Your CRM Is a Crime Scene
Here’s what I’ve learned investigating CRM environments across dozens of companies in 2025 and why I believe it’s time to burn the map and build a new one.
Let’s get honest.
No AE wants to open the CRM.
Not really.
They do it because they have to. For the manager. The forecast. The commission clawback clause.
Not because it helps them sell.
And that alone should terrify us.
The one system designed to unify the go-to-market engine…
is the one system no one actually trusts, enjoys, or uses consistently.
The CRM is not a system of intelligence.
It’s a graveyard of context.
Here’s what I’ve learned investigating CRM environments across dozens of companies in 2025 and why I believe it’s time to burn the map and build a new one.
1. The Data Is Fiction and Everyone Knows It
No rep logs notes in real-time.
No founder updates opp stages every Friday.
No CS team loves the “task due” feature.
You know what I’ve seen?
Fake close dates to hit stage thresholds
Stale ICP tags from a persona you abandoned six months ago
Accounts stuck in “Active Opportunity” because no one wants to disqualify them and get questioned
Your CRM is full of stories people are incentivized to tell — not the truth.
The result?
Bad visibility, worse decisions, and a distorted sense of GTM progress.
2. Automation Made It Worse, Not Better
In theory, automation should help.
In practice, it’s made the mess exponential.
Sequences fire based on old field logic
Enrichment tools clash with manual overrides
Handoffs happen automatically to the wrong team
SDRs and AEs battle over ownership triggered by “last touched” fields
You think you’ve streamlined GTM.
You’ve actually just multiplied dysfunction at scale.
We’re not orchestrating systems. We’re compounding chaos.
3. Nobody Understands the Logic Anymore
Ask any GTM team: “Why does this opp go from stage 3 to stage 5?”
You’ll get 4 different answers. Maybe a Google Sheet. And a shrug.
Fields no one updates
Rules no one agreed to
Dashboards no one trusts
Definitions no one aligned on
Every team lives in a slightly different CRM reality.
And still, this is the system used for forecasting, planning, hiring, board reporting.
If this were a manufacturing plant, we’d call it negligence.
4. AE Adherence Is the Industry’s Quietest Crisis
You can buy the best CRM in the world.
But if your AEs don’t use it, it’s dead on arrival.
In 2025:
Reps run pipelines out of spreadsheets
Forecast in Notion or Slack
Take notes in Apple Notes
Tag managers when they want visibility otherwise they don’t
CRMs were designed to record activity.
But reps don’t want surveillance.
They want leverage.
The best sellers don’t need a system of record.
They need a system that thinks with them.
5. What We Need Is a System of Intelligence
The next evolution of CRM isn’t prettier dashboards or better integrations.
It’s a fundamental shift:
From:
System of Record → “We log things here.”
To:
System of Intelligence → “The system learns from us, and helps us move faster.”
What this might look like:
A deal room that updates based on live stakeholder movement
Contextual nudges tied to buying signals, not task deadlines
Agents that surface risk based on real-time changes in deal velocity
Workflows built around customer motion, not internal process
We don’t need more CRM fields.
We need systems that think, adapt, and whisper next steps without being asked.
6. The Headless CRM Era Is (Quietly) Beginning
Smart teams aren’t “customizing Salesforce” anymore.
They’re bypassing it altogether.
I’m seeing:
Airtable or Notion as the real interface
Data piped via APIs to and from a lightweight backend
GPT agents keeping narrative memory across tools
CRM used like plumbing not as the cockpit
The CRM is still the engine room. But the dashboard lives somewhere else.
This is “headless CRM.”
Where the UI is human, flexible, contextual and the logic is managed behind the scenes.
This isn’t fringe.
It’s what’s coming for every modern GTM motion.
Final Note: Don’t Optimize Your CRM. Rethink What It’s For.
You can train your reps harder.
You can add more fields.
You can audit your funnel every quarter.
Or you can admit:
The CRM is not broken.
It’s obsolete for what modern GTM now demands.
What we need is not cleaner dashboards.
What we need is a new model of motion.
This is where Flywheel Engineering begins not with better hygiene, but with better physics.