This session dives deeply into why CRMs fail, how unstructured data creates both chaos and opportunity, the real reason leads should be eliminated, and why RevOps is uniquely positioned to rebuild the entire GTM architecture around accurate, automated customer truth.
CRM failure is not an edge case. It is the default outcome of most implementations. The day to day experience of most operators is defined by fragmented systems, missing information, manual data entry, poor hygiene, and competing definitions of what is actually happening in the revenue engine.
Rob kicked off the content by grounding the conversation in his own experience. After working across eight startups on the technical and RevOps side, he repeatedly encountered the same systemic problems: messy data models, constant firefighting, requests for fields no one fills out, and pipelines built on subjective narratives rather than objective truth.
Courtney added the perspective of someone who is often hired specifically to fix the mess. She shared that most organizations bring her in at moments of extreme operational dysfunction. Some teams are scaling quickly and want to build automation correctly, while others sit on years of bad data and broken workflows without the time or expertise to repair them.
Jared, who has held nearly every GTM role from SDR to RVP to sales engineering leader and finally RevOps, has been on both sides of the CRM pain equation. Reps feel systems make their job harder. Ops teams feel reps ignore the process. Leaders feel they cannot trust any number they see.
The webinar quickly surfaces the core diagnosis: CRM data is broken at the foundation because humans are being asked to operate as data pipelines. And no amount of tooling, enrichment, AI or dashboards will fix the system until that root issue is addressed.
One of the strongest themes throughout the webinar is that sales reps cannot be responsible for data entry. Not because they are incapable, but because their compensation, goals, and psychological incentives all push them toward selling, not data stewardship.
As Jared put it, reps are coin operated. They will do the activities that directly help them close deals and nothing that does not.
This manifests in several predictable patterns:
Courtney highlighted the gap between what happens on sales calls and what ends up in the CRM. It is extremely common for a rep to walk out of a meeting convinced a deal is closing within days, even when the actual conversation shows much weaker signals. Without transcripts or objective call data, the CRM captures only the rep’s interpretation, not the truth.
Rob summarized the fundamental flaw clearly: as long as humans are manually entering data, the foundation of your CRM will always be unstable.
For more on to think of your CRM as a revenue operator, check out RevOps Co-op Blog: It’s Time To Stop Thinking of a CRM as a Selling Tool.
The discussion then shifts toward the deeper structural issues causing this chaos. Operational leaders often assume the CRM is the problem or that sales is the problem. But Rob makes the argument that the real culprit is the underlying data model.
CRMs are relational databases, which means they are only as strong as their object relationships. But in most organizations:
The result is a relational database with broken relationships. This destroys reporting, forecasting, and GTM visibility.
Jared adds that even the most basic question can become unanswerable in a broken data model. At a previous company, he was asked how many customers the business had. After weeks of digging, he found that most of the information lived in PDFs, not in the CRM.
This kind of scenario is routine: purchase history spread across contracts, product usage stored in back end systems, customer attributes scattered across spreadsheets, and enrichment tools.
RevOps ends up stitching together fragmented truth instead of operating from a shared source of customer reality.
For more on data + AI, check out RevOpsAF Podcast Episode 50: Thinking of AI? Think Data First.
One of the boldest recommendations in the webinar is Rob's argument that the industry should retire the concept of leads entirely.
The traditional Salesforce model assumes a linear process where leads convert into accounts, contacts, and opportunities. But this model does not work in modern GTM systems because:
Rob’s replacement is straightforward: maintain a single object for people, the contact, and use relationships to determine lifecycle status.
This creates a far more accurate and scalable model:
This relational approach eliminates duplication, preserves context, and enables far better reporting, segmentation, and automation.
Courtney notes that every company using leads uses them in a different and often dysfunctional way, making cross org consistency impossible.
A single contact centric model solves this by enforcing structure and eliminating guesswork.
For more on the Common Customer Data Model, check out The Common Customer Data Model as the GTM Brain.
The conversation then expands into why the customer must be the central entity in a shared GTM data model.
Marketing wants to know which ICP personas resonate with which messages.
Sales wants to know which champions are driving the deal.
CS wants to know what was promised during sales and what use cases to prioritize.
Product wants to know which features are being requested and by whom.
All of these insights originate from the customer, yet the signals are scattered across:
Rob argues that the customer is already generating a rich stream of unstructured truth, but most companies have no system to convert that truth into something structured, reportable, and actionable.
When structured correctly:
This is how the GTM engine becomes synchronized rather than siloed.
For more on this topic, check out this article: The Living Customer Record: RevOps’ Next Evolution.
At several points in the discussion, the panel reinforced a critical but often misunderstood point: AI cannot fix broken CRM data models.
Large language models excel at summarizing or interpreting unstructured data, but they cannot replace structured fields for reporting, forecasting, or governance.
Rob shared that even in legal AI applications, simple counting tasks often fail because LLMs are not optimized for deterministic answers. That means they cannot reliably replace structured picklists, numeric fields, or date fields that reporting depends on.
AI becomes powerful only after RevOps creates a unified model that can ingest unstructured data, extract key insights, and convert them into validated, structured fields.
AI is not the house.
AI is the electricity.
The data model is the wiring.
For more on this topic as it relates to cold outbound, check out RevOpsAF Podcast Episode 27: How AI Killed Cold Prospecting.
Throughout the webinar, the panel makes one message clear: no other function can or will own this transformation.
RevOps alone sits at the intersection, touching every workflow and every system. RevOps is the natural owner of:
As Matthew emphasizes near the close, RevOps cannot hide behind tools or data. Influence in the organization comes from storytelling, trust building, system ownership, and showing each team the growing value of shared customer truth.
For more on this topic, check out this article: The Hidden Cost of CRM Dysfunction in Sales Data.
Rob closed the webinar by outlining a crawl, walk, run maturity model for teams that want to fix their CRM foundation without years of disruption.
Build structural integrity.
Convert existing unstructured signals into structured insights.
Operationalize customer truth across the GTM engine.
When executed well, this model transforms RevOps from a reactive firefighting team into a strategic, insight generating, cross functional system owner.
For more on being a strategic revenue operator, check out RevOpsAF Podcast Episode 19: How to be a Strategic Revenue Operator.
Need deeper guidance on redesigning your CRM foundation, improving your data model or building AI driven workflows that actually work? Explore more articles and webinar recordings or join our global community of 18,000 revenue operators for courses, discussions and hands on help.
Want to give your sales team 40% of their time back? Learn how GTM Engine can help or check out their interactive demo here. Check out their blog and newsletter for more resources on AI and sales.
.jpg)
%20(1).jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
