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I worked as an implementation consultant during the 1st or 2nd generation of CRM apps back in the fist decade of this century. Then, since 2010 I became a CRM e

I worked as an implementation consultant during the 1st or 2nd generation of CRM apps back in the fist decade of this century. Then, since 2010 I became a CRM end-user, mainly of Salesforce. After all those years listening to sales people complain about workflows and broken UI/UX, I realized the perfect system for this type of user is a message driven minimal UI app. System would send email/IM to users all day long asking questions about news leads, changes in opps stages, phone calls, contracts sent for signature etc. Sales folks would click a link, fill in a 2 field form and hit save. Call that "micro updates", if you will. The system mimics the sales manager who nudges the sales person for updates. Navigation within the app is minimal, so there is no room for alibis like: "Oh, I'm not updating it because it takes too much of my time. I was doing sales work instead." All this would be for the operational CRM. Analytical/management parts of the system would present the typical UI/UX we all know about.

rodolphoarruda 3y ago
Update: Kommo.com seems to be aligned with the idea to be message driven having integrations with WhatsApp and Telegram (among others).
arethuza 3y ago
"message driven minimal UI app" Via Slack/Teams/WhatsApp?
- rodolphoarruda 3y ago
  I don't know about Teams. To me, it is more like a web conferencing tool. In case of Slack and WhatsApp, yes, they would be perfect channels to push the update requests for the sales teams. IMHO.
iFelix 3y ago
Interesting! Hubspot launched a chat interface[1] but it doesn't have that component you describe where it pro-actively asks you for things. I think logging will eventually become much less painful than it is today with good integrations and LLM, most of it could be done automatically. [1] https://chatspot.ai/ https://chatspot.ai/
9dev 3y ago
I feel like that covers half the story. The system should be smart enough not to poll users, but push queries if it detects changes to persistent data. For example, if some sales employee took a call from a previously-unknown number, gather as much data as possible (call metadata, documents modified during and after the call, content touched by the sales guy) and only then query them for new lead information. What I'd like to see is an actually smart system that interfaces with data in my company, connects the dots intelligently and prompts humans for input where it requires it.

rodolphoarruda 3y ago

Update: Kommo.com seems to be aligned with the idea to be message driven having integrations with WhatsApp and Telegram (among others).

arethuza 3y ago

"message driven minimal UI app" Via Slack/Teams/WhatsApp?

rodolphoarruda 3y ago
I don't know about Teams. To me, it is more like a web conferencing tool. In case of Slack and WhatsApp, yes, they would be perfect channels to push the update requests for the sales teams. IMHO.

iFelix 3y ago

Interesting! Hubspot launched a chat interface[1] but it doesn't have that component you describe where it pro-actively asks you for things. I think logging will eventually become much less painful than it is today with good integrations and LLM, most of it could be done automatically. [1] https://chatspot.ai/ https://chatspot.ai/

9dev 3y ago

I feel like that covers half the story. The system should be smart enough not to poll users, but push queries if it detects changes to persistent data. For example, if some sales employee took a call from a previously-unknown number, gather as much data as possible (call metadata, documents modified during and after the call, content touched by the sales guy) and only then query them for new lead information. What I'd like to see is an actually smart system that interfaces with data in my company, connects the dots intelligently and prompts humans for input where it requires it.