A new CRM

Many people including me work with CRMs daily. The problem is that it still feels like I am working for the CRM instead of the CRM working for me.

Since the launch of Salesforce the Layout of a CRM has not changed much:

1. Hubspot democratized the software and made it available to SMBs
2. New players, such as: Folk and Attio focused on making it faster, slicker, and more modern.
3. These new players themselves are getting competition from OpenSource players, such as Twenty

Note that this is a market expansion and not a (r)evolution. Salesforce is likely to prevail due to its size and trigger-friendly M&A strategy. The CRM is commoditized and incremental improvements will unlikely yield meaningful outcomes. ¹

Meanwhile, a plethora of tooling was built on top of the enterprise sales stack to re-introduce the needed agility and to undo the damage. On Instagram, Gen Z is joking about the mundane tasks an SDR, AE must perform instead of actually selling the product. ²

There are now plenty of enterprise solutions that help improve productivity (Scratchpad, People.ai, Clari) and we see these products are made available in the SMB space as well (eg. Unhaze).

None of this is revolutionary.

Since the AI productivity boom, customers understand that sales teams must not spend time on prospecting, call notes, and outreach texts:

None of these solutions that I have seen so far introduce a new way of working with a CRM. They all rely on existing UI//UX and standard workflows.

On the other hand, products like Motion show that employees like to adopt a new UI/UX if it radically improves their productivity. Instead of making the scheduling process easy, Motion plans out the whole day for a busy desk worker.

I envision the same shift for CRM tools. Instead of making the interaction more efficient with a CRM one should rebuild the software from the ground up.