The tale of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad CRM

You’ve probably had your boss tell you “if it’s not in Salesforce it doesn’t exist” more times than you can count. That your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform can only help you if you put the time, sweat, and data into it religiously. What can we tell you? Old beliefs die hard.

Here’s what we know: There needs to be a better way to get data in your CRM that doesn’t rely on hours wasted on manual tasks and getting chased down to update every single field every single time.

To be fair, there’s a good reason your bosses–and the community at large–have held onto the belief that a good CRM is a high-maintenance one. Legacy CRMs have necessitated a fanatic dedication to data entry to deliver value, with the avg. seller spending nearly 20% of their time just keeping it up to date.

But just because a story held wisdom before, doesn’t mean we should treat it as law forever. And just because your CRM requires rich context on your customers to deliver value, doesn’t mean you should be the one trudging uphill both ways in the snow to enter it.

CRMs have been on the scene for more than two decades, and they still feel like they’re stuck in the past. They’ve failed to deliver on the promise of streamlined sales work, instead forcing teams into wasting time on manual work. And, at the end of the day, they still aren’t able to give you a truly unified, 360-degree view of your customer, no matter how much time you spend updating them.

We recently published our CRM manifesto to talk about what a truly modern CRM should look like–modern, flexible, and intelligent–and how we’re building it at Clarify. But to put that topic into perspective, we also need to spend some time talking about why there’s a need for a CRM reinvention in the first place.

Without further ado, here’s the tale of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad CRM and how it came to be.

History of the CRM

To understand where we are, let's look at where we've been. The concept of CRM dates back to the 1980s with digital rolodexes like ACT!, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that CRM software as we know it today began to take shape.

The evolution of CRM systems closely mirrored the growth of the internet. As businesses moved online, CRMs shifted from on-premise solutions to cloud-based platforms. This transition, led by companies like Salesforce, revolutionized how businesses could access and manage customer data.

In the early 2000s, CRMs began to expand their capabilities–incorporating features like email marketing, lead scoring, and basic analytics–and evolved into online solutions you could access from anywhere in the modern world. This period was all about figuring out how to do B2B sales at a foundational level.

As we moved into the mid-2010s, most companies had developed a standard playbook for how to run a B2B business with the CRM as its gravitational center. This era demonstrated our ability to make B2B sales a repeatable, scalable operation with the CRM as the centerpiece and marketing as the engine.

The OG diagram for the stack Mike Molinet and I built at Branch in 2015 ft. the CRM as our center of gravity, an outbounding tool, an email marketing tool, an enrichment tool, and a deduplication tool. See my post with Kyle Poyar for more.

‍I like this about these two early periods of the CRM’s evolution like the pre- and post- invention era of the modern car. Early days were all about figuring out what parts you needed and how to get the car to run, but you still had to rely on other forms of transport. Once we figured that out, the focus shifted to building as many cars as possible as quickly as we could. It’s hard to imagine a world before it.

Today, AI and machine learning could change how our metaphorical cars look all together to help us imagine a revamp of the CRM that doesn’t look, feel, or operate the it’s predecessors. However, despite all the rapid progress made to sales technology in the years leading up to today’s AI-driven age, traditional CRM vendors haven’t managed to fully deliver on their promises.

But we’ll get into why, and where, legacy CRMs fall short. First, we want to give some credit where credit is due.

What previous CRMs did well

Simply put, early CRMs were game-changers. They centralized customer data, making it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. This was a massive leap forward from the days of physical rolodexes and siloed databases.

These systems excelled at providing a single source of truth for customer data. For the first time, businesses had a centralized repo for all customer interactions, eliminating the need to juggle multiple spreadsheets or databases. This centralization helped us track sales pipelines better than ever and visualize the process of moving deals from lead to close.

However, the definition of a CRM or system of record for customer relationships has varied wildly over the last few decades.

Take Google Sheets, for example. Originally developed as a web-based alternative to traditional spreadsheet software, it gained popularity early on because it offered free, real-time collaboration features, and easy integration with other Google services. While it wasn’t designed as a CRM, it was collaborative and accessible enough and offered acceptable enough analysis features for basic customer relationship management tasks. Plus, it was easy for multiple team members to access it through add-ons, especially on small teams.

Let’s look at one of the more early examples of the CRM from the 20th century: Siebel CRM. It was originally developed by Siebel Systems in 1993 and created to address the growing need for sales automation. It grew to capture 45% of the market share by 2002 thanks to a wide feature set that included sales automation, marketing and customer service applications, and its ability to handle complex, enterprise-level CRM use cases. It was particularly well suited for large organizations that needed robust customer data management, sales tracking, and mature customer service capabilities because it offered a level of specialization and scalability that general-purpose tools like spreadsheets couldn't match. While it’s no longer a flagship product, Oracle recently extended support for the platform to 2035.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t give credit to the 10,000-pound gorilla that is Salesforce. Marc Benioff founded the company in 1999 around his vision of simplifying software usage through cloud-based CRM and grew that idea into a $30-billion enterprise used by millions of people. However, as we talked about in our manifesto, this rapid growth led to increased complexity, user frustration, and a shift away from their initial customer-centric focus. It also ushered in a strategy of pushing innovation to third-party developers and increasing prices, which created a fragmented user experience and growing resentment in the community, with the worst of the pushback forming since 2010. Many users now feel Salesforce's value prop no longer justifies its cost, which presents both a challenge for Salesforce to reconnect with its original mission and an opportunity for competitors to address the market's evolving demands.

Our fourth mile marker for historical institutional CRM success lies with HubSpot, of course. Founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot truly reimagined the marketing playbook with its inbound methodology, and later branched to the sales side with its free CRM in 2014. The big value add of the HubSpot CRM was how well it integrated with their existing Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs for a more unified workflow around customer relationship management, lead generation, and sales automation. Unlike Salesforce's complex and pricey platform, HubSpot's CRM still maintains a focus on user-friendliness and value with a range of features across basic contact management to advanced marketing automation at a more accessible price point for small to medium-sized businesses.

All of the above have truly helped revenue professionals and sales teams move the needle and address critical business needs. These tech advances also set the stage for more sophisticated customer relationship management.

The issues with current CRMs

Despite their early promise, today's CRMs feel like relics of a bygone era. The issues span tool limitations, workflow challenges, and cultural obstacles, but some of the most pressing problems lie in the realm of data modeling, analytics, and analysis capabilities.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these problem sets.

‍Problems and limits of legacy CRMs

‍And all this is to say nothing of the human and financial issues a badly-designed CRM often causes, including:

1. high customization costs
2. Inflexible processes and outdated methodologies
3. confusion from feature overload and poor context, and
4. siloed knowledge in disparate systems or the isolated minds of individual team members.

You deserve a CRM that, at the very least, gets out of your way and lets you do your job. At its best, you deserve a CRM that is just as much a relationship-building tool as it is a sales tool.

A better future: What is possible for CRMs

Imagine a CRM that not only stores data but understands it, providing actionable insights and automating routine tasks. This level of intelligent automation could free up sales reps to focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals. Think of your CRM not as a source of burden but an enthusiastic, competent SDR added to your team.

At Clarify, we're not just dreaming about this future—we're building it. We’re focused on solving the problems that have plagued the CRMs of old to give you a platform that acts as an extension of your brain and understands the rich context that defines real relationships.

Here’s how:

1. We offer flexible data structures out of the box: Unlike legacy CRMs with rigid schemas, we let you create and manage custom objects with custom properties, nested objects, and linked relationships easily so your CRM actually reflects your unique business context and scales with your needs.
2. We’re built to support event data: You can build a true, unified customer 360 with tracked user objects with custom attributes, page views, and custom events with properties.
3. We don't just store data, we understand and act on it: As an AI-native CRM with advanced analytics: Our platform incorporates advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities, providing actionable insights and automating routine tasks to help your team to focus on your most valuable assets: your relationships with customers.
4. We support real-time insights: With Clarify, you can perform complex analyses in real-time within the CRM itself. Our architecture is designed for speed and efficiency, so you can make immediate, data-driven decisions with confidence.
5. We eliminate data silos: We make a unified data view across teams possible by seamlessly integrating marketing, sales, and customer success data. Clarify acts as a CDP-CRM hybrid, bringing together event-based marketing data with relationship data for a complete view of your customer interactions.
6. We’re a joy–and breeze–to use: We’re dedicated to building what makes sense and helping you avoid the technical debt common in legacy systems. No more slow interfaces and shadow ops.
7. We're developer friendly ❤️: We've invested heavily in creating an easy-to-use developer platform. Engineers can write in modern programming languages like Python and JavaScript, enjoy reliable uptime, and work with comprehensive, well-documented APIs.

It's time to say goodbye to rigid data models, siloed information, and limited analytics. You and your team deserve a platform that acts as a force multiplier, not a burden tripping you up.

Ready to see what the future of CRM looks like? Join our waitlist and be among the first to experience Clarify. Together, we can build a better future for revenue teams and help you leverage your most valuable asset: your customer relationships.