We do not have a CRM. This started as an experiment and became a conviction, but it is worth being precise about what replaced it, because the answer is not “vibes.”
Every sales call is recorded and transcribed into the company brain. Every email thread with a prospect is read by the same system. When I need the history of an account, I ask a question — “where did the security review stall, and who raised it?” — and get an answer assembled from the actual record, with the receipts linked. The account history is not a set of fields a tired AE filled in at 6 p.m. on a Friday. It is the conversations themselves.
What this bought us:
No data entry, which means no data decay. The classic CRM failure is not the software; it is that the map diverges from the territory the moment someone forgets to log a call. Our record cannot diverge — it is the territory.
Preparation compresses. Before a renewal call, the prep is one question: what has this customer asked for, complained about, or been promised, in order? That used to be an hour of archaeology across three tools.
Handoffs stopped losing information. When an account moves between people, the new owner inherits the full record, not a summary written by the departing one.
What broke on the way, because things did break:
Pipeline reporting was the hardest loss. A CRM’s real product is a Tuesday-morning forecast grid, and for a while we could not produce one. We rebuilt it as a recurring procedure that reads the record and drafts the pipeline review — which turned out to be better, because it cites its sources, but it took real work to trust it.
Discipline moved from data entry to instrumentation. If a conversation happens off the record — a hallway chat at a conference — it does not exist. We had to build the habit of narrating those back into the system.
The unresolved part: this works at our size, with our density of recorded interaction. Whether it survives a sales org ten times larger is a question we will answer in public, either way.
— GTM lead, New York