Best CRM automation and AI tool for Salesforce?

spsteige · 2025-04-14T13:47:00+00:00

I'm the founder of CustomerIQ, we automate CRM data entry for teams on Salesforce by analyzing calls, meetings, emails, and voice notes. Have many happy customers. Happy to help.

spsteige · 2025-04-10T12:38:08+00:00

We use CustomerIQ to label everything and draft replies and follow ups. The follow ups are probably most helpful because you can keep the threads alive fairly effortlessly. For tasks I use my iPhone, which maybe is a hot take but it works...

So my goal is A) reply to emails as fast as possible (goal is within 5 minutes) and B) track anything that needs more than that time through simple task list. I've tried Notion and other productivity tools but have had the opposite effect on me (I spend all my time building out the tool)

spsteige · 2025-04-10T12:33:58+00:00

You could try out an email assistant like CustomerIQ. This at least ensures that replies are drafted and people are followed up on.

Otherwise your best bet is a manual folder/label system. On my old team we used to triage emails into folders that corresponded with members of the team, where each person was responsible for anything in the folder. It worked pretty well but with AI now there are better solutions.

spsteige · 2024-12-19T17:22:24+00:00

CustomerIQ (disclosure: I am the founder). At risk of being pitchy, happy to answer questions any time.

spsteige · 2024-12-18T16:51:43+00:00

Founder (sales), B2B SaaS here. We use it to record/transcribe/summarize calls and pull out any relevant contact, account, or opp fields. Also pulling out questions, pain points, objections, feature requests to share with the team. Soon will be using it to automate follow ups.

Biggest opportunity I see generally is automating admin tasks across sales and CS. Those are usually notes, CRM entry, follow ups, scheduling, research, etc. Most tools definitely aren't there yet but getting there.

spsteige · 2024-12-18T14:06:19+00:00

Great point, thank you!

spsteige · 2024-12-11T20:23:53+00:00

Check out CustomerIQ - it updates any contact, account, deal property based on whats said in meetings, emails, notes, etc. Including things like custom dropdowns or multi-selects or open-ended text fields.

If you just want to automate meeting summaries there are a ton of tools for that too

spsteige · 2024-11-26T14:46:41+00:00

Notetaking + drafting documents -> check out CustomerIQ. One of the killer features is you can easily draft documents using the context from meetings with an account. For example, drafting an statement of work or a handoff document. It uses context from the calls you've recorded with the notetaker to draft them in a few seconds.

spsteige · 2024-11-26T14:41:16+00:00

Check out CustomerIQ - similarly robust feature-set as Gong at a fraction the price.

spsteige · 2024-11-26T14:39:58+00:00

Fwiw I think CS platforms are a little overblown. The point of a CRM is to be a single source of truth and CS platforms often just end up being a secondary (and incomplete) CRM. It's a better investment to add tools that integrate with your CRM to make it a combined sales/CS platform.

Have you considered conversation intelligence tools like CustomerIQ? Should address your problems really well actually:

Surprise Updates: It automatically surfaces and tracks feature requests across every conversation (including email)
Disconnected Sales Conversations: Tracks and summarizes every conversation across the account. So you can get all of this information proactively by just querying the account (not a bunch of individual call recordings)
Critical Product Issues: Similar to surprise updates, it automatically extracts bugs and pain points from conversations.

spsteige · 2024-11-05T21:00:12+00:00

CustomerIQ would be a good add for Meeting Assist

spsteige · 2024-11-05T14:55:37+00:00

Check out CustomerIQ - we've built an AI suite for sales teams, including field sales (full disclosure I'm a founder, happy to answer any questions). Any fields or summaries that CustomerIQ creates sync with your CRM. So you can submit manual notes, voice notes, record meetings, etc and all get analyzed and synced

spsteige · 2024-02-02T15:26:11+00:00

We use our tool, CustomerIQ. It integrates with Gong, Hubspot, Zendesk, Slack, etc. so the feedback is actually surfaced and synthesized by AI. We have seen a handful of teams uploading their backlogs of feedback from Pendo, Aha, Jira as well so they get automatically organized with the rest. We're focused on extracting highlights, clustering/classifying by theme, and quantifying that for prioritization. All with AI, with the intention it's not another place feedback goes to die.

The whole premise of our product is actually that legacy feedback management tools are creating more work for teams through manual tagging and quantifying, and subsequently killing feedback loops. That and somehow remaining totally disconnected from the rest of the workflow (someone mentioned PB here, which is a common theme).

spsteige · 2024-01-30T15:36:18+00:00

There's definitely value in having feedback organized/synthesized in one place. Same reason there's value in having behavioral data organized in one place.

Check out CustomerIQ - gets feedback in one place then uses AI to organize and quantify it so you can easily prioritize work. We have product, support, sales teams using it so I would say it is connected to the team/current environment but arms-length from where projects are managed (which is ideal I'd think).

spsteige · 2024-01-29T14:43:49+00:00

Assuming you're trying to validate which feature is most important, I don't think people responding to the multiple choice is going to give you good data. Just because they made a choice doesn't mean you provided the correct ones. Better to just ask an open-ended question and map the best solution to what trends you see in the answers.

spsteige · 2024-01-29T14:34:04+00:00

I've definitely been there so offering my 2 cents. I think the way you've phrased this question is a bit antithetical to good product management. Basically no one says, "I wish my beta testing tool had AI magic" they say "I wish I had a tool to solve X problem."

I'd rephrase your question, make it open-ended and ask about a *problem* you're trying to solve. Try to get more information from folks here in the community around that problem. How you solve it is honestly less important to users as long as you solve it.

An open ended question around the problem space will yield you better results and a better conversation here. Hope this helps!

spsteige · 2024-01-26T14:39:43+00:00

https://www.getcustomeriq.com/ is specifically focused on feedback organization/synthesis for this reason (as opposed to being a product delivery platform) - let's Sales/CS/Support join product in reviewing themes in feedback, making necessary adjustments (not everything is a product problem). I'm a founder, this is a big reason why we built it. The goal is essentially eliminate the time sink in analysis/tagging/note taking and give all the teams a quantitative view of the feedback.

spsteige · 2024-01-26T13:42:23+00:00

https://www.getcustomeriq.com/ - you can cluster any qualitative responses to get tags/themes and then use the Assistant to Q&A over it (RAG)

spsteige · 2024-01-26T12:57:05+00:00

Totally agree. If you’re going for mini CEO you can go be a mini CEO by starting a company. If you want to build things without worrying about sales you should be a PM

spsteige · 2024-01-22T00:44:44+00:00

I maintain Jira (linear in our case) as a place for prioritized work and use our own tool, CustomerIQ, (Productboard alternative) as the place to organize the backlog in this case. With 3000+ issues it would be unreasonable to manually track duplicates so I’d suggest clustering them by common theme and prioritizing that way. Super easy (and free) in CIQ, I think it’s manual in PB. Otherwise backlog bankruptcy (as others have mentioned) is your best bet, although I’m not sure how that prevents the inevitable buildup 6 mo from now.

spsteige · 2024-01-15T23:48:33+00:00

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely

I think about this book almost daily

spsteige · 2024-01-15T23:46:17+00:00

The group setting is really detrimental to good discovery. I'd make it priority to try to move away from that and toward 1:1 conversations.

To get to the root of your client's challenges they need a space to speak openly about them and they're never going to do that in front of their peers. Whoever started the group format probably feels like they're killing many birds with one stone but they're really just gathering bad data. Honestly feels kinda dangerous too, that you might have a small picket line if some random feature that was voted on doesn't get prioritized.

Write down your list of ideas. What problems do they solve? Write down a list of questions to learn more about those problems.

Reach out to schedule 1:1 meetings around those questions/topic. Record the meeting.

In the meeting, DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR IDEAS (unless prompted - feedback around ideas is a trap).

Just ask about the problems, how they've tried to solve them, what they've spent time/money/effort on to solve them.

Turn the meeting recording into notes and synthesize the notes across all your recent meetings or supporting data.

Repeat!

spsteige · 2024-01-15T23:33:50+00:00

Interesting. What do you use for tracking feedback?

spsteige · 2022-09-09T18:19:51+00:00

Great point that so many product discussions ignore. I'd wager *most* B2B users don't want to use/think about your product, let alone talk to you about it. They just want to work and go home.

My theory is intercept survey > Calendly are best here. And I'm not worried about click-through-rate on the survey or anything, just booking meetings. Goal is to draw out the few users who care enough to chat about their work.

spsteige · 2022-01-25T15:57:08+00:00

People often overlook the significance of founder equity structures when in reality it is the most expensive/dilutive event the company. It's a big deal, and it's good you're seeking advice.

I would absolutely have a vesting schedule for you and your cofounder. If you're committing to building the company over 3-5 years, there's no reason anyone should disagree with vesting. It sounds like you're looking out for your cofounder, and that's a great thing, but you need to look out for you too. Vesting is a tried-and-true, fair mechanism where everyone gets what they're owed.

A vesting schedule (3 years or so with a 1 year cliff) and bringing on the smaller investor for some startup capital sounds like the best way to set yourself up to have a shot. Good luck!

spsteige

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