Insights
GrowCRM Has Been Slowly Dying. What's the Kiss of Life It's Getting?
21 August 2026
CRM is supposed to be a growth tool. In most businesses, it’s never really been that. It’s been the elephant in the room: a system of record with little or no value beyond policing the sales team and checking in on them, tolerated rather than discussed, because nobody quite wants to say out loud that the thing sales leadership relies on to “see what’s happening” is mostly just surveillance with a login page.
Ask any experienced sales manager, off the record, and they’ll tell you the real story. Deals get invented, or nudged forward a stage, just to keep a pipeline review calm. Call counts get padded. Notes get written for whoever might be reading them, not because they’re useful: enough there to survive a check-in without triggering another one. None of it is really dishonesty. It’s what happens when a system exists to police you rather than help you. You learn to feed it exactly enough to take the pressure off, so you can get back to the job you’re actually paid to do: selling.
I’ve sat through the “we need a better CRM” conversation more times than I can count. Someone makes the case, the business absorbs the pain of evaluating alternatives, migrates the data, retrains the team, and rolls out something genuinely better. Within six months, the same behaviours are back: deals half-logged, notes nobody reads, a pipeline dashboard everyone quietly distrusts because everyone knows what’s actually happening on the ground doesn’t match what the system says.
The platform was never really the problem. Every version did the same basic thing: it recorded what you’d already done, and it never actually helped you do it. That made it a hindrance, not a help, and it made the job harder rather than easier, no matter how many times the interface got a fresh coat of paint. What using any of them requires is the same: stopping what you’re doing, opening a separate tool, and manually re-entering something you just did, in whatever format the system decided on rather than however it actually happened. Hard to use, energy-sapping, and frankly a chore. It’s not an exaggeration to call CRM the least loved app in most businesses that have one.
The burden is finally easing
So how do we take CRM and turn it into something that actually helps us sell, instead of something we constantly have to feed?
That’s starting to change, and not because anyone built a nicer interface.
HubSpot’s a good example of how fast this is moving. Breeze, their AI layer, now drafts emails and content for you inside the CRM, automatically enriches contact records with data a rep would otherwise have to go and find themselves, and runs a prospecting agent that finds net-new contacts matching who you actually sell to, without anyone lifting a finger. Salesforce, Zoho and whatever Microsoft’s calling its offering this quarter are all racing down the same path.
That’s genuinely useful, and worth taking seriously. But it’s worth asking the harder question: does any of it actually fix the core issue, or is it just a more capable version of the same shape? Drafting your emails and finding you new leads is real value, but it doesn’t touch the thing that made CRM a chore in the first place: a rep still has to stop, open the tool, and manually tell it what happened. The features that genuinely move the needle are the quieter ones, like automatic data enrichment, where the system fills in what it can infer instead of waiting to be told. The flashier ones mostly add capability on top of the same old burden rather than removing it.
Here’s what would actually change things. A CRM that lives inside how you already work, not a separate destination you have to visit: update a deal by talking to it between meetings instead of typing, the way you’d brief a colleague in the corridor. Meetings recorded and transcribed automatically, so nothing depends on someone remembering to write it up afterwards. Relevant history surfaced before a call starts, instead of a rep digging back through old notes to relearn what they already knew. Follow-ups drafted and ready to send the moment a call ends, while the momentum’s still there, not three days later once it’s gone. That’s not a feature list bolted onto a dashboard. That’s a CRM built around the actual shape of a sales day.
The main products are getting there. Slowly.
In my world, two businesses are going further
I see two businesses further along than that, and I’m not watching from outside either of them.
At Captivate, where I’m fractional COO, we write sales automation software for industries like software distribution, and it does more than most people expect from anything calling itself a CRM. It researches a prospect before the call happens. It aids you during the call itself: objections answered in real time, which still catches people off guard when I describe it to them. And it handles the follow-up afterwards, so nothing depends on a rep remembering to send it once the moment’s passed.
At APIConnects, where I work alongside Nitil and the team as an adviser, the path was different but the destination’s similar. They used AI to build their own CRM from scratch, tuned specifically to how they operate: Outlook-integrated, with AI-driven discovery and coaching built in. It’s not a one-off build, either. It’s growing in capability by the week. Happy to make an introduction to either if you want to see it up close.
Both are a nod to where this is heading, not the exception. What they’re really doing is removing the moment that made CRM a chore in the first place: the gap between doing the work and having to separately record that you did it.
For years, CRM has been the least loved app in most businesses that have one. AI, it turns out, might be exactly the kiss of life it needed.
Postscript, 29 August 2026: Five days after this went up, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Salesforce in Claude: 37 prebuilt sales skills that let reps work through Claude’s chat interface instead of clicking through Salesforce’s own UI. Salesforce’s own president of applications put a number on the exact problem this piece describes: a rep’s typical morning of 10,000 clicks inside Salesforce collapsing to a 30-second AI-generated briefing. The biggest CRM vendor on earth, reframing itself away from the click-and-log burden and toward an AI layer doing the synthesis work. That’s the kiss of life, at platform scale.