Manuel H.

I’ll take a well crafted cold email over a LI message, but that’s just me

Hi Jordan, while I didn’t use it for a CRM (SFDC was ingrained), I did successfully implement DevRev as an AI-native customer service system. DevRev had, at the time, effectively all the functionalities of a CRM that we actually used (SFDC is a swiss army knife, but most people just use one or two implements), it understood accounts, could track opportunities, create reports, etc. Depending on where you are at, I think it’s a fine CRM all the way up to around $20M in ARR, and possibly beyond. Being AI-native also means you can have it perform a lot of things autonomously.

I have contacts at both if you’d like an intro Peter P.

I’ve used and brought in BackEngine a few times now, yes. AIcelerate is similiar, but more focused on large enterprise versus BackEngine being more mid-market focused.

Legacy CSPs are struggling to remain relevant, I agree. Any CSP that requires human care and feeding (of data) is unfortunately highly exposed. There are some neo-CSPs as I call them, execution intelligence platforms like AIcelerate and BackEngine which passively ingest all the signals and then provide signals output which can be automated. Traditional CSPs have been about making sure work was being done and logged. EIPs are focused on the outcomes.

Hi Scott, great question, definitely an opportunity I’ve run into. IMHO, when it comes to sales forecasts, there is one for the “company”, and then there are nuanced department-level ones. Both are important ones IMHO. Sales may be more optimistic on what they plan to close, but the company shouldn’t count on that until it manifests. Similarly, CS might be more conservative / realistic when it comes to predicting churn versus what the company might require. My recommendation would be to have one common company-level forecast that the exec team uses for board reporting / company forecasting, but delegate to each group their own modified version of that and have them call out where and why they deviate at the forecast call.

pure gold

Salesforce, just like Cisco, IBM, and few others in that category are large enough that they can just keep innovating through M&A. Cisco for instance hasn’t brought a real new, home-grown product to market in over a decade, yet they are still growing profitably

The thing to keep in mind, with Salesforce, you aren’t buying the software as much as access to the full ecosystem, which you rarely need early in a company’s lifecycle, but which becomes inevitable later on, especially when an M&A event is on the horizon

I’ve been around long enough to see Salesforce killers come and get killed… I do also see a lot of people at the early stage vibing something together, and I think that’s a good idea for the first $1-$10M+ in ARR, but there will come a point where maintenance of the custom thing will cost you more in distraction than it costs to buy Salesforce and a few RevOps people.