Your CRM should be a serendipity factory

From little black books to PRMs

Once upon a time the primitive cave people of SaaS had this Promethean fire of an idea that we should have a way to manage our relationships with people we wanted to sell things to. We called these customer relationship management systems, or CRMs for short. (It's kind of funny because CRMs are mostly used for *prospect* relationship management. Why don't we call these things PRMs?)

CRMs were a cool idea because sales is hard, and often a long game, and it's important to have a way to keep track of all of the things we are doing to develop and build relationships with people. People in the olden days had a little black book and kept track of the people they met by leaving notes on business cards and flipping through them and sending nice birthday cards and personal notes.

Of course, along the way to late-stage capitalism, as CRMs developed, the soul of sales was scooped out and productized and the bucolic, halcyon notion of keeping track of relationships descended into a bastardized, transmogrified tool that in a best case scenario simply tracks outbound activities against a list of accounts and makes sure that contact information of target prospects is up to date and deduplicated.

What a first-principles CRM would track

Okay I am sensationalizing, but the point stands that if we look at many CRMs today, they lack many things that if we were to think about from first principles the answer to the question "how should we relate to our prospects?" we would probably design something quite different. Here are some examples of things I think we would want to keep track of:

1. All of the 1st degree connections of everyone in our business, mapped to all of the potential prospects for our company, to map potential warm intro paths.

2. Relatedly, a list of people who we were trying to convince to download their 1st degree connections, so we could map more potential warm intro paths.

3. A list of all of the events our prospects were planning to attend, so we could know where to bump into them.

4. Details on each prospect, including prior work history and alma maters, so we could map people in our network who maybe don't know them personally but could try to find someone who does.

5. Even more details on each prospect, including where they like to golf and their (likely) favorite sports team, so we could know where to bump into them or what sports outing to invite them to.

6. Even more details on each prospect, including things like their birthday and their address, so we could send them nice notes or even a gift.

7. Even more details on each prospect, like webinars their company held, marketing initiatives their company tried, highlights from podcasts they or their team recently ran.

8. Notifications on the detected comings and goings of your prospects.

Start with the account list

I humbly submit that if we were starting from first principles today about "how do we make the revenue line go up for our business", we would first think about how we build a social graph that lets us make genuine connections with our prospects long before we started to build up tooling for cold outbound. I think we should start making our CRMs a serendipity factory by enriching our contact database with fields that let us find ways to our prospects as quickly and effectively as possible.

Foundational to enriching your contacts for serendipity is of course a solid account list scored and segmented so nicely that you end up with an account list juicy enough that you want to know literally everything about everyone who works there. You need to know where to focus on your serendipity, and that starts with having a strong point of view on your favorite accounts. Without this, I guarantee that you will revert to the mean of building a CRM primed for cold outbound.

What the sales motion looks like

But imagine what happens once you've done the work to score your top X00 or X000 accounts and mapped them out with the data points above. You run entirely different motions. Your sales standup is "I'm planning to golf a round at [a golf course, I don't golf] because Billy Bob is going to be there", and "Sally Sue is going to speak at this conference in a month, I'm planning to reach out to her for some time and send her a pre-conference care package", and "Joe Joe went to Vanderbilt, just like our advisor Tom Tom, so I'm asking Tom Tom who he knows that knows Joe Joe", run programmatically with agents doing the work to find these data points and keep your CRM hydrated with manufactured serendipity for your sales team to jump on. Sounds like a fun sales motion to me, and a nice one to drop a newly onboarding AE into ("hey, here are 100 accounts, each one has 3-4 warm connection points we mapped out for you, and 10-15 potential connection points, and here are 3 events someone at that company is going to be at in the next 2 months"). This will shorten loops to reaching and selling to your prospects.

Agents keep it hydrated

The great news is CLIs and the agents we build to work with them are excellent at finding this information and pushing it into your CRM. If anyone wants to jam on what a serendipity factory CRM could look like for your enterprise business… well then, I'm just a guy, standing in front of your dehydrated CRM, asking you if I can help water it :)