How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Multiple CRMs

I’ve been involved with nearly a dozen B2C companies over the past decade as an advisor, leader, or candidate. All of them were using more than one CRM to talk to customers. The average is actually closer to 3, even at seed-stage companies!

Imagine having 3 mission-critical employees who handle all messaging to and from customers but never talk to each other. Each of them believes they are your only employee, or believes they run the entirety of customer engagement.

Worse yet, some of these don’t even talk to your core application. Others can only be accessed from deep inside your core application by engineers (I’m looking at you, Sendgrid transactional emails! I made that same mistake early on in my career).

This is effectively what you are doing if you are using 3 SaaS CRM tools for different channels or lifecycle stages – and not building effective infrastructure to share data in real-time with these tools.

🛣 How Did We Get Here?

This is likely rooted in a belief that CRM is a tactic or tool rather than a strategy. Despite every company claiming to be “Customer obsessed”, and despite the fact that it’s right there in the acronym: Customer Relationship Management.

Each department in a company has a different CRM requirement, and it’s often driven by a short-term reactive need. So, Marketing wants an email campaign tool. Operations wants a helpdesk ticketing tool. Product wants a mobile push notification tool. Sales wants a prospecting tool. And, of course, everyone wants a chatbot.

👾 Why Is This a Problem?

There are hundreds of good CRM vendors, and it’s traditionally been faster to integrate vertical tools than align on one horizontal multi-channel tool across departments. But CRMs only see the data you give them, and thus operate blind on key aspects of customer data outside of their control. Moreover, you could be overpaying for multiple tools – especially if you have teams that need to go into more than one tool to handle a customer workflow.

In an era of growth at all costs, the inefficiencies from vendor overspend and lack of a single customer view driving channel data have been less of a pain point -- provided KPIs like top line revenue and retention were being hit. But now, companies are being asked to increase top-line conversion and retention rates while lowering bottom-line cost to serve and cost to implement.

🧠 So What is the Solution?

Up until now, there were very expensive options, both of which I've done:

1. Pick one CRM to rule them all and put in the effort to migrate everything over
2. Build a data platform that pipes data into and out of CRMs, BI tools, and application stacks.

In the era of AI and more sophisticated SaaS data platforms, the effort to do number 2 should become a commodity. This is where the next generation Customer Data Platform comes in, and why this will be a key part of the post-AI product stack going forward.