Great feedback, Steve.
It would be really helpful to me (us) if we got very specific around this point:
it lacks that authentic and intuitive nature of how leads pass through the pipeline in terms of leads, tasks (activity sets), projects, etc. It’s just not there.
What are you trying to do that you aren’t able to? Or where do you find it unintuitive? I really want to get to the bottom of this and I appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion.
Hi Jonathan,
I think in your case I’d recommend using tags to indicate the status of the prospect. Something like:
Status - First touch
Status - Follow-up
Status - SQL
With that in place, you can easily filter from the contacts view:
… and the CRM:
Another missing piece of the puzzle might be the Task Management feature:
From there you can filter to view only tasks associated with contacts:
Let me know why this won’t work for you or what you’d prefer to have. Definitely want to help you work it out. The more specific we can be, the better. I have a feeling that all the pieces are there for what you need, it’s just connecting the dots to find the features important to your preferred workflow.
For me an amazingly simple system is Freshsales. They treat a Lead as a whole separate entity. A lead record contains a lot of information but you can start with basic information such as name, company, phone, and email. The relationship develops you can add information on potential deals without adding a separate deal; it’s all one record. These leads also have a status to represent the qualification process, but I guess this would be done with tags, but a dropdown with a clear unambiguous status is easier to manage.
The point is that at this stage its a single record that can be quickly accessed and modified. Nice simple and clean.
Its only when a lead is qualified is the record “converted” into a contact records, and account record and a deal record. This is the point at which AC CRM would excel because the automation is such as time saver.
OK, I can see how the Manage Tasks function can help there… I’m going to try make this work BTW…
Come create a thread here when you run into friction or something seems unintuitive. Here to help.
I’ll have a look through. Thanks…
You asked for specific detail on where the AC CRM fails. Here’s a couple…
TASK CREATION
Most tasks are to-do’s. GTD. Yes, there are meetings and calls but most are actionable things to do (send proposal, send letter, prepare report, run analysis, run reports, etc.). I cannot for the life of me figure out why I have to allocate a 15-minute time frame to every task considering it doesn’t show up anywhere else in the system.
In a typical CRM system (I use insightly), I can give the task a name, assign it to people, select a category, and a due date. I can set a reminder, progress and priority if I want. I can link the task to a person (lead, contact or deal). There is nothing special about this - these functions are at the core of any basic CRM.
TASK MANAGEMENT
Honestly, there is nothing nice to say about the TASK widget on the home screen. There’s no point in even having it on the screen.
TASK OVERVIEW
Not sure if this is a bug or on purpose, but when you navigate to the task management screen, the oldest task is on top. You have to click the arrow to show the more urgent task. This screen desperately needs help. The columns are meaningless. When, Relation, Status? Completely not necessary. The when “in 7 days” doesn’t reflect common English communication. If I ask you when the meeting is, I’m not going to say “we are meeting in 5 days”. I’m going to say “we’re meeting on the 24th at 2pm”. The relation and status columns do not provide any meaningful information.
IN a REAL CRM, tasks are displayed in order, based on common sense and use common terminology. Here’s a screen shot of my insightly task page.
I can see what needs to be done today, tomorrow and next week. I can also see overdue tasks. I can also immediately click the contact associated with the task and make edits on the fly.
DEALS PAGE
You mentioned before to try and use the deals page to handle tasks but this is cumbersome. Remember, if you attach a TASK to a contact that is NOT a deal, it won’t show up here. Odd. The next action is strange. If it’s overdue, it’s listed under next action as “2 days ago”. Again, shouldn’t it be all date based?
I hope this has provided enough information. This is just a look at tasks. Others have mentioned notes, leads, etc. Again, basic CRM core elements which are missing. I know we can use tags, deals, etc., but it feels like you’re trying to force basic CRM operations into a system that is not really designed for it. Given that AC is a marketing automation solution, this makes perfect sense! But since you’re now claiming AC includes a CRM, you’re going to have to demonstrate authentic CRM capabilities.
Incredible feedback, Steven. Invaluable. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that.
I’d think of our current task management more like a blank canvas than a finished painting. We’ve only recently released the new CRM and we haven’t fleshed out the task management solution. It’s there, but it’s not a fully mature feature. From here, with feedback from you and other users, we’ll iterate on our task management till it’s, not just on par with, but better than existing solutions. You’ll find that over time our CRM slowly transforms into a best of breed solution just like our email marketing and marketing automation. It’s one of our three core solutions and we’ll work on it till it’s as close to perfect as possible.
I’ve sent your post to our product team (they too appreciated your feedback) so it’s in the hands of the people who can make the decision to shift our focus onto iterating on our task management.
Thanks for the reply Brian and thanks for being so prompt and engaged with users here. I appreciate your indication that the CRM is still in it’s infancy. As much as best of breed sounds appealing, I’m keen for you guys to get to quickly get to a point where the CRM is at least on par with typical CRM products on the marketing. Let’s get the basics done. Cheers.
Thank you very much for this Steven. There is a lot here to consider as we evaluate the future of tasks in ActiveCampaign. There’s a number of great items in here that I noted specifically and a few we’ve already got on our radar. Thanks again.
@Brian I’m glad to see you getting involved in this thread. I, along with others, have been commenting on some of the shortfalls of the CRM in other threads so I hope you’re looking at those as well. One of the biggest weaknesses I saw was in the task functionality, causing me to go with another CRM (Salesforce). I’m still using AC for my email marketing but I’m ‘forced’ to use another CRM.
The biggest weakness (Unless you’re a solo shop) is the inability for your CRM to schedule tasks to other users. I have other people in my organization that need to be involved in the process.
Agree, I’m going to continue my involvement with insightly as my main CRM/task management engine. I’ve spent considerable time trying to get AC to at least “pretend” to act like a half-way decent CRM but it’s full of shortfalls and terribly frustrating - there really is a long way to go. There is light at the end of the tunnel as Brian has indicated that AC is going to focus on this but there doesn’t seem to be a timeline (“slowly transforms”). It’s also encouraging that he active in this community and concerns are being addressed. Looking forward to those concerns being put into action.
@Brian: If you need more, take a look in the beta forum for the Deals. I have some feedback there. (that’s currently all crickety lol).
My concerns are especially about user privileges on what can be seen and cannot be seen. CRMs that others have mentioned in here are all good when it comes to access rights. Some users (sales guys) simply do not need to see it. Seeing as AC is primarily email related work, I would prefer the sales people to not have to see (and/or confuse) email related stuff like automations, etc.
I have about 16 sales people I’m currently pushing to an external platform and it’s extra work whereas if they were on AC it would have been so much more fluid. However, with the ability to see/tinker/question unrelated parts of their jobs, they are not part of AC.
@mham You should definitely be able to configure user access privileges so that your salespeople do not see Campaigns, Automations, etc.
This done though “My Settings” then “Users.” Then you create a Group and define what they can and can’t see:
Then you assign users to those groups.
Let me know if this solves your concern.
Ah, okay, I’ll talk to our product team and see where we’re at on resolving those concerns.
Hi @Brian - I am doing an AC pilot with a client (almost purely focused on the CRM functionality with intention to start leveraging the marketing side later) and I feel there are a few minor shortcomings that would make a huge difference…otherwise I love the product and the client is initially very happy with the usability and UX. But I’ve already discovered some serious limitations that I hope you can help address…
I need to be able to set automations based on CRM activities. For example, I need a trigger like ‘email (deals/sales email via IMAP Gmail, not a marketing campaign) last sent’ or ‘date of last note added’ aren’t available triggers for automations. My use case in this particular instance is to create an automation to move a deal from “Closing” to “Rotting” stage when it hasn’t been ‘touched’ by its owner in over two weeks. No way to do this currently, unless I’m missing something.
There isn’t a way to associate a custom field like ‘closed lost reason’ to a deal…instead that custom dropdown field must be associated to a contact. This is problematic because a single contact is very likely to have multiple deals…how would I be able to structure this data easily for reporting later? The answer is that currently, we can’t…and this is a problem because being able to report on why we are losing deals is critical.
The automation triggers that are based on CRM functions aren’t mapped to a specific Deal, but rather to the ‘last updated deal’ or ‘newest deal’…this is a problem because it’s entirely likely that we’ll have multiple deals going for a single Organization and a single Contact…making it difficult to create deal-activity-triggered automations. It’s risky (at best) with the options currently available to assume that the automation would be triggered for the intended deal if someone is updating another deal under that contact and/or organization within a similar timeframe.
Would like to be able to assign tasks to other team members beyond just the Deal owner. We have a collaborative, SDR-driven team so there are multiple salespeople touching each deal.
Happy to jump on the phone to chat if you like…again, very happy but could be ecstatic if these issues were resolved quickly…I think these are the types of things that could keep the Deals functionality from being a real CRM solution, unfortunately.
Hi Brian, We have been using the AC CRM for almost 1 year now. I am used to multiple CRM solutions and now I am worried that you are not really up to create a proper CRM in AC.
I have to implement BASE CRM, so my question are, will the Zapier sync work? Add/Edit contacts, tasks etc etc
Your CRM should allow you to add a contact record without having to add an email address. – most CRM’s allow you to do this. There are times when all you have is a name and yet you want to add it in your CRM. Over time you (might) add their phone number, other pertinent information, and even an email address. I realize your company’s genesis is email marketing automation but if you want to play in the CRM space you need to turn off the email field requirement.
