ever shared a tool.

What's left is one mechanism: borrowed trust. These firms buy through people who already have access their Accountant, their IT partner, the agency that built their website, a peer at an industry event. So our entire GTM reduces to a single question: how do we become the thing trusted people recommend?

In practice that means the "channels" look strange on a dashboard. Partner relationships instead of ad spend. Content written to be found when a consultant researches on a client's behalf, not when an end user browses. Being findable and credible at the exact moment someone is about to spend their own reputation on us, because that's what a recommendation is.

It's slow. Painfully slow compared to any funnel chart I've seen at a SaaS meetup. But it compounds, and once a trusted advisor recommends you twice, you're not a vendor anymore, you're part of how they do their job.

Curious how others sell into markets where the buyer only buys through existing relationships. What actually moved the needle for you?

(Disclosure: I'm the founder of Uliasti, the team behind the product: Advanzo. Happy to go deeper in the comments.)

Planning to implement AI quote generation at the end of this year but we already ran into problem during testing. The tool quickly produced a clean quote, but for a multi-year deal it ignored our discount floor without any warning or approval step.

The vendor suggested adding the rules to the prompt. But that approach is more like a suggestion than a real policy engine. So, where should we put our pricing guardrails?

I specifically want to be able to export those notes, weekly, and use them for a sales report, but Hub Spot dont do this unless you pay for the next tier up, and Nimble dont have the functionality. Can anyone recommend one? Its esentially something we could run out of an excel spreadsheet so we're looking for something cheap. Thankyou!

I operate a digital transformation services company. I recently landed a project with a small maintenance company doing 150 - 250K annually(conservative estimates). They are scaling and planning to franchise.

The engagement:
- CRM audit

- Deliverables:

1. Optimization roadmap with prioritized recommendations + implementation
2. AI Voice agent readiness and implementation to capture after-hours calls
3. SOP drafts for admin and field operations as their team expands.

How would you go about pricing this engagement?

I am considering a fixed project fee, a monthly retainer, and revenue share as options.

They have already signed on with a relatively flexible budget.

Is there anywhere else I should post this question? Thank you!

Been doing CRM audits for a few agents/teams lately — data hygiene, pipeline health, tagging, that kind of thing — and the pattern across every single one has been strikingly consistent:

1. 20-25% of "active" pipeline is actually stale. Leads marked as live with zero logged activity in 30+ days. Most CRMs don't surface this by default, so nobody's watching for it until it's a real problem.
2. Tagging rot. Same tag existing as 3-4 casing variants ("Buyer" / "buyer" / "BUYER"), which silently breaks any saved search or campaign built on top of it.
3. Zero consent tracking. Almost every export I've looked at has no opt-in/consent field at all — a real exposure most agents don't think about until someone asks.

None of this needs new leads or new tools. It's all sitting in the CRM they already have.

Curious if this tracks with what others here are seeing, or if I've just gotten an unlucky sample size. If anyone wants to compare notes on their own setup, happy to talk through what I'm checking for.

If you're making a call to a regular phone number in the US, how is the call getting recorded, transcribed and summarized back into the CRM? Is a VOIP system or a dialer being used?
Is Whatsapp being used?

I am asking about the recording part in particular when making a regular phone call. I know once a recording has been captured, voice to text and AI can do the transcribing and summarization. Does the CRM have like an api to receive the text including the metadata, so it knows where to place it?