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A while ago I used Hubspot CRM for a bit. I think it's slow and quirky, and to me it's a big red flag how hard they make it to get the data out (or, well, 2 yea

A while ago I used Hubspot CRM for a bit. I think it's slow and quirky, and to me it's a big red flag how hard they make it to get the data out (or, well, 2 years ago at least). But Hubspot gets one thing right that I never understood other CRMs can't do. If Hubspot sees an email from name@company.com, they automatically make a new contact for that name, and a new organization for that company (derived from the @company.com), enrich it all with available data (employee size etc), which I guess they get from some Clearbit-like data. This is super useful, because it means all relevant organization about a new lead who just reached out is just there. The only manual logging I ever have to do is eg log calls or write internal notes. No bookkeeping whatsoever. Similarly, if I want to log someone I met at, say, a conference, I just enter their email address from their business card (or whatever) and -poof- the contact and organization are there. Maybe I'll add the phone number if they're oldschool like that, but that's it. All the otherfields are immediately in "good enough" mode. A while later I tried Close.io, who advertise loudly in the blogosphere about how much other CRMs make you click and type, and I had to make every contact and organization by hand! How is that automation? I simply don't understand how any CRM in 2019 can ship with so much manual data entry. What am I missing? Is my use case such an edge case? If you'd add stuff like this, then maybe I'd be interested in switching over. But having to manually maintain every single piece of data, when much information is publicly available from various sources, is just not worth my time. And if you have this feature, I'd highlight it proudly on the website :D To other HN'ers, if you have suggestions for CRMs that get this right, I'm interested.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drikerf 7y ago
Thank you for taking the time to write this :)! I populate some things based on the domain but not all that you mention. I like these little smartness things and I want to do this. It's one of the things I'm going to try to make this autumn :).
jarvuschris 7y ago
The open source Odoo does that too
aidos 7y ago
The few bits of automation hubspot do have, you end up fighting to behave well. It’s so hard to organise data in hubspot that you’ll end up negating any benefits from the automation. In my experience, it all becomes messy quickly. I’d probably rank it as the worst bit of software I’ve ever used. The apis are inconsistent and incomplete. You can have multiple email addresses for a contact, but you can never extract them over the api and the only the primary is treated as a first class citizen. The interface somehow manages to portray the least amount of useful information in the largest amount of space I’ve ever seen. Updating anything is so painful that it’s hard to motivate yourself to do it. /rant
- dshah 7y ago
  Disclosure: I am one of the HubSpot founders. Sorry for the poor experience you've had with the HubSpot CRM. We are working hard to make things better -- especially the APIs and how we present information in the Contact view. Thanks for the candid feedback.
  - aidos 7y ago
    Thanks for commenting, in spite of my rude assessment. Things have gotten marginally better over the last couple of years since we started using it, but it’s still not a great experience. Every part feels a bit kludged together. Take email integration. Really you should be doing something like closeio which just reads and syncs emails. Instead you rely on a plugin to bcc on send (miss the boat and the whole email chain is gone forever). But I don’t want to use the plugin (for reasons I don’t recall, oh maybe because I had to remember to keep turning it off all the time when emailing domains outside what we wanted in the crm). But then there are the obtuse track vs log flags, and depending on what you do, you may or may not receive the responses later in hubspot so someone else maybe can’t deal with it while you’re off. There’s a lot more candid feedback I could give, but the response from the support team so far is basically, “put it in the forum”. Which seems to be the place ideas go to die.
skwoods98 7y ago
I'm clearly biased (co-founder), but I'd suggest having a look at Nudge.ai for exactly that.
skwoods98 7y ago
I'm clearly biased (co-founder), but I'd suggest having a look at Nudge.ai. Does exactly what you're asking about.
- rrggrr 7y ago
  Just added a nudge.ai account. Some feedback: 1. I'd like to see a zapier integration asap. 2. Consider a MixMax integration. Ping me if you want a contact there; or perhaps they'll catch this thread. You can reach me at gardner ...\at/... hiredinsight ...\dot/... co
  - skwoods98 7y ago
    Thanks - good thoughts all round.
throw03172019 7y ago
Started on HubSpot and jumped around until we landed on PipeDrive. Very happy with it and their API makes it very easy to do internal tools and automation flows.
grayed-down 7y ago
A client of ours bought a CRM on Codecanyon and I have to say that it's pretty impressive. It's called Perfex. It's written in CodeIgniter and has a lot of hooks so we were able to trick it out quite extensively. And it will create a lead or contact if information is sent through a web form that you can create on the platform. We created a curl interface that fronts several different forms that feed into the CRM including contact and registration forms on various different sites.
roh26it 7y ago
Have you tried Freshsales? It's loaded with automation but still has a DIY feel no akin to other enterprise crms Disclosure: I work there and would love feedback.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

drikerf 7y ago

Thank you for taking the time to write this :)! I populate some things based on the domain but not all that you mention. I like these little smartness things and I want to do this. It's one of the things I'm going to try to make this autumn :).

jarvuschris 7y ago

The open source Odoo does that too

aidos 7y ago

The few bits of automation hubspot do have, you end up fighting to behave well. It’s so hard to organise data in hubspot that you’ll end up negating any benefits from the automation. In my experience, it all becomes messy quickly. I’d probably rank it as the worst bit of software I’ve ever used. The apis are inconsistent and incomplete. You can have multiple email addresses for a contact, but you can never extract them over the api and the only the primary is treated as a first class citizen. The interface somehow manages to portray the least amount of useful information in the largest amount of space I’ve ever seen. Updating anything is so painful that it’s hard to motivate yourself to do it. /rant

dshah 7y ago
Disclosure: I am one of the HubSpot founders. Sorry for the poor experience you've had with the HubSpot CRM. We are working hard to make things better -- especially the APIs and how we present information in the Contact view. Thanks for the candid feedback.
- aidos 7y ago
  Thanks for commenting, in spite of my rude assessment. Things have gotten marginally better over the last couple of years since we started using it, but it’s still not a great experience. Every part feels a bit kludged together. Take email integration. Really you should be doing something like closeio which just reads and syncs emails. Instead you rely on a plugin to bcc on send (miss the boat and the whole email chain is gone forever). But I don’t want to use the plugin (for reasons I don’t recall, oh maybe because I had to remember to keep turning it off all the time when emailing domains outside what we wanted in the crm). But then there are the obtuse track vs log flags, and depending on what you do, you may or may not receive the responses later in hubspot so someone else maybe can’t deal with it while you’re off. There’s a lot more candid feedback I could give, but the response from the support team so far is basically, “put it in the forum”. Which seems to be the place ideas go to die.

skwoods98 7y ago

I'm clearly biased (co-founder), but I'd suggest having a look at Nudge.ai for exactly that.

skwoods98 7y ago

I'm clearly biased (co-founder), but I'd suggest having a look at Nudge.ai. Does exactly what you're asking about.

rrggrr 7y ago
Just added a nudge.ai account. Some feedback: 1. I'd like to see a zapier integration asap. 2. Consider a MixMax integration. Ping me if you want a contact there; or perhaps they'll catch this thread. You can reach me at gardner ...\at/... hiredinsight ...\dot/... co
- skwoods98 7y ago
  Thanks - good thoughts all round.

throw03172019 7y ago

Started on HubSpot and jumped around until we landed on PipeDrive. Very happy with it and their API makes it very easy to do internal tools and automation flows.

grayed-down 7y ago

A client of ours bought a CRM on Codecanyon and I have to say that it's pretty impressive. It's called Perfex. It's written in CodeIgniter and has a lot of hooks so we were able to trick it out quite extensively. And it will create a lead or contact if information is sent through a web form that you can create on the platform. We created a curl interface that fronts several different forms that feed into the CRM including contact and registration forms on various different sites.

roh26it 7y ago

Have you tried Freshsales? It's loaded with automation but still has a DIY feel no akin to other enterprise crms Disclosure: I work there and would love feedback.