The problem with CRMs: built for deals, not for people

Ask any salesperson what they think of their CRM. The answer is almost always the same: a necessary evil. A system that has to be filled in because management needs reporting. Not because it helps the salesperson.

It's not that CRMs are badly built. Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive — these are technically impressive products. They visualise pipelines, calculate forecasts, automate workflows. They're perfect. For companies.

But not for the people who are supposed to use them.

A typical CRM captures: company name, contact, deal value, pipeline stage, last touch, next step. Everything the company needs to know about the customer.

What it doesn't capture: that your contact is going through a tough time. That over lunch last time he told you he's thinking about a job change. That his wife is expecting a child. That he actually prefers coffee to wine.

These are the things that build relationships. And no CRM in the world has a field for them.

The problem isn't that salespeople don't maintain their CRM. The problem is that the CRM stores the wrong things.

In theory you could use a free-text notes field. But who actually does? Who writes "daughter just finished high school, fan of Werder Bremen, considering selling the house" into a Salesforce text field? It feels wrong. And even if you do — who reads it before the next meeting?

The result: the most important information lives only in the salesperson's head. And there it has a shelf-life problem. With 50 customers, maybe. With 100, it gets tight. With 200, it's impossible.

So what always happens, happens: you walk into the meeting hoping you'll remember what was discussed last time. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, there's that brief moment of awkwardness when the customer realises they're interchangeable.

But the opposite is also true: when you remember, when you ask, when you show that the last conversation didn't just disappear — something arises that no CRM feature can replace. Trust.

The gap is obvious: between what the company wants to know about the customer and what the human in front of the customer needs to know, there's a canyon.

CRMs serve one side. The other side — the personal, human, actually decisive side — has been served by no one.

Until now.