I wonder if CRMs for SaaS companies are fundamentally broken. Or maybe it's just the way we think about it?

Hear me out

If I told you that I had a SaaS company for a couple years, was doing some marketing, closing some deals, and was stuck in a revenue plateau, where would you look?

For me, it's churn and pricing. I've always worked bottom-up, and I believe it's a sound place to start.

However, after looking at most CRMs for SMB and mid-market SaaS, they tend to stop being valuable at the point of sale.

Our diligent call notes and follow-up sequences tend to devolve into sloppy "handoffs to CS" and "is this customer list current?" scenarios.

This gap was what led to the advent of CS platforms...another "flavor" of CRM that leans more heavily on in-app event tracking to power follow-up (instead of marketing events and sales pipelines).

Which is cool...but fundamentally, why are they separate?

I've burned so many brain cells working on inter-team handoffs, integrating HubSpot with XYZ, making sure people aren't asking customers the same questions over and over, etc...

Not to mention the more mythical creatures, such as "churn cohorts by acquisition channel"...

Shouldn't we have customer data from the top of the funnel on down, in a single place? Without having to spend a million bucks on complicated data warehousing setups?

I feel strongly that if a CRM is "managing customer relationships", and it truly wants to help SaaS companies scale for the long term, it should work bottom-up instead of top-down.

And as of now, I don't think that anything out there does.

Thoughts? Is this thinking on track? Not looking for a "tool debate" per se, because I know a lot of things "can" be set up to do at least some of this.

But is there anything that's BUILT to do it? And if not...should there be?

@danmartell @devbasu @tylertringas @Patticus @dohertyjf paging all my friends who are smarter than me / would love for you to weigh in or tell me I'm full of crap random Friday night SaaS thoughts