If rolling your own CRM has ever crossed your mind, I say…no time like the present.
You know AI is going to be the shiny object for enterprise vendors until reality quiets the hype…
And you know you’re going just to be paying for their R&D as they scramble to find new ways to sell your own data back to you…
CRM is old in the tooth…and boring…and not going to generate billions of dollars of economic value / shareholder wealth. CRM in itself is essentially a commodity at this point.
So why continue to tether to vendor solutions that are not specific to the way you do or want to do business?
Is it a “build vs. buy” thing? Did someone, somewhere in your career scare you by saying, “Always buy, don’t build, blah blah, etc.”?
Is it just something you’ve never really thought about?
Or has it maybe been popping into your head as a possibility as you watch in utter amazement as Silicon Valley becomes more and more detached from enterprise realities as they pursue their AI moonshots?
Whatever the case, I think we’re at a super interesting inflection point where the thought of even doing a custom / customized core CRM architecture goes from crazy talk…to “why are we not talking about this?” level.
The pieces are all there. The thinking is out there. Simple conversational /generative AI on its own without all of the bells and whistles will help you envision the structures and what an ideal implementation could look like.
You can de-risk in the process by reevaluating vendor relationships that were based on dependencies that may no longer exist moving forward.
I know we’re coming up on Halloween, but leveraging existing (and real) technologies in new ways and building something this foundational does not have to be scary.
There is so much potential value to be mined from reevaluating current systems and even ways of thinking about things.
Maybe the time is now to think about where CRM fits into your future plans and whether it makes sense to bring that a little closer to the vest.
Maybe rolling your own CRM isn’t the big, hairy monster it seems once you pull away the mask.