You know those pretty cakes that are actually cardboard inside? Picture that.
Updated March 10, 2020
You know those pretty cakes that are actually cardboard inside? Picture that.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
We have used SharpSpring for our company in three capacities: as a CRM (customer relations management), a social media scheduling/management platform, and briefly for its sales pipeline features. My experience is primarily in the social and CRM capacity. As a CRM, we were simply looking for a decent address book where we could keep track of our clients' and potential clients' contact information in a place our whole team could organize and access. As a social media management platform, we were looking to schedule posts for roughly 25 individual clients' businesses on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We were using it to replace Sendible, which we were disappointed with because of glitches and poor customer support.
- Quick response time when you submit a support ticket.
- Attractive interface.
- Good customer communication—always polite and friendly.
- Their CRM is very clunky. It does not allow a contact to exist without an email address, but oftentimes we have two contacts within a business who use the same business email address. In order to have both of their names and phone numbers available, we're stuck putting fake@fakeemail.com (or a similar false address) as their email. Their custom field options are unwieldy and you have to have a TON of them because they don't have very many slots for information we'd like to keep.
- Their social media management platform is aggravating if you have more than about three profiles connected. The content calendar cannot be sorted other than by channel (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) so everything is dumped together. I've frequently had posts and profiles disappear without explanation. The usual response seems to be, "Well, it's working NOW." That doesn't really help us when we've lost a lot of content our clients pay us for.
- Their support is fast, but frequently not helpful. Like, they say "20 minutes response time!" or something, but the email you get within twenty minutes is often an irrelevant or nit-picky question. It's filler. They don't read your issue thoroughly, send back an email with a random question, and check off their 'fast response time,' box. The real answers are frequently long in coming, full of "our development team is working on this," and ending with yet another complicated and sometimes impossible workaround.
- Positive impact: It more-or-less does its job and has not completely broken while we've looked for another software.
- Negative impact: It has sucked up dozens of hours of billable time both through its technical glitches that cause information to disappear and its unwieldy workarounds for features that should be simple.
- It cut down our CRM and social costs significantly, most likely 40% or more.
Sendible: SharpSpring was cheaper, had other features we were planning to use (and have since abandoned), and looked to be less glitchy than Sendible, which was not intuitive, had poor support, and lost posts occasionally. We have come to find out that SharpSpring lacks many useful features (filtering the calendar, shortening links, reliably sharing Youtube links, LinkedIn photo posting, Facebook direct photo upload, etc.). We've also had much difficulty in getting it to reliably post anything. Profiles have disappeared, posts have disappeared, and SharpSpring's suggestion was to create 25 more Facebook profiles to manage our business pages. Um, what? We don't even have that many people on our team! HubSpot: We were basically using this as an address book. We were hoping to have a cleaner, simpler interface with SharpSpring that would enable our whole team easy access to client contact information. We also hoped to utilize their pipeline for sales. Turns out, the sales features are clunky and lack ways to add information we need and the contacts feature makes it extremely difficult to save contacts without email addresses, save multiple business locations, and many other fields that would be handy to not have to create from scratch.