aheadCRM

For more than twenty years, CRM vendors sold the 360-degree customer view as a commercial superpower: every contact, every transaction, every complaint, every campaign response in one place. As we discussed in our recent CRMKonvo with Andreas Schuster of SugarAI , the promise always had a flaw. Seeing everything is not the same as understanding anything, or seeing the right thing. The question is not whether AI completes the circle, but whether it lets us admit sellers never wanted the circle. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers). Else, be my guest and continue to read. Or do both … Three Point Six Degrees and the Death of the Dashlet Andreas opened with a wordplay that is better than most keynotes: out of the 360 degrees, perhaps only 3.6 matter. " The more they know in terms of data, the less guidance they get what to know. " He recalled sales leaders of a decade ago...

Gartner rewrote the CRM rules this year. It was probably right to. Buyers still need to read the fine print. Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for CRM Sales Platforms is likely the most consequential edition in years . But it isn't because of the vendor movements. It's because of the rule changes that caused these movements. Let me start with the part that deserves credit. Gartner correctly saw the market shift and acted. The report was renamed from Sales Force Automation Platforms to CRM Sales Platforms, and the substance moved with the name. The old report was defined around records: leads, accounts, opportunities, pipeline, quotes, partner portals. The new one is defined around orchestration and composite AI, whether predictive, generative and agentic capabilities actually feed each other, and whether one can see, govern and correct what those systems do. It is the right call. Anyone who has sat through a vendor demo in 2025 or 2026 knows the gap between "we have AI...

Every AI CRM vendor selling into 2026 has an AI agent story by now. The differentiator is no longer whether agents exist, but who is allowed to build the next one, how long that takes, and what happens to the bill once it works. For decades, CRM has promised growth and mostly delivered data entry, decaying from a system of action into a system of record. The agentic shift changes that, and with it the questions buyers should ask. Let’s put Creatio's AI CRM to those questions, following a deal from lead to order to see how much orchestration ships out of the box and how much a revenue team must assemble. The findings are published in full in my report, AI CRM for Revenue Growth : Inside Creatio's AI-Native No-Code Platform . The company behind the platform Creatio is a privately held, AI CRM and no-code workflow automation company headquartered in Boston, founded in 2014 by Katherine Kostereva , who remains CEO. It ran as bpm'online until a 2019 rebranding, bootstrapped ...

The contemporary B2B sales landscape is currently drowning in its own engineering achievements. For the past decade, the holy grail of outbound sales development was scale: how many touches could an automated sequence tool squeeze out of a Sales Development Representative (SDR) per day? The answer was always "more". With the mainstream infiltration of generative artificial intelligence and LLMs, the marginal cost of creating more text collapsed to zero, well, almost. Predictably, this did not produce a renaissance of enlightened business communication; it merely triggered an existential crisis in the recipients’ mailboxes. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers). Else, be my guest and continue to read. Or do both … When any entry-level sales rep can prompt a system to instantly parse a prospect's digital footprint and draft a customized icebreaker, personalization is no mo...