A CRM for people like me: a Recatch review

Bookmark #1 is now Recatch

I don't like Salesforce.

A really ugly UI, lag, complicated setup, and so on... I could list the reasons forever, but the most fundamental one is that it feels like a tool that doesn't think much about 'people like me'.

Of course Salesforce has plenty of features for all that, but since you have to set everything up yourself, I honestly don't see how it's fundamentally different from a spreadsheet.

Still, we've already sunk too much time into setting up Salesforce... so it's going to be hard to pull it out.
So right now, everyone at our company manages leads in their own sheets and Notion pages, and Salesforce is used only as an ₩8 million-a-year reporting CRM.

So I, too, manage marketing performance in a spreadsheet, and my own sales pipeline in Recatch as my CRM.

And I can definitely feel my productivity going up.
Because I'm building the habit of checking the CRM first thing every day when I get to work.

Propose a way of working, not features

Honestly, the features in Recatch are things you could cobble together yourself by connecting Zapier, Webflow, and a scheduling tool.
And I think that will stay true no matter what features the Recatch team ships.

What matters isn't the sum of individual features, but what this solution proposes through them.
And that is: 'don't miss your inbound leads.'

For someone like me, a B2B marketer publishing content to generate inbound leads, that's why Recatch looks good.

And Recatch's actual UX/UI is laid out as if it's saying 'here's how you can manage inbound leads better.' That's what makes me open Recatch every day.

As someone who markets work SaaS myself, I'm reminded every time how important it is to send a message like this.

That said, you can't ignore the features either.

I was among the very first to use Recatch when it launched, and I canceled not long after.
That's because the Korean scheduling tool Doeneun Sigan let you use everything Recatch offered at the time for far less.

Same features at a lower price; you can't help but make the rational choice.

Then a few years went by, and when I happened to start using Recatch again, it had changed a lot, and for the better, more than I expected.

1. Beyond the lead router, you have a lot of freedom in setting where inbound leads get sent.
2. You can split lead stages however you like, and setup is very easy.
3. Writing up and organizing meeting notes for each deal is simple.

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Beyond that, I've been trying to gradually use features like dashboards and playbooks lately.

Aside from a few parts, the UX is intuitive enough that I can do most of the setup without looking at the guide, so there's been no trouble.

And above all, I like that entering content and moving deal cards feels snappy, with no lag.

I'm sensitive to lag, so even Notion sometimes makes me motion-sick, and I could feel how much effort the Recatch designers and front-end developers put in.

My current feeling: if the price stays the same, I'd keep using it even if it never got another update.
It also feels like it's going to be harder and harder to live without~

My own tips for getting the most out of Recatch

Belatedly: Recatch's core feature is that when a lead is generated, it connects straight to a video meeting or follow-up action.
Normally you'd need a back-and-forth trading two or three time slots to set up a meeting, and they solved that with a tool.

What's really disappointing here is that many people I've met, after they start using Recatch, 'often don't follow up before the meeting.'

We must not forget that a meeting time the customer picked is 'something that can disappear at any moment' if we don't do any other follow-up.

In other words, Recatch buys you a little time; it doesn't eliminate the work.
No matter how well you set up the workflow, in the end, sales is done by people.

Follow-up strategy when an inbound lead comes in through Recatch

1. If possible, call within 10 minutes and discover more information beyond what's in the form.
2. If it's a high-priority customer, propose, 'how about our sales team visiting you at that time instead?' They've already set the time aside, so they'll very likely say yes.
3. After the meeting, move the deal card to the appropriate stage to minimize the cases where follow-up slips.

Of course, I recently had 10 meetings booked at once after a webinar, and couldn't do much advance follow-up, or was doing other things at that time. Still, I think this is the mindset to have.

In fact, when I did no follow-up at all for a week on a meeting booked through Recatch, the other person forgot about the appointment.
Recatch itself has a reminder feature, but that alone isn't enough. They made the appointment with me, not with Recatch, so of course I need to reach out myself.

Sometimes simple execution beats strategy and system design.

In the end, the reason I keep using Recatch is that it turned me into 'someone who uses a CRM.'
Salesforce, with all its features but lag from the login screen on, I only need to use once a week, when I organize and report the data I've gathered through Recatch.

Recently, I saw a deal close with someone I followed up with quickly via Recatch: they signed the contract after just one video meeting and two emails.

If Recatch had been a tool that made me put things off, that probably wouldn't have happened.

I hope Recatch keeps growing as a CRM you reach for every day.

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Appendix: features I wish Recatch had

These two are features I personally wished were stronger while actually using Recatch.

1. Add-ons that help with discovery
   1. Right now, an AI agent tracks down information about incoming leads and reports it for you.
   2. But publicly available information is often simply wrong, so I'd like it to make discovery easier for a human to do.
   3. For example, showing a few guides in the deal card's 'Memo' tab on what's worth finding out in the meeting would make for a more productive hour.
   4. Here, I personally like to ask about things like 'how and why they learned about us and came to us', 'decision criteria', and 'the ideal solution'.
2. Japanese language support for the booking page
   1. This year we started serving Korea, the US, and Japan.
   2. Recatch currently supports Korean/English based on Chrome's system language, but I'm not sure whether it supports Japanese.
   3. If possible, I'd like the multilingual setup options to be strengthened, the same as for English.