Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM’s (formerly SharpSpring) is a powerful yet user-friendly marketing automation and CRM platform that caters to the needs of small to mid-sized businesses. As an all-in-one solution, it offers a solid set of features, including lead management, email marketing, social media management, and a built-in CRM at no extra cost.
Lead Gen & CRM’s key strength lies in its intuitive interface, which makes it easy to create complex automation workflows without requiring extensive technical knowledge. The visual campaign builder allows marketers to design multi-step campaigns with ease, while the opportunity management and task tracking features enable sales teams to stay on top of their pipeline.
However, Lead Gen & CRM is not without its drawbacks. Some users have reported occasional glitches and slower performance compared to other platforms. Additionally, while the feature set is comprehensive, it may not be as advanced as some enterprise-level solutions. Despite these minor shortcomings, Lead Gen & CRM remains a solid choice for businesses seeking an integrated marketing automation tool with CRM features.
Lead Gen & CRM core capabilties
Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM marks a massive structural evolution for the software platform formerly known as SharpSpring. Following its acquisition by email marketing pioneer Constant Contact, the software dropped the legacy SharpSpring moniker to align completely with its parent company’s massive digital outreach ecosystem.
Lead Gen & CRM packs a powerful punch when it comes to its core CRM capabilities. At the heart of its CRM functionality is robust lead generation and management. The platform allows you to track, score, qualify, and convert leads, giving you a 360-degree view of your prospects' journey.
A standout feature is Lead Gen & CRM's ability to de-anonymize website visitors and track their behavior, enabling deep personalization. You can tailor experiences to each lead contextually based on their interests and actions.
The CRM also excels at email management, with tools to build custom emails and automate personalized outreach at scale. You can set up targeted campaigns triggered by specific lead behaviors or statuses.
For lead capture, Lead Gen & CRM provides flexible form and landing page builders. These allow you to craft custom assets that feed prospects' information directly into the CRM. Progressive profiling helps gradually build out lead profiles over time.
I'm impressed by how Lead Gen & CRM has seamlessly integrated core CRM functionality with its marketing automation capabilities. Having both in a single platform streamlines operations and aligns sales and marketing, which is great for tightly-knit startups.
However, some long-term users indicate that it may lack a few of the more advanced features you'd find in a standalone system. For many small or midsize companies, though, Lead Gen & CRM's CRM will be more than sufficient for their use case.
Overall, Lead Gen & CRM delivers on the CRM essentials — lead management, email outreach, and custom form capture — while surrounding them with strong marketing automation. This combination makes it a compelling central revenue platform for SMBs.
How easy is Lead Gen & CRM to use?
Lead Gen & CRM's user interface aims to simplify navigation and reduce the learning curve for new users. Key customization options allow the platform to adapt to various business needs and use cases.
I found Lead Gen & CRM's visual campaign builder to be very intuitive once you get oriented. However, for non-marketers or those new to marketing automation, the workflow may be a bit overwhelming at first. Lead Gen & CRM does provide an excellent knowledge base to help users get up to speed, though.
Lead Gen & CRM's onboarding is one of its standout features. You get paired with an Onboarding Specialist who guides you through training over your first 60 days. The process starts with goal-setting and expectation-setting calls. Then you move into the thick of it with platform setup, data and system integration, as well as instance configuration.
After that, Lead Gen & CRM offers a menu of 30-60 minute training sessions on key platform capabilities that can be mixed, matched, and ordered to your needs. Topics include the CRM, marketing campaigns, landing pages, forms, automation, analytics, and more.
So while the workflow UI might not be immediately intuitive for all, Lead Gen & CRM compensates with strong training and onboarding. With guidance from the onboarding team, most users seem to gain proficiency within the first couple of months.
A potential downside is the flip side of customization; it may take more time to configure the platform to your needs than a more standardized tool. But if you want that flexibility and are willing to invest some upfront effort, it pays off in the long run.
Overall, I give Lead Gen & CRM high marks for its user interface, training resources, and customization options to fit diverse business cases. With a bit of time to orient and personalized onboarding, new users can harness its power.
Lead Gen & CRM integrations
Lead Gen & CRM offers a robust set of integration options to connect it with other business applications and extend its functionality. The CRM integrates with a wide variety of popular apps out of the box through its App Marketplace. Here you can find connectors for marketing tools like Facebook Lead Ads, Unbounce, Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, and more.
I found the integration with Unbounce particularly useful, as it allows marketing leads captured on Unbounce landing pages to automatically sync into Lead Gen & CRM for follow-up. The Facebook Lead Ads integration is also handy for pulling in leads generated from social media campaigns.
For more custom integrations, Lead Gen & CRM supports popular automation platforms Zapier and Make (formerly Integromat). With these iPaaS (integration platform as a service) tools, you can connect Lead Gen & CRM to over 1000 other apps without needing to write any code. I was able to use Zapier to set up an integration that sends new leads from my website's contact form directly into Lead Gen & CRM, then creates tasks for a hypothetical sales team to reach out to.
Lead Gen & CRM also provides a full-featured REST API that allows developers to integrate the CRM with any other system. The API documentation is comprehensive, and the platform uses standard OAuth 2.0 authentication. Advanced users suggest that the API is relatively straightforward to work with when building a custom integration.
One thing I would like to see is more granular user permissions around integrations. Currently, any user can set up an integration, which could potentially lead to data being unintentionally exposed. It would be nice to have admin-level controls over what integrations and connected apps each user can access.
But in the end, Lead Gen & CRM's integration capabilities are quite strong. The combination of pre-built app connectors, iPaaS support, and a robust API means the platform can fit into most any tech stack. And based on my experience, the integrations are stable, and the data syncing between systems is reliable. Lead Gen & CRM has clearly put a lot of thought into making its CRM as extensible as possible.
How good is Lead Gen & CRM customer support?
Lead Gen & CRM provides a robust customer support experience for its CRM users. They offer a variety of channels to get help, including phone, email, and live chat support. Live chat is especially responsive and helpful for getting quick answers to questions.
The company also has a well-organized knowledge base with tutorials, training resources, and FAQs to help users self-serve and troubleshoot issues on their own. The articles are clear and include helpful screenshots. There's a handy search feature to find relevant content quickly.
However, Lead Gen & CRM could improve a few areas of its support. First, the live support channels are not 24/7 - you can generally only get real-time help during extended business hours. Off hours, you have to rely on their ticket system and wait for a response.
But, while many customers rave about the quality and friendliness of the support, some reviews mention that the first response time can occasionally be a bit slow, and complex issues may require some back and forth to fully resolve. Lead Gen & CRM doesn't publish official response time averages that I could find.
Lead Gen & CRM pricing and plans
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Starting Price (500 contacts) | $12/month | $33/month | $120/month |
Price at 1,000 Contacts | $35/month | $55/month | $160/month |
Price at 10,000 Contacts | $80/month | $110/month | $275/month |
Best for | Solopreneurs & basic list management | Growing small businesses needing automation | High-volume teams and advanced marketing |
Limitations | 1 user seat; single-step welcome automations; 10x contact email send limit | 3 user seats; multi-step behavioral workflows; A/B testing; 12x email send limit | Unlimited user seats; custom behavioral paths; revenue attribution; 24x email send limit |
Following its corporate acquisition and transition into Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM, the platform has fundamentally abandoned its old, prohibitively expensive entry pricing structure. Rather than forcing early-stage startups to commit to a massive $449 monthly baseline just to manage 1,000 contacts, the platform now operates on a sliding, feature-tiered scale that makes full-funnel marketing automation accessible to microscopic budgets.
The modern ecosystem is split into three core tracks: Lite, Standard, and Premium. The foundational Lite plan starts at just $12/month for up to 500 contacts, scaling up to $33/month at the 1,000-contact threshold. While highly economical, the Lite plan severely restricts collaborative teams, limiting access to a single user seat and locking out all advanced behavioral workflows in favor of simple, single-step welcome emails.
The Standard plan represents the optimal middle ground for mid-sized teams, starting at $35/month and adjusting to $55/month for 1,000 contacts. Upgrading to Standard unlocks up to 3 user seats, robust multi-step marketing automation trees, behavioral contact segmentation, and subject line A/B testing tools.
For corporate teams requiring deep telemetry, the Premium tier begins at $80/month ($110/month at 1,000 contacts), removing user seat caps entirely while unlocking custom visual automation paths, revenue attribution dashboards, and integrated SEO tools.
Buyers must keep an eye on their contact ceilings, however: crossing into a higher contact bracket mid-cycle triggers an automatic account upgrade, and exceeding your monthly tiered email delivery volume limits results in an overage fee of $0.002 per email. For massive databases scaling past 50,000 records or specialized white-label marketing setups, customized Agency and Enterprise quotes remain available upon request.
How we tested Lead Gen & CRM
At TechRadar Pro, our CRM testing methodology goes beyond vendor's advertised functionality. To properly evaluate Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM and its core promise of delivering a unified sales-and-marketing environment, our testing analysts deployed the software in a live production environment configured for mid-market business demands.
We conducted a visual automation stress test, carried out visitor de-anonymization tracking, and assessed the dynamic content performance. Support was also a key feature for the review, and because Constant Contact locks real-time help desks behind extended regional business hours rather than offering global 24/7 coverage, we systematically verified their customer support turnaround. That way you can trust our review wherever you're based.
Lead Gen & CRM review: Summary
Lead Gen & CRM is a solid, intuitive, and easy-to-use CRM solution that provides good value for small to mid-sized businesses and marketing agencies. The platform offers a robust set of features, including lead management, email marketing, social media management, and a built-in CRM at an affordable price point compared to some competitors.
However, Lead Gen & CRM is not without some shortcomings. While the core feature set is solid, it may fall short for companies with very advanced sales automation needs. Some users have also reported occasional performance issues and bugs.
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