I value how Upsales rolls CRM, sales activity tracking and marketing automation into a single, cohesive platform that fits our B2B cybersecurity sales cycle really well. I’m Gruenewald Gudgel, Security Operations & Admin Coordinator at Orange County Cyber Defense Group in California. My day-to-day work includes managing our security tool stack, running internal audits, vetting new SaaS platforms, and helping our sales and technical teams get set up on tools smoothly. Before we started using Upsales, prospect and client data was spread all over the place. Our sales team logged follow-ups in one place, sent outreach from another, and stored security assessment notes in separate cloud folders. It was slow to pull up full context before a discovery call with an IT manager, and we wasted a lot of time copying notes between systems after scoping calls and proposal reviews.
What clicks for me is how easy it is to build custom contact records and automated outreach flows without heavy technical lift. I was able to create segmented lists for IT decision-makers, MSP partners, and existing clients, and add custom fields to track things like vulnerability scan status, quote expiry dates, and compliance audit timelines. A few months back, I built a nurture sequence for leads who reach out about our penetration testing and security assessment services. After someone submits an inquiry, they automatically get our service overview packet, a gentle check-in three business days later, and unresponsive leads get flagged so one of our sales engineers can step in for direct outreach. I put the whole workflow together myself, no outside developer support needed — that flexibility matters when our pipeline moves fast and we can’t afford delays around proposal deadlines.
I also like that every email open, link click, and campaign interaction lives right on the contact timeline. If one of our engineers jumps onto a call, they can quickly see what resources the prospect has already reviewed, so they don’t waste time repeating information. The reporting views are straightforward to pull during our weekly pipeline meetings, letting us see which outreach pieces are driving consultation requests and which ones need reworking.
As a lean cybersecurity team of 11–50 people selling managed security and compliance services, Upsales gives us a unified hub to manage leads and client relationships. It stays focused on B2B sales workflows and doesn’t pile on unnecessary consumer-facing marketing tools that would add no real value to our security service sales process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My biggest pain point is that Upsales’ journey builder and automation logic are built around generic B2B sales stages, and they do not adapt well to the specialized milestones of cybersecurity service scoping. Our sales cycles track granular events: discovery call wrap-up, statement of work draft status, penetration testing kickoff dates, evidence deliverable deadlines, and compliance report review timelines. Although I can create custom fields to record these details, stacking layered conditional rules quickly grows tangled and hard to govern. A few weeks ago, I attempted to build a workflow to streamline our scoping outreach. It was meant to send tailored follow-up materials right after a discovery call, pause all automated messages once an SOW went out for signature, and kick off a re-engagement track if the prospect opted out before reserving a testing window. Unfortunately, the nested logic kept triggering incorrectly, and we mistakenly delivered a quote reminder to an organization that had already elected to put their security project on hold. That error created an awkward moment with the prospect and required extra outreach from our sales engineer to clarify. Since then, every new automation we build goes through several rounds of manual testing and peer validation before activation. This extra review burden piles on administrative work when our team is already occupied with security monitoring, internal audits, and active client scoping.
Document management is another notable shortcoming for our workflows. We routinely exchange large scoping packets, vulnerability testing methodology documents, sample compliance reports, and fully executed SOWs with prospects and clients. Upsales’ native file storage has tight capacity limits, and it lacks purpose-built version control to separate draft scoping materials from finalized, approved deliverables. There is no straightforward way to tag uploaded files with actionable status labels such as “awaiting client signature” or “ready for test execution.” Before kickoff meetings or formal assessment starts, if our engineers need to retrieve the official signed SOW package, I have to leave Upsales and navigate our **SharePoint** repository to locate the correct executed version. This constant context switching eats into valuable time, especially when we are working against tight testing windows and compliance review deadlines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
