Keap

The automation of all of the different Services needed to run a small business. CRM, phone, text in the app or desktop, email, scheduling, quotes, invoices, estorefront, Payment Gateway, Keap is all you need to run a local business.

The didn't have any pre configured solution for specific industry like contractors, handyman or brick and mortar stores, Doctors or Dentist, etc.

First I want to give credit where credit is due - Keap is an absolute monster in terms of features and the level of detail in which you can build automations and customer engagements. With well over a decade having started as Infusionsoft, there's plenty of complex structuring and intricate details that you have at your fingertips.

Keap also offers the necessary parts of a complete customer lifecycle management, like sales pipelines and fairly solid contact views, although not as detailed as the HubSpot CRM for example.

The onboarding experience was great and I worked with an expert who knew Keap inside out, and without it, the learning process would have been extremely steep I feel.

However, Keap has custom fields and forms that you can use to tag and tie data to customers with, which makes it very powerful and offers excellent customization features, something I find very valuable to meet our business needs, versus being boxed in, in a one-size-fits-all contact view.

While the strength of Keap is its richness in detail with which you can create various engagements and automations, it's also overwhelming in the beginning to wrap yourself around that part. They could do a better job of integrating their knowledgebase inside the app to give relevant sources of information.

Missing systems prompts and UI flaws.
There are some issues with the UI that are counter-productive, like the search field at the top of the dashboard only being limited to search for contacts, instead of the entire dashboard. Similarly, when you create a contact you have three options to tag them with; lead/client/other. If you don't mark the contact with any of these and click 'Save', you'll never find out that it's required to select one, no prompts. And they can't be edited, and you can't add additional options for reasons unknown.

The landing page and email builders are just outright bad.
With so many builders out on the market, and with it being such a central part of marketing, it's surprising that the builder is so immature. The focus has been on building out the marketing automation of Keap, and the builders are feeling the lack of love. We wanted to shift our need of having to use Instapage as part of our marketing stack, but with the builder being so darn bad, I may need to keep it, which for us means Keap is less value for money.

Email and landing page templates are sorely lacking.

No Ecommerce available for Max, only through the legacy version.