The Clarify Manifesto: A new generation of CRM

Underneath all the tooling, processes, best practices, and thought leadership of the last 25 years of CRM tech lies one core, human mission: To get better at building lasting relationships.

After all, people buy products and learn skills not from software, but from other people. The mediums may have changed from in-office pitches to digital ads and demos, but the spirit remains. The challenge of the modern age is to cut through all the noise and help software get out of the way of authentic, person-to-person connection.

We’re here to take you on a journey from the relationship management of the past to the relationship fostering of the future.

Below, we’ll take you through the three epochs CRM evolution that have led us to creating Clarify and the core beliefs that guide our work:

1. CRM of the past: The age of the simple rolodex
2. CRM of the present: Why it’s time to reimagine relationship management
3. CRM of the future: The core tenets guiding our work to build a truly modern CRM

Let’s connect and make something awesome.

Part 01: Past‍

The Simple Rolodex

Customer Relationship Management tools as we conventionally know them have been around for nearly 25 years, but the need for a record system to manage relationships with customers and contacts goes back even further.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s Farley File system stands out as one of the earliest examples in the 1930s and 40s and helped him and his team keep track of important information about folks Roosevelt knew personally and professionally.

As we moved into the 1970s, companies began caring more about customer satisfaction and scaling sales motions. The tools of the time, however, limited them to basic spreadsheets until the release of the first digital rolodex, ACT!, in the mid 80s.

Since that time, a lot has changed. The internet has become more powerful, faster, and more expansive. iPhones have revolutionized what it means to be reachable (and ever online). Global events like COVID have disrupted how we work, socialize, and connect with each other.

But, despite all this technological innovation, traditional CRMs still keep track of important details about our customers and users in much the same way as they did in the 1980s.

We spend hours–often manually–inputting and updating contacts, accounts, opportunities, notes, and structures data tables to keep tabs on new people, companies, and deals.

This generation of rolodex may have graduated from a spot on your physical desk (or in a drawer) to a hard drive in your desktop computer, but it still requires input and effort and energy.

In the business days of old, you had to manually update your physical rolodex. In the digital age days of the recent past, you still have to input energy in this system to extract value. After all, inanimate objects and programs couldn’t perform actions.

To be fair to the semi-modern rolodex that is the CRM, this was the value prop of much software for the 2010s. You put in time, energy and resources, and you’ll get out value at a greater scale than before. You still see complicated systems and tools today promise basically the same thing.

But the modern age demands more impact with less work, and technology has begun to evolve to deliver on this thanks to the waves of cloud, mobile and AI innovation. You shouldn’t have to put in endless time and energy and resources into a system that gives value.

Your digital rolodex can and should update itself to help you take action that drives meaningful growth for your business.

Part 02: Present ‍

Why Now?

Simply put, people are tired of the status quo (Salesforce), which has failed to deliver the promise of a rolodex that gives you more than you put into it. Across 200 interviews with sales and revenue operators, we’ve consistently heard complaints about Salesforce: “It’s so bad.” “My instance sucks.” “It’s so hard to use.” “It’s so slow.”

Despite this obvious and loud frustration, no one has succeeded in building a true, modern competitor to Salesforce. This is largely because of the power of the ecosystem Salesforce has built with apps and partners, some degree of flexibility within the platform to address a wide range of use cases, and historic data lock in.

So, what’s different about this moment in time?

Salesforce has built a remarkable $30B business. Its technology is extremely versatile and millions of people rely on it to do their jobs. But with massive growth in the last decade has come bloat, friction, and user frustration.

Unfortunately, Salesforce has pushed all innovation to address these issues to the marketplace. Features that should exist in your CRM now require you to buy another tool to access. And, as SFDC has squeezed growth out of more and more quarters by increasing prices, resentment and price fatigue have reached a breaking point among users.

Many users rightfully feel Salesforce has strayed from their original company promise of driving every decision through their focus on customers. As one GTM leader put it in an early discovery interview with us: "Salesforce is treating their customer base like an annuity and has lost focus on being the customer company."

People are looking for alternatives because price far exceeds value and experience.

The biggest alternative folks have turned to has been HubSpot, a fierce, $3B competitor for sure, but a mile wide and an inch deep. This isn’t meant as a criticism as much as an observation of the inevitable issue HubSpot has run into as they’ve built more and more into the product to solve as many customer pain points across the org as possible. This stems from their core thesis: If you solved all of a customer's problems in one spot–even if you didn’t do it quite as well as a best in class vendor solving each individual problem–the ease of setup, use, and consolidation would make it worth it.

However, like SFDC, HubSpot was founded nearly two decades ago (2006) within a different technological context and this has meaningfully impacted how the product feels today. To many users, it can feel like features and workflows were built in silos, disjointed from one another and the use cases they support.

Example: In Hubspot you have to define internal AND external names for contact attributes. Why? Until recently, you couldn’t pass event attributes into events that would be used by their email marketing suite. Why?

It’s easy to point fingers at legacy companies and ascribe frustrations to deliberate product and feature oversight. But the reality, as fans of Clayton M. Christensen know, is that innovation becomes harder and harder to tap into as products become more established and the teams building them get further from one another.

In recent years, some new vendors have appeared in the CRM space (see: Cloze, Copper, Pipedrive etc.). However, while well-intentioned, these options are essentially a copy of the old school CRM, made faster and less annoying to use.

There has been no substantial innovation on top of, inside of, or around the CRM. Without a meaningful differentiation from the CRM styles of old, there just isn’t enough to overcome switching costs from and market pull to de facto leaders. Salesforce has, unfortunately, taken up the mantle as the tool no one ever got fired for using (sorry, IBM).

This isn’t to say SFDC or Hubspot–or any of the tools out there–weren’t good tools or offerings in the market initially. But, as they’ve rapidly layered on more and more features to support increasingly complicated use cases, these de facto choices have left many revenue professionals propping up an unstable, fire-prone house of cards.

TL;DR: More features > more problems > more headache.

Today, many core workflows within GTM (and RevOps specifically) are hamstrung with significant fragmentation and inefficiency. Work to maintain them feels scattered. Tell us if any of these issues sound familiar:

• Having to spend hours navigating challenging backfills efforts thanks to failed Zapier workflows.
• Drowning in debugging hell as you try to isolate a source of an issue when Hubspot and Salesforce are set up in a bi-directional sync, each with different inputs and outputs.
• Dealing with missing key attributes after a consultant accidentally deleted them.

All this to say, the de facto choice is no longer “good enough” in the face of the modern, AI-native age and the challenges that have come with it. Too often, increased total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintenance costs leave revenue professionals holding an expensive tab.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks in part to the rise of the modern data stack (ETL, warehouses, iPaaS), we can rethink how CRMs can serve modern revenue teams.

Just because something is the de facto choice doesn’t mean it’s the best one. While modern teams have demonstrated a remarkable ability to do a lot within constraints, these brittle and overcomplicated limitations have meaningful impacts on not just your company, but your customers, too.

And, when your CRM fails to help you build meaningful relationships, your customers won’t blame your system. They’ll blame you for not meeting them where they are.

Part 03: Future ‍

This is the Way

At Clarify, we believe rich context–a blend of the informational and personal data–is what truly defines relationships.

This data is the lifeblood of modern organizations. It guides all teams from sales to marketing to product to operations to success.

What questions do these teams spend most of their time trying to solve?

• How do we find new leads?
• How do we connect with prospects?
• How do we host meetings and track the context from those meetings?
• How do we keep track of our follow ups?
• How do we remember to connect with people (no matter where our team is based)?
• How do we share context amongst our colleagues?

Collecting customer data has historically taken up a ton of time and energy, largely because most of this information lives outside your existing CRM. Uncovering it and making use of it to create true customer 360s for your GTM teams is a heavy lift and that hinges on how well it was captured and structured.

Imagine if your CRM could act as a digital rolodex with context about your email, your calendar, your texts, and your phone calls and could sort through all the chaos to align both structured data and unstructured data in a way that was actually useful.

Imagine if your CRM acted as an extension of your brain and teammates, clueing in to the rich tapestry of information that guides actual relationship building. Not just where a person works, but how they work, what they love to do, what relationships matter most to them, and what your shared interests are. ‍

Imagine if your CRM could use this context to take action for you, and support you in the moments where it knows you are uniquely positioned to drive the next step.

This is the vision of the modern, AI-native CRM that we’re building at Clarify. One that can act as an augmented brain to help you easily find, connect, and nurture relationships with the people who matter most to your business, whether that’s virtually, asynchronously, or in person.

You shouldn’t have to pay with your time, energy, and sanity to get value out of your customer platform. Your CRM should automate and take away the mundane work of capturing context from your systems and make it effortless to understand people, build relationships with them, take complex sequences of sales steps and simplify them in order to ultimately generate revenue more quickly and easily for your business.

We are building this next generation CRM, and we’re crafting it around three key tenets:

1. Your CRM should be modern, fast, collaborative and a joy to use.
2. Your CRM should be flexible, event-driven and customizable to your workflows and data model to grow with your business.
3. Your CRM should be intelligent and take work off your plate to help you learn and execute better and faster.

Your CRM should be modern

A modern CRM should, first and foremost, not suck to use.

What does this mean? It should literally spark joy with how fast, and snappy it feels, and save founders and revenue team members time, prevent frustration, and help you build meaningful relationships.

We often hear people lament having to use Salesforce not because it's a bad product, but because the friction and slow interface makes it frustrating to use. It requires immense knowledge, shadow ops, time and attention to build something that delivers value and doesn’t drown you in tech debt down the line. Even in the best of cases you still end up building technical debt that slows down your organization.

There’s a better way, and we’re dedicated to building it. Your CRM should be a force multiplier working to serve you, not a burden working against you.

Our first design rule is to build what makes sense. You won’t find yourself clicking through multiple buttons to perform simple actions.

Instead, you’ll find an intuitive product with embedded automations and smart shortcuts to save you time and keep you in the flow of your work. Yes, we have ⌘K, plus intelligence baked into your UI so you can use NLP to craft all the views and filters you need.

We’re building a CRM that people love to love. The modern CRM can and should feel natural, efficient, and enjoyable to use.

Your CRM should be flexible

A modern CRM should give you all the flexibility you need to map your business context and create a unified, cross-functional view of your data.

HubSpot and Salesforce have custom objects, but as many folks already know, setting them up saps a ton of your time and energy. If you don’t take that battle on, you’re left locked into default objects and configurations that might suit you at 100 customers, but will likely break as you scale. Simply put, it’s just more difficult than it needs to be.

We're creating a flexible product that lets you make and manage custom objects with custom properties and create nested objects and linked relationships so you can tailor your CRM to fit your exact needs.

Imagine you need to sort some leads in a different way while keeping their connections. Our schema gives you space for semantic information describing what your objects are, how they're used, and how it links and converts.

Most high-performance B2B teams today layer marketing data on top of their relationship data (a CDP-CRM sandwich, if you will). But complexity of management and costs deter operators from unifying the two into a more complete revenue platform. It shouldn’t be this way. When you unite all your marketing data with your relationship data within your CRM, you can bring your GTM teams together around the same revenue goal with the same context on what drives the pipeline. No more fighting over MQL and SQL definitions, wasted budget on ill-targeted marketing campaigns, or endless meetings to sync and re-sync between marketing and sales teams. And no more crying over figuring out how to transform user-event data into contact-company object data from two different systems that were developed two decades apart.

This is why we’re building Clarify, a CRM that supports event data, tracked user objects with custom attributes, page views, and custom events with properties and seamlessly connects to your CDP, analytics providers, and warehouse to give you all the data you need, where you need it.

And, this should all be delightful for developers to build on top of. We're investing heavily in a developer platform and experience that gives engineers what they need, including the ability to write in modern programming languages like Python and Javascript, great uptime, and APIs that work.

You shouldn't have to pay overpriced agencies and wrestle with complex coding requirements to get the most out of your CRM.

Your CRM should be intelligent

The modern CRM should act as an extension of you and use the context of the work you’re already doing to suggest and take the next best action.

Most of the hype around AI today comes from converting unstructured data into structured data and building AI bots.

AI-native CRMs could be so much more. Sure, it can send some emails for you, but it can also automatically create, suggest, and close relevant tasks based on call recordings, action items, your location, and even your Slack messages. Think of your CRM less as an error-prone email assistant and more as your trusted SDR.

For the seller, this looks like a CRM that can take all the context from conversations and interactions with people online and in real life–from voice memos to text messages to multimedia messages to photos–and digest that into the next best action.

With Clarify, this vision is reality. Our platform hooks into your Google Workspace, pulling emails and calendar records to take the next best action.

We know the real potential of an AI-native CRM lies in how your data is deployed. With Clarify, it's not just about AI agents doing something for you, but about you doing things faster and more easily through automation, without having to think about it.

The ideal modern CRM uses AI to transition from a pull-based system (where you have to go perform every action to get value) to a push-based system (where the CRM continuously provides value with basically no clicks by you).

When you complete a call, the CRM should know the follow ups and draft the email for you. When you send an email that has a task linked to it, it should close it for you. When you’re overwhelmed with leads and follow ups, the CRM should help you prioritize what’s most important each day and not just mercilessly throw you a pile of reminders.

These are just a few of the many examples where a next generation CRM delivers value to you without demanding nearly as much time and attention as legacy providers.

In short: The modern CRM should act as an extension of your brain.

The modern CRM is a relationship tool, not just a sales tool. It needs to act as a natural extension of your team and not just collect user information, but make it easy to access, understand, and act on that information across sales, marketing, success, and support right out of the box.

You shouldn’t have to wrestle a CRM poorly-suited to your needs just because it’s always been done that way. And embracing a better solution shouldn’t feel like a gamble on lofty promises.

You deserve a CRM that helps you get your job done, with all the context needed to save you time, develop more meaningful relationships with users, and grow your revenue.

If you’d like to join us on this journey, join our waitlist list below. No spam or snake oil, we promise.