Your CRM was built backwards

When I led global customer success at HubSpot, the customer base grew from roughly 70,000 to more than 220,000 in just four years. Growth at that scale stress-tests every assumption you make about your customer. At that point, the data required to understand a single customer sat in product logs, billing systems, support queues, and the notes a customer service representative typed based on memory. All that data created a record, but not an understanding. AI agents are closing the gap. The CRM software category will not survive in its current form, as it is built on disjointed data that is hard to integrate usefully. THE FUNNEL WAS AN ORG CHART DRAWN SIDEWAYS The customer journey has evolved from a funnel to a flywheel and then a loop. Every version has the same defect: It focuses on what the company does, in the order the company does it. But that is rarely what happens. Here’s what happens. A customer who is three months into a contract has two failed logins, an unresolved billing dispute, and an upgrade offer from someone who doesn’t know about either. In Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer survey, 55% of customers said it feels like they’re dealing with individual dep…