Close brought simplicity back—and with it, my enjoyment of selling. Plus, switching back to Close was an immediate 10x ROI for us.”
As the founder of OutboundSync, Harris Kenny knew how to build a product to simplify outbound sales. There was only one problem: the more he scaled his tool, the more he found himself drifting from the simplicity that started it.
Kenny’s background had immersed him in the world of sales tech. Before launching OutboundSync as an integrated outbound sales tool uniting outbound with HubSpot and Salesforce, he helped companies build their own outbound engines through his agency.
Kenny had started out running systems like Close CRM. Close, in fact, had given his agency a fast, founder-friendly way to manage outbound sales, deals, and calls in one place. He enjoyed the simple, clean interface—and how much it worked.
However, as his agency expanded and he observed that many of his clients used HubSpot, the gravitational pull of scaled solutions proved impossible to resist.
“I started with Close,” said Kenny, “but as we had clients using HubSpot, it felt like it made more sense to be using the tool they were using. So I became a HubSpot Solutions partner.”
The move made sense to Kenny. Moving to HubSpot meant joining a massive ecosystem that his customers were familiar with. This made sense with his old business. But then his business changed.
As he built new workflows for his SaaS, complexity started to creep in. Multi-tool integrations with HubSpot proved daunting. Disconnected automations meant more manual work.
As it turned out, the systems he was building to support other teams were starting to slow his own.
It was enough to make him wonder if his growth actually felt like progress.
On the surface, Kenny was pleased. The foundation for scaling was there, but the practical use cases for automating his founder-led operation weren’t as idyllic as he’d imagined them.
“Founder-led” for Kenny meant he could even run much of his go-to-market motion himself; that’s how sophisticated automation can be at this stage of technology. But something was missing.
HubSpot, robust as it is, turned out not to be an ideal fit for Kenny’s founder-led motion. Yes, it made sense to use HubSpot when his business was a HubSpot agency.
Yet Kenny found it stacked on more manual complexity than he could handle. While that might work for a team, Kenny’s founder-led approach required business-friendly automations built for smaller teams.
HubSpot is not a one-size-fits-all solution, after all.
“It’s a massive platform and a complex data model,” said Kenny. Lots of pricing tiers, lots of integrations, lots of options. And that’s great. But what happens if you find yourself checking “yes” to all of these boxes? “As I shut down my agency and focused on scaling my SaaS, I was finding that we weren’t using the right-sized tools for our actual team.”
As Kenny worked within the HubSpot ecosystem, he found himself stuck in a “terrible middle ground.” Yes, HubSpot was fine, but it wasn’t working for his specific needs.
Even simple actions took too many clicks, and many outbound automations would break somewhere downstream. If Kenny were clicking 10 times to build a new deal workflow, he’d find it wouldn’t work.
Integrations didn’t help. If anything, they seemed to get in the way. Few were built with the level of care that he has put into building OutboundSync. One particularly frustrating issue with getting Slack to integrate with Salesforce proved to be the last straw.
“What pushed me over the edge was trying to set up the Slack / Salesforce connection,” said Kenny. “I spent an hour and I had made no progress.”
After all that frustration, Kenny returned to his founder-led approach. He needed simplicity. And in doing so, he remembered back to when his solutions seemed simplest.
“Close CRM,” Kenny said. “Of course. So I [went back and] set up a trial. And I just started putting stuff together.”
To Kenny, the reversion back to Close came from a thought experiment: what if he only had an hour of work to do each day?
What would it look like? How could he create the maximum output by doing the minimum things?
The answers led him back to Close.
Kenny had pictured himself taking a vacation and imagined what might happen if new potential deals were to come in. He realized that if OutboundSync won five deals while he was out, he couldn’t onboard them all within an hour. “So that’s what brought me back to Close.”
Other pieces of the stack started falling into place as well, such as the scheduling tool SavvyCal. He returned to his realization that less is more. With a simpler CRM in place, he could run a simpler data model.
Automating his outbound reach required fewer fields and fewer activities. As long as the data was in the system—as long as it was correct—the workflows began to work.
“What if less is more?” Kenny recalls asking himself. “What if I just pick a CRM that has a simpler data model, fewer fields, fewer activities, fewer properties? But if [the data] is in there, it’s right?”
The experiment began with a trial of Close CRM. Kenny immediately began assembling his stack. First on his checklist: trying it out with a test sales scenario to see if the new automations would work.
Not only did it work, but the inputs required to make the deal work were minimal. Kenny reported that he only needed three bits of information, and the workflow ran smoothly. His outbound sales become fun again. Moreover, he achieved a sense of control that he had never had with more complex systems.
With that simplicity came a side benefit: saving money. “I’m saving money as I switch to Close immediately,” reported Kenny. “And then I’m going to save money as my other subscriptions expire as well.”
Rather than relying on expensive plans to enable complex CRM workflows, the simple approach is proving to be the most effective one for his company at this stage. And cost-effectiveness is part of that.
“I am truly having fun doing this stuff at work again,” reported Kenny. “Which I haven’t experienced for a while. I’m in such a good mood [on sales] and I’m so happy to have a chat.”
Going back to the founder-led approach that made OutboundSync work in the first place has been reinvigorating. His original principles—lean, simple, hands-on—have returned. Kenny finds Close CRM’s features practical.
Perhaps even more important, he doesn’t have to do things like train people on an enormous, complicated interface. This makes onboarding less costly. It’s also fitting more neatly into his original question: what if he only had one hour of work per day to create the most outstanding results his business was capable of?
In addition to giving him more clarity, the cost savings have been fun to manage.
“Probably at the end of the day, I will reduce our tech stack spend by probably a thousand dollars a month,” Kenny said. “That’s an immediate 10x return on Close, even if we close no more deals, just from a cost perspective.”
HubSpot is a great tool full of robust features that teams can squeeze a lot of scale out of. But for Kenny’s approach, the return to Close was a breath of fresh air.
He’s boomeranged back to the original solution and found that the return to simplicity is what he needed. Its leaner fit works better for the founder-led team approach, reducing his costs and bringing fun back to the workplace.
Fewer clicks. Faster follow-up. All in Close.
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