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Burned $1,800 on a marketing automation platform, went back to spreadsheets
Last year I signed up for one of those fancy marketing automation tools thinking it would fix our lead follow-up. Paid $1,800 for the year upfront, plus another $400 for setup help. The onboarding took six weeks and honestly the whole thing felt like learning a second job. Our sales team still ended up manually exporting leads because the tool kept glitching on our CRM sync. After three months I cancelled and went back to a shared spreadsheet with conditional formatting. It's ugly but it works and costs me zero extra. We actually close more deals now because the team actually uses the spreadsheet. Has anyone else found that simple tools beat the expensive ones once you factor in the time cost?
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blake_williams1mo ago
Man, I have to push back on framing this as some big lesson about simple tools beating expensive ones. You paid $1,800 upfront plus $400 for setup and bailed after three months, so yeah of course that stings, but that is more about how the thing got picked and rolled out than about automation being a scam. Six weeks of onboarding with nobody on your team owning it was never going to work no matter what you bought. Spreadsheets are fine when you have a small team and low lead volume, but they break the second you need two people editing at once or you want any kind of history on a lead. Is the real problem the tool, or is it that nobody set it up right and nobody was told to actually use it? I get that the spreadsheet is free and people use it, but "people use it" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
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