When CRM becomes a teammate

The new way of working starts when the data we already have begins to help us make better decisions. It does not start with more dashboards.

On Tuesday, a breakfast meeting at Knowit confirmed several of my own thoughts on AI, CRM and commercial development.

Many organisations hold large volumes of structured and unstructured customer data, activity data, order data, meeting notes, emails and history.

Yet much of this is still used passively.

🔸 We search in dashboards.
🔸 Click through countless CRM tabs.
🔸 Check email.
🔸 Reconcile spreadsheets.
🔸 Talk with colleagues across different functions.
🔸 Check our own notes and try to create overview manually.

That is the old way of working, which many of us recognise.

The new way of working is not about replacing human judgement. It is about giving people better decision support, closer to the workflow. 💡

For me, CRM has always been one of the most interesting areas within commercial development, precisely because it sits so close to customer value, sales leadership and operational execution.

But CRM should not only be a system for simple customer data, registration, control and pipeline follow-up.

It should be a place for an active commercial decision layer. A system that helps us understand customers better.

💥 Spot patterns earlier.
💥 Prioritise more accurately.
💥 Prepare meetings better.
💥 Follow up more precisely.
💥 And not least use insight across sales, marketing, customer service, operations and leadership.

👉 How can we extract more of the insight the organisation already holds, make better use of data, and apply this more effectively in sales, customer follow-up and commercial leadership?

I want to explore how CRM can be developed further with GenAI, so I intend to make this one of my next AI projects.

The gap between using CRM the old way and getting full benefit from the potential is large.

As the charts show, many organisations have high AI ambitions. But "current reality" is often much weaker. Data quality, governance, KPI measurement, structure and use in operations do not always keep pace.

Success with AI is about building new ways of working that create value for the whole organisation.

Nicolai Tangen and the Oil Fund have put it well:
When others achieve 10–20% improvement on the bottom line, how many years can you afford to stay on the sidelines? When competitors learn faster over one, two or three years, the gap becomes hard to close.

This is a leadership theme. AI will not create lasting value if it becomes a side project. Value comes when data, people, workflow and governance are connected to concrete business results. 📈

Thanks to Knowit, Jprofessionals, Snowflake and Mowi for a highly relevant seminar. Especially useful to hear perspectives from Morten Hauge and Hamik Sevan on how data, processes, technology, governance and people can be connected to create value in the workflow. 💯

#AI #CRM #CommercialLeadership #DigitalTransformation #CustomerValue