Why Your CRM Sucks

Hello Predictable Revenue community,

Book update: we’re approaching the 1 month to launch date! I’m planning two small in person events, October 10th in San Francisco and November 3rd in New York. Let me know if either work for you.

An offer: if you hit me back with your pre-order receipt and I’ll create a mini-course showing how to implement the below system in Hubspot/a spreadsheet. From field creation to setting up the right views to how to write a good ‘next action’. We’ve reached 192 pre-orders already and I have something special planned for when we cross 200…

Onto the newsletter…

tl;dr - you're not using it right.

This week I was working with a founder who had 75 deals in their CRM pipeline. It’s crunch time and they need to get some revenue coming in the door in the next 3 months. When I asked them what they needed to do today to move deals forward, they stared at their Kanban board and said: "I don't know."

Their CRM looked beautiful. Color-coded stages, deal values, probability scores, fancy dashboards. But it was completely useless for the one thing that actually matters: telling them what to do next.

The CRM Trap

Here's what happens to most founders: You set up a CRM because someone told you that's what growing companies do. You spend hours configuring fields, stages, and integrations. You import your contacts and start tracking deals. Or maybe you didn’t do any of this and just started adding deals in randomly… No judgement, I’ve done it both ways. Both suck. 

Then you log in each morning and... what? You see a bunch of boxes with company names and dollar amounts. Your brain has to work overtime just to remember: What did we talk about? What were they waiting for? What's the next step?

So you end up managing deals through email, Slack, and your memory. The CRM becomes a reporting tool for showing your cofounder you’re kinda doing something, not a productivity tool for closing deals.

Why Every CRM Sucks at the Thing That Matters Most

I built a CRM company as my first startup. We were trying to solve exactly this problem: helping salespeople know what to do next. That experience taught me something brutal about the CRM industry.

Every CRM company is optimized for the wrong thing. They're built for marketing teams who want dashboards and reporting. They're built for sales leaders who want forecasts and pipeline reviews. They're not built for the person actually trying to close deals.

The fundamental problem: CRMs show you where deals are, but they don't tell you what to do about it.

You can see that "Acme Corp" is in the "Demo" stage, but that tells you nothing. Did they reschedule three times? Are they waiting for pricing? Did they go dark after the demo? Your CRM has no idea, so neither do you.

The Only System That Actually Works

After years of watching founders struggle with this, I've found there are only two fields that matter:

Next Action: What's the very next thing you need to do to move this deal forward?

Next Action Date: When are you going to do it?

That's it. Everything else is noise.

Here's how it works in practice:

Instead of "Demo," you write: "9/24: Demo scheduled for 9/26" with a date of September 26th.

Instead of "Send proposal," you write: "9/24: Send proposal. Review meeting booked with their boss on 10/2" with a date of October 2nd.

Instead of "Follow up," you write: "9/26: FU to see if raise is close to closing” with a date of September 26th.

Now when you log into your CRM each morning, you know exactly what to do. No guessing. No trying to remember. No digging through email threads.

Pro-tip: if you need to do something, start your next action with a verb, eg. “send a proposal for x”. This tells your brain exactly what you need to do and forces you to think through what to do next clearly instead of just brain dumping. If you have a next step scheduled, nice work, write that instead, eg. “FU meeting booked Oct 1st”. 

Two Habits That Change Everything

The system only works if you build two simple habits:

Every morning: Open your "Active Opportunities" view first thing. Before Slack, before email, before LinkedIn. Look at what's due today and do those things. I’d say “before coffee'“ but want it to be realistic…

Every Friday: Run "Follow-Up Friday." Pick five deals from your nurture pipeline and do something with them. Send an email, make a call, check if their situation changed. Just five things. That's it. If you happen to do more? Awesome.

I intentionally keep the initial ask of each of these habits small to make them easy to repeat. What I find typically happens is that once I start, I end up doing more than just 5. But this gives me permission to only do 5 things and still consider it a win.

The magic isn't in doing more work. It's in building the discipline to never let good opportunities die from neglect.

Why This Matters for Early Revenue

When you're an early-stage founder, revenue risk doesn't come from a lack of leads. It comes from deals slipping through the cracks because nobody followed up at the right time.

I've seen founders lose $50K deals because they forgot to follow up when the prospect said "circle back in Q4." I've seen companies miss their fundraising targets because half their pipeline went stale while they were chasing new leads.

Your CRM should be your memory, not your burden. It should make you faster, not slower. It should tell you what to do, not what happened.

A Personal Productivity Tool, Not a Reporting Dashboard

Stop thinking about your CRM as a reporting tool. Start thinking about it as a personal productivity system.

The goal isn't to impress your investors with clean data and beautiful charts. The goal is to never lose track of a deal that could have closed.

When you're the founder doing the selling, your CRM has one job: help you remember what you promised to do and when you promised to do it. If it's not doing that, it's broken.

Making It Stick

The hardest part isn't setting up the fields. It's building the discipline to actually use them.

Every time you talk to a prospect, immediately update the next action. Every time you send an email, log what you did and what happens next. Every time you think about a deal, capture that thought in the system.

Your goal is "mind like water"—a concept from David Allen's Getting Things Done. When everything you need to remember is captured in a system you trust, your brain can focus on selling instead of remembering.

The Bottom Line

Your CRM doesn't suck because it's missing features. It sucks because you're using it wrong.

Stop trying to track everything and start tracking the only thing that matters: what you need to do next.

Set up two views: Active Opportunities (sorted by next action date) and Nurture Pipeline (for Follow-Up Fridays). Add next action and next action date to every deal. Use it every morning and every Friday.

That's it. No fancy workflows, no complex automations, no expensive add-ons.

Just a simple system that tells you what to do next.

Collin 

PS - If enough people are interested, I'll create a mini video course showing exactly how to set this up in HubSpot—the specific views, fields, and filters that make it work. Hit reply if you want me to build it.

PPS - If you don’t have a CRM, awesome! Check out the google sheet template from my “don’t buy a crm” post.