What is CRM and how will it change in the age of abundant intelligence?

The core of a CRM is really the proprietary knowledge you have about your relationship with your customers.

It is knowledge that is unique to you, and can only be unique to you (“we agreed this” and “we have had this history”), combined with knowledge that you captured from public sources, that you save in your database (their names and public info, what they sell, etc.).

It is then the usage of that relationship data to do three things:

1. Know specific information about a specific customer when you are going to interact with that specific customer
2. Collect an aggregate of customers that might be interested in an offer and make an offer to them (preferably leveraging unique information about each, if possible)
3. Establish relationships with new customers
4. (Meta need above those three) Create, enforce and measure internal processes about how you interact with customers to do the three things above

Interestingly, this maps 1-1 and exactly to the four areas that FunnelBud’s customer needs research revealed (results in Analysis and Conclusions: Customer Research 2024-05 (id: pmf2024) – only available upon request):

1. Know your relationship history
2. Send campaigns to segments
3. Find new companies to sell to
4. Measure the effectiveness of your sales process and your campaign

These needs will remain, even in the age of abundant intelligence. Even with abundant intelligence, you (or your agents) will need to know information about a specific customer you are about to interact with, to create an aggregate of customers who might be interested in an offer and then make that offer to them in an individualized way, and establish relationships with new customers – as well as measure how you do the above three things to do it better, differently or not at all next time.

So the data layer will remain – but gaining access to that data will fundamentally and drastically change, as you no longer need “an interface” – you can probably just surface the data that you need, when you need it, in the way that you need it (whether it be (1) a summary of the key points you need to remember for your meeting, (2) a table generated for you on the fly that you can look at to grok the types of customers or do some sampling of who to target and who not to target in your new campaign, (3) suggestions on companies that might be interesting to target based on your previous sales, or (4) generate a dashboard on the fly showing you the sales you’ve made in the quarter.

The CRM will also be able to do things for you on the fly – such as cold call for you, render emails that you can send, send emails, respond to queries, and follow a process that you outline (but dynamic based on intelligently adapting to the unique customers’ attributes and real time reactions, with a goal in mind).

Traditional CRM companies have the data layer – but the question is if the data layer will even stay the same or will fundamentally change.

However they are burdened with a now outdated interface, because “interface”, I believe, will be a word of the past. Interface will be whatever you need to see when you need to see it, generated dynamically on the fly when you need it, containing the data that you need to see in it. A list? Generated. A customer? Generated. A plan of action? Generated. A campaign outline? Generated.