TIL my 3-year-old CRM lost 47 client leads overnight and I didn't even notice for a week

So here's the thing - I've been using this cheap CRM for my freelance real estate business since 2021. It worked fine for tracking calls and showings. But last Tuesday I logged in and saw I had zero contacts in the pipeline. Zero. At first I thought it was a glitch, but nope, the data was just gone. Three years of client info, notes on properties we toured, follow-up dates - all wiped. I spent the next 3 days trying to get support from a company that barely has a phone number. They finally told me there was a server migration and my old plan got dropped. Now I'm stuck either paying $60 a month for a tier I never needed or losing all that history. On one hand, I could upgrade and get my data back plus some new features. On the other hand, I could cut my losses and start fresh with a spreadsheet and Google Calendar for like zero dollars. Has anyone else had to rebuild their whole client tracking system from scratch after something like this? What did you do about lost leads you can't recover?

3 comments

3 Comments

evan_grant704d ago

Nah man that's rough but honestly this is probably gonna save you in the long run. I lost a whole notebook of client info once when my car got broken into and I was panicking for weeks trying to remember who I was supposed to call back. Turns out the clients that mattered remembered ME and reached out again. The ones I lost contact with were probably tire kickers anyway. If you go with a spreadsheet and Google Calendar you'll be surprised how much simpler things get because you're not drowning in fields and tags and status updates that don't matter. Just keep a simple log of names, dates you talked, and what they wanted. That's all you really need. The 60 bucks a month sounds like a trap to me, they're just holding your data hostage. I'd say start fresh, write down the clients you actually remember having real conversations with, and move on.

margaretc424d ago

60 clients probably had you paying way more attention to the app than the actual people you were talking to, @evan_grant70.

shane1704d ago

Quoting "the ones that mattered remembered me" - that's a lot of faith to put in memory, but okay. Unless @margaretc42's point was that the app was the problem, not the number of clients.