There is no good CRM
September 2024
Here’s what a Good CRM would do.
It would let me start typing a friend’s name, then select them from a list:
Once selected, it would show me:
- Their smiling face
- Contact info
- Any notes I might have added
and, crucially:
- Our most recent conversations
It’s this last part that no CRM can offer, and that is why there is no good CRM.
Plenty of tools will kinda-sorta do this job—integrating with Gmail to show our last few email exchanges, or connecting to Outlook Calendar to present the last event we attended together.
That’s a cute trick, but it’s worse than useless. Unless email is the only means of communication you ever use with anyone.
And it’s not! You have conversations going across multiple channels. WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, LinkedIn DMs. Public exchanges in the replies of a shitpost on Twitter or Threads.
If your CRM presents a weeks-old email exchange as the most relevant context for catching up with someone who just sent you an Instagram DM about their sick cat, your CRM is not Good. It is, in fact, worse than useless.
So: There is no Good CRM, and there never will be. Because WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, Instagram, and every similar platform really want you to log in, because they are optimizing for engagement.
In the absence of an Actually Good CRM, the absolute best you can do is a tool that maps people to the channels where you stay in touch. The process of opening those channels and catching up on the conversational thread has to be a manual one where you click, click, scroll. Engage.
What does this tool look like? Literally a .csv file or (if you want to get fancy) a spreadsheet:
You can’t do better than this. Try, and you’ll end up doing worse. Sorry!