The New CRM

I've spent more time fiddling with CRMs than I'd like to admit. Traditional offerings are complex - Salesforce, definitely, even HubSpot these days - and they ask too much of the people who use them.

They're bloated with features, full of hidden settings, and require specialized admins just to keep everything running. Most teams never tap into more than a fraction of what's possible.

Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work - fundraisers, sales reps, account managers - are stuck fighting the tool instead of using it. They spend more time logging activity and cleaning data than moving relationships forward.

A new kind of CRM is starting to emerge.

It's lighter, more focused, and more opinionated. It assumes you don't have a dedicated ops team and that you don't want to spend six months on implementation. It's built around real workflows instead of endless configuration screens.

In this new model:

• The CRM fits your team's mental model instead of forcing a new one on you.
• Data entry is minimized or automated, not a second job for every user.
• Views and reports are designed around decisions, not dashboards for the sake of dashboards.
• Integrations are simple and purposeful instead of a maze of half-connected tools.

The new CRM doesn't try to be everything for everyone. It tries to be the right thing for the right kind of team.

That's the shift I'm most excited about: away from "powerful but painful" and toward "simple, usable, and actually used."