The future of CRM

I've been kicking in my head the sensationalistically titled but otherwise clairvoyant post by a16z partners Zeya Yang , Marc Andrusko and Angela Strange "Death of a Salesforce: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech".

Their premise is that when we stop thinking of CRMs as relational databases and start conceiving them as mineable unstructured repositories of rich media interactions we will unleash the next generation of relationship software, one that empowers instead of straitjacketing.

The rich media we hope to capture becomes training data for models that will create non-deterministic communication workflows that will empower more meaningful relationship building and drive better outcomes.

So far so good. Those of us in the real-time communications trenches know that is what our software should be about: provide the context, deliver the interaction, capture the media and flush out the nuance of what was said (or was left unsaid).

If we succeed, the prize is: "the way sellers and buyers interact will be fundamentally different"

Going farther:

1. Intelligence Amplification - make the people sound smart, look smart, appear to have the answers, ask better questions, know when to wrap it up.
2. Integrating the (sales) Man and the (marketing) Machine - integrate then help teams understand all the signals that the prospect/customer is sending. Through all the channels. Seamlessly.
3. Replacing the humans - SDRs are geting replaced today. Sales Managers go next. Like in all the other professions where humans are not exercising creativity. Reducing Sales performed by humans to the purest expression of creativity.
4. Predicting the outcomes - think pipeline forecasts, churn prediction and prevention, sales performance precognition.

It's in this going farther that the real exciting applications emerge.

If we get there, Salesforce the CRM app as we know it will die.

Salesforce the company will simply buy the future when it becomes the present. And hopefully it'll be one of Zeya's, Marc's or Angela's portcos.