#18 Why revenue teams get CRMs all wrong - Doug Davidoff, CEO & Founder of Lift Enablement
with
Doug Davidoff
,
CEO & Founder of Lift Enablement
February 27, 2024
·
33
min.
Key Takeaways
- CRM adoption is a vanity metric — utilization is what actually matters. Adoption metrics like "logs in once a week" tell you nothing about whether the CRM is driving business outcomes. The real question is whether reps are using the CRM the way the business process demands, and whether it makes following that process easier than ignoring it.
- The business process must drive the CRM — never the other way around. Doug calls this Lift Enablement's "prime directive": when the CRM starts dictating how people work instead of enabling how they should work, you've already lost. Most implementations get this backwards, which is why reps treat the CRM as a reporting burden rather than a productivity tool.
- A 65-70% win rate is a red flag, not a success metric. If your win rate is that high, it means reps are only logging deals where the prospect has already decided to buy — which inflates win rates, compresses reported sales cycles, and hides the real top-of-funnel breakdown. The fix is a two-pipeline model: a development pipeline separate from the sales-qualified pipeline.
- Obsessing over efficiency in a complex system will eventually break the system. Doug draws a direct parallel to US manufacturing in the 1980s — the more efficient they got, the more money they lost, because efficiency trades away resilience and flexibility. The same dynamic plays out in go-to-market when every variable is over-optimized in isolation.
- Go-to-market is poker, not chess — and most RevOps teams are playing the wrong game. Chess assumes perfect information and rewards computation. Poker is a game of imperfect information, stakes, and trade-offs. Treating pipeline management like a deterministic system causes teams to over-control processes and eliminate the variation that actually drives growth.
- The most valuable CRM data is who isn't buying from you — not who is. Tracking only closed-won deals means you're managing the rearview mirror. The real leverage is understanding where early-stage prospects drop off, which requires capturing pre-intent activity that most CRMs never see because reps don't log it until a deal is nearly certain.
- Reps will only use the CRM consistently when there's "juice for the squeeze." The only sustainable path to utilization is configuring the CRM to proactively queue reps — surfacing who to call, what to say, and what content to share — so the system does the cognitive work instead of adding to it. When the CRM removes thinking rather than requiring it, behavior change follows naturally.
Hosts and Guest

Janis Zech
CEO at Weflow
Janis Zech is the Co-founder and CEO of Weflow. Previously, he scaled his last B2B SaaS company from $0 to $76M ARR as CRO. In this episode, he shares his perspective on revenue teams and CRMs, what it takes to make them actually useful, and where adoption alone falls short. He also discusses the pitfalls to avoid, how to implement CRM more effectively, and how to use it in a sensible way.

Philipp Stelzer
CPO at Weflow
Philipp Stelzer is the Co-founder and CPO of Weflow. He focuses on how revenue teams capture activity, inspect deals, and forecast inside Salesforce. In this episode, he shares his perspective on CRMs and revenue workflows, why adoption by itself is not enough, and what better CRM usage looks like in practice. He also discusses common mistakes, how to implement it correctly, and how to make forecasting more reliable.

Doug Davidoff
CEO & Founder of Lift Enablement
Doug Davidoff is the CEO & Founder of Lift Enablement. In this episode, he shares his perspective on sales and marketing, the role of the CRM, and why CRM adoption is not enough. He also discusses how to implement CRM correctly and effectively, common pitfalls to consider, and how to use a CRM as effectively and sensibly as possible.
Full Transcript
Janis Zech: Doug, welcome.
Doug Davidoff: It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited. I'm excited to talk with you.
Janis Zech: Yeah, same here. I mean, you have a long experience in all things go to market strategy, RevOps before that wasn't even a thing. So super excited to talk to you about, you know, all things systems and system augmentation and setup. So, yeah, maybe you can start with a short introduction then we dive right in.
Doug Davidoff: Yeah. So, you know, I'll introduce myself best through the conversation. That's what I always find me. You know, what do they have to say? Their bio is always less interesting to me. But, yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. I started this company in two thousand four. We started off as Imagine. Today, we're Lift Enablement. We work with mid market companies. What's that? Think of it as two hundred to five thousand employees, fifty to five hundred people in go to market. We view things through a structural lens. So one of the things that I've found is that the vast majority of businesses, especially if they get to the point where you have two hundred employees, you have to be doing a lot of things. And everyone keeps looking for more and more and more. And what I realized a long time ago is it's actually just kinda how are we getting in our own way? How do we reposition the things that we're doing to unlock the latent potential and the latent energy within the organization? That's what I think three quarters of growth is — just getting out of your own way. And so, that's kinda how we like to look at things. And, you know, it's led us to a really interesting path. We work with companies on a performance basis, a tech implementation basis, and just an overall structure for how they're going to market.
Janis Zech: Awesome. Yeah. I mean, so we wanna apply that experience to a topic that is, I think, dear to our hearts. And I think a lot of people are very familiar with, like, you know, what's the role of the CRM? How do you drive adoption and utilization? Or how you would actually say, how do you pull people in the right direction to not see it as an enemy, but actually a friend that helps you be more successful. So I'm super curious to learn a bit more about, you know, your view of the role of the CRM, and then we go deeper and deeper and deeper into this topic.
Doug Davidoff: Yeah. So it's a great question, and it's a place where I think people get themselves into a whole lot of trouble and get lost — is the role of the CRM. There's only one reason that a company gets a CRM. There's only one reason for a company to think about. I guess there's a subset of the reasons, but there's only one purpose, and that is you want more growth, you want better growth, and you want more profitable growth. And that is about managing margins externally and costs internal. So in its simplest way, especially if you think of CRM as it relates to sales, the role of the CRM is to be able to make more sales with less. Which I think is something you never hear people talk about. Right? Like, I think you hear things like it should centralize all things marketing, sales, and service data. It should be the system of records, the one truth. Right? But, you know, coming from a — it should help drive more profitable growth, more efficient growth — is, I think, a really interesting view. And I think also when most people think about the CRM, whether you're in RevOps or in sales, wouldn't necessarily be the answer. How do you view that?
Janis Zech: The thing where I see a lot of — where a lot of companies, I think, get themselves into trouble, and I'm seeing it right now. It's fascinating because, you know, we're in a market that's difficult. People are having to rethink things. They're having to really double down on what their proposition is. And I candidly think they're getting it wrong.
Doug Davidoff: And here's where I think they're getting it wrong. They're so focused on what it is that they're selling. I think they've lost sight of what it is that they're buying. I can tell you as a customer of multiple products right now, I'm getting overwhelmed with noise that I don't care about. I didn't buy you for that. I had someone send to me that we're one of their lower utilization customers. And if you utilize more — and here's all the thing — I didn't buy you for that. Like, why are you inflicting this on me? So here's how I look at it. The people that decide to get CRM. Well, let me ask you this question. If a company is growing as fast or faster than they want and they see that growth being sustainable, they're generating the margins that they want, they're exceeding their profit expectations, how many of those companies have on their list of things to do — address CRM? No one. No one does. Right? So what's the problem? What's the problem that it's solving? The ultimate problem that it's solving is something around growth, something around margins, something around profitability. Now all those things — I'm not saying that those things don't matter. Not saying that source of truth doesn't. Not saying that alignment doesn't. They matter to the extent — like, why do you want your CRM to be the source of truth? Do you want it to be the source of truth because, like, you wanna win the source of truth award? Probably not. Like, when I talk to my customers, when I talk to my prospects, one of the things I say is, we understand you're not hiring us because you wanna win the blue ribbon award for the best or the cleanest CRM implementation. Right? You're hiring us to work on your CRM if that's what we're doing because you've got critical business outcomes. You've got some critical objectives that need to be achieved. That's why we're doing it. You know, one of the places where RevOps gets themselves into trouble as an example is if we define ourselves as keeping order, which — by the way, I would agree overall, if you have too much chaos, that's gonna get in the way of scale. But when the focus becomes order, when the focus becomes process compliance because of process compliance, you become the sales prevention department. Right? You get in the way. We have to remember that sales and marketing, by the way, is built on distinction. It's built on differentiation. It is built on variation. Right? And so never lose sight of why you're doing this and why we're doing CRM. Like, someone will tell me, we need to replace our CRM. I'm like, what's the problem? They'll say, systems are disconnected. No one knows what someone else is doing. Okay. Well, why — like, what is a problem about that? Like, so a problem is something that matters. A problem is an outcome that you're incapable of addressing. Now I would say if you don't have a source of truth, then there are likely things that you can't do that will lead to higher costs, you know, lower — not maximizing revenue opportunities, etcetera. But the order of operations is really, really important to whether or not whatever you're doing is actually gonna work and stand up to real life.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, we've had so many conversations with especially RevOps folks because it's a very RevOps focused audience. And I mean, I think always this idea of, okay, how do you actually drive ROI? Right? Like, what are the things that really matter? So let's maybe double click on that. If you think about CRM as, hey, more efficient and maybe predictable growth at a really good sales productivity — let's frame it that way. And maybe I'm framing it wrong, but, like, would you say there are pitfalls you're observing? And those might be perceptions. Those might be realities. Those might be technical things. Right? Like, what are the pitfalls you're seeing many companies are doing that prevent them from actually achieving that? Because I think to the earlier point, many folks, many companies, many sales and RevOps leaders wouldn't necessarily think about CRM that way. Right? So I'm super curious what you observe working with so many different companies.
Doug Davidoff: So I think one of the pitfalls is there's this obsession with efficiency, and it's so easy to manage and impact efficiency with technology. Right? So I think that's one of the reasons that we have these pitfalls. You know, if you haven't read the book The Goal, and you're dealing with CRM, I would highly recommend that you read The Goal. The Goal has nothing to do with sales technology. It's all about manufacturing. It was written in the nineteen nineties. It's probably the longest parable in the history of the world, but that's a story for another day. The story that it tells, and what it really unlocks, is the problem that existed in US manufacturing, especially in the nineteen eighties. And in the nineteen eighties, US manufacturers were as obsessed about efficiency as sales and marketing organizations are today, and they became more and more and more efficient. And the more efficient they got, the more money they lost. The bigger their write downs, the increased rate of bankruptcy. And the reason for that is twofold. We all know too much of anything is bad. Right? There comes a point where too much efficiency is bad. Too much quality, believe it or not, is probably bad. So the cost of it — like the trade off of efficiency — is resiliency and flexibility. Right? And we saw this in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. We built this amazing worldwide supply chain. It was beyond the dreams of supply chain dreamers for efficiency. I mean, we were just in time — two minutes. There was no slack in the system. All of a sudden, we're still paying the price. We're still adjusting to the fact that we had an unexpected disruption to something that's built for no disruption at all. And that is the danger of losing resiliency and flexibility. But here's the other thing. One of the problems that we look at when we're talking about sales and marketing process is we operate in a complex system. Right? And the difficulty when you're in a complex system and we're doing something in technology is technology operates on algorithms. So we pull a little piece of something out. Like, we're gonna work on email marketing. We're gonna say, we wanna increase the click because this email was really good and it had a good click rate. I always like to say, was the email good because it had a high click rate, or did it have a high click rate because the email was good? And so in a complex ecosystem — and this gets really meta, so I don't mean to do that — causes become effects to the next cause. So we feed back on ourselves. So we go in and we fix something that causes something to make what we fixed now be broken. Because when you're dealing with variable processes and complex processes interdependent, you're dealing with constraints and bottlenecks. Right? And so suddenly, the answer to maximizing the optimization of a complex system is not optimizing each of the individual parts. And that's where we keep falling ourselves into. We're trying to optimize our email, optimize our ad spend, optimize our — and here's the perfect example. Businesses worship sales cycle. Right? Everybody wants a shorter sales cycle. I was on a podcast with Pete Caputo from Databox, and he brought up that, wow, your sales cycle seems long compared — of course, our deal size was larger. There's a whole bunch of different things. And suddenly, there's this conversation that emerges of, wow, I wouldn't expect that a longer sales cycle could be good. And I'm like, well, sales cycle — by the way, if you wanna shorten your sales cycle, I can give you the greatest tip in the world. Do you wanna know how to absolutely shorten it? Minimize your short cycle rate. Just wait until someone's about to write a check before you start talking to them.
Janis Zech: Yeah. Right.
Doug Davidoff: Like, here's what I don't understand. Let's say I'm thinking about doing something and it's part of our twenty twenty five plan. Right? And so we're in the early stages of prepping and we know we wanna do something in twenty twenty five. And you're measuring sales cycle. Right? And you're, hey, congratulations, Jane cut her sales cycle by twenty percent. Hey, Ralph, what's going on? Your sales cycle is getting long. And now you learn about me. Do you wanna call me out and put me in your pipeline? I'm a one year sales cycle if you're lucky.
Janis Zech: Yeah.
Doug Davidoff: I think everybody would wanna know about me. I think there's really an opportunity to influence. We talk about account based marketing, like all those things. And so we become so intent based, so post intent, that we forget the job of sales and marketing — influence happens pre intent. Once we have intent, as a matter of fact, they call it intent bias. It's like all those things plug in. And I mean, sometimes I feel like we're back in the nineteen seventies and eighties where this is just a new variation of closing is the most important skill. Like, we used to think closing's what mattered because it's what happened closest to somebody buying. Then we finally realized, oh wait, it all happens long before you get to the close. So that's the business process that we're trying to manage. And the CRM is to give us insight and capability and the ability to manage that level of complexity. And when we lose sight of that, that's where I think a lot of things go wrong.
Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting how you speak about a complex system, which I mean, I think is defined as, you know, you put an input, but you don't know the output. Right? And the relationship is not a one to one relationship. I think that's very much what explains the marketing and the sales work. And what is so interesting is we've become obsessed with measuring everything. And I'm a big proponent of, you know, a data driven culture and especially informed decision making. Right? I think it's not about more data. It's really about finding the right insight that actually helps you make better decisions. But what is super interesting is — if you think about the top of the funnel, right — it is so hard to measure, for example, what we are doing here properly and to understand what is the impact on pipeline. And I think there are specific things in top of funnel that are just extremely hard to measure, but might have a huge impact on all the higher intent, you know, down the funnel demand generation aspects. And I think that's just — it is almost like a — I mean, there's many companies trying to solve that, but I think it's really fundamentally an unsolved problem unless you then really only focus on what you can measure and you invest there further. Right? Then you basically end up with maybe making the wrong decision, although the data tells you you're making absolutely the right decision.
Doug Davidoff: Well, so there's a couple things on that, and I completely agree with you. I mean, the first thing that we have to understand about all data is all data happened. Right? There's no data for tomorrow.
Janis Zech: Yep. Right. By definition.
Doug Davidoff: Right. So by definition, when we're looking at that, we're looking in the rearview. I'm a big believer in a data culture. I forget who coined it. Someone said data informed instead of data driven. I kinda like that. But here's where data goes wrong. Data goes wrong when we use it for answers. Data goes wrong when we use data to replace thinking. Data is powerful when it enables our thinking. So here's how you know, from my perspective, if you're using data well or not. Are you using data to give you an answer, or are you using it to simulate a better question and hypothesis? Data doesn't tell us which is better. Data gives us something to go deeper on. And let's not forget — I don't remember who this was, but someone actually labeled their role. It was like a higher end SDR equivalent, and I actually think this is what we should call top of funnel — fire starters. That's what we want. We want fire starters. If you think about what sales and marketing is — if all we're doing is selling to people who already need what we have, then I call that order taking. Right? And as you get bigger and you get stronger, those things will happen. But go to market, maintaining that value, maintaining that growth curve, that vitality — we're looking to produce nothing short of magic. We are trying to take needs that aren't fully understood, solutions that haven't been fully developed, and enable them to connect. There's an aspect of — there's two plus two equals kangaroo. There's an element of that that's happening. And if we try to over control it, then we get in the way. I mean, it sounds like I'm saying all art and not science, but actually all art is science. Right? We play a probabilistic game. It's about managing probabilities. It's not about managing definitives. Like, the worst analogy that I think kills RevOps is we talk about playing chess. RevOps is not chess. Go to market is not chess. It is poker. Chess is a competition of computation. Everybody has perfect information. Poker is a game of imperfect information. Poker is a game of stakes. It's a game of trade offs. That's where we are, and it's a fundamentally different game. And so when we — my problem is we keep treating humans — you know the whole thing, it's not B to B, it's H to H. But we keep treating the people like they're a flaw in the system, like they're the bug. Right? People are unpredictable. The whole beauty of the forty years I've spent in sales and marketing is that things happen that I could never have expected to happen. Right? You're riding a wave. You're riding a tornado. And Jeffrey Moore, who's probably the greatest go to market consultant, marketing consultant of all time — you know, everyone remembers him for Crossing the Chasm. Great book. But his second book was Inside the Tornado. And what he talked about was when you're in that fast growth space, you're riding a tornado. Right? And those are the things that we need to understand. And we need to realize that the map is not the terrain. The CRM presents the model. The CRM supports our ability to manage things. It is not the thing.
Janis Zech: Let's go back to the CRM. I wanna dive a bit deeper there. I mean, you have this idea of adoption versus utilization. Can you explain what that is and why the one matters more than the other?
Doug Davidoff: I'll give you a sound bite. The worst thing that you can do is focus on adoption. I don't care about adoption. Here's the problem with adoption. Here's how people measure adoption — frequency of use of the CRM. Like, we had one client that had a very clear adoption metric. What percentage — and by the way, when we met them, their adoption was six percent. What percentage of sales reps log in to the CRM at least once a month?
Janis Zech: Once a month? Yeah. Okay. But by the way, not — and by the way, it wasn't what percentage of salespeople add data even once. It's what percentage log into the CRM? From a product perspective, that's a churn risk, I'd say.
Doug Davidoff: Well, good news for them was it was a homegrown CRM. So if they churn, they were gonna churn on themselves. So what they wanted was they wanted to get to a ninety percent plus adoption, and they wanted to define their metric as logs into CRM at least once a week. Well, I don't really care if you log into the CRM. I don't know what I get for logging in. What's the most common mistake that I see sales organizations make with CRM? Data gets in late. Because let's be clear about something. In the moment, using CRM doesn't make anything easy. It's a step. It's something that I have to do. I have to type on a keyboard. It's a whole lot easier just to ignore. Right? And so when do most sales reps add deals? Well, they need a quote. By the way, I don't wanna add a deal as a sales rep sometimes because if I add a deal, all of a sudden my manager's gonna be asking me about it seventeen times a day. What's going on with it? What's going on with it? What's going on with it? So it's like, you know what, I'd just as soon not put it in. And so we look at it and we see — oh, wow. One of my favorite things that people say when we talk about sales performance is, once we get in front of them, we're great. We have no problem. If we get in front of them, we win. And sometimes they even show me, like, here's our CRM. We've got a sixty five, seventy percent win rate. By the way, let me tell everybody this. If you have a sixty five or seventy percent win rate, increase your prices. Increase your prices by twenty percent at least. Because if you've got a sixty five to seventy percent win rate, you've actually got a problem. Right? You're actually costing yourself money and costing yourself growth. But that's how it looks because by the time I put them in the CRM, there's a very high predisposition to buy. There's a very high predisposition to buy from you. Like, I see some people — their lead generation and initial process is so bad that they really have to wanna buy from you because they have to work to get in front of a salesperson. And so the difficulty with adoption is it gives you the — it looks like the CRM is being used. It looks like you have the data. You've got each sales rep averaging seventy deals or whatever. Like, they're in there. It looks like it's okay. But this is where data gets you into real trouble. Right? It's what Mark Twain once said. It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you think you know that ain't so. So you look at it and you say, we have a twenty three day sales cycle. I love this. We're a solution consultative selling organization. We have a twenty three day sales cycle. Let me be very clear — if you have a twenty three day sales cycle, you are not consultative. Right? If you have a twenty three day sales cycle, you're catching them — like, they've already decided they want it.
Janis Zech: Yeah. For sure. I mean, you have folks who understand when to create an opportunity and the opportunity is pretty much won. So all your exit criteria, sales stages — I mean, they don't matter. Right? Like, they basically — yeah, you can get rid of that immediately.
Doug Davidoff: And by the way, the most valuable data for a sales organization is not who buys from you or how much are they buying from you. It's who's not buying from you that should. Like, so if I don't have that early stage, if I don't have — so we actually use a two pipeline solution for this. We have a development pipeline, then we have the actual sales qualified element to it, because we wanna see what are we doing, where do things break down, what's happening on that journey to something being there. Because, oh, by the way, I can't actually control if you have a problem that I solve that needs solving. But I can control being relevant to you. And so what I know is in any given month, five percent of my market is gonna have a problem this month. They're gonna want reason and perspective. Now they'll probably try to figure it out internally, but think about it this way. If I could have a relationship with two hundred companies that fit my profile — that think and see, oh hey, I have a relevant meaningful take. They have a problem, and they go, I wonder what Doug and his team think about this, because they have a pretty interesting perspective on things. Well, if I do that, I'm now generating ten inquiries. Five percent. Right? It just kinda takes care of itself. Right? So how am I building that? I mean, we call that top of funnel. Like, it kinda frustrates me sometimes. But how do I build that relevance? That's what enables me to actually scale. Right? The whole first promise of inbound marketing — I remember saying this all the time. Something happened in your market today that's gonna cause that person in your market to buy from your competitor three years from now. Here's my question. Do you want them getting to know who you are today as that need develops over three years, or do you wanna wait till you have to find them when they're actually in their buying pursuit? Those are the things that we need to keep track of. Those are the things that we need to understand. So my question isn't, are we adopting CRM? It's are we utilizing CRM? What is utilization? Utilization is, are we using the CRM the way we're supposed to be utilizing the CRM? This is where I come to what we call at Lift the prime directive. Whenever you touch any technology, and let's talk about CRM here specifically, the business process must drive the CRM. The CRM should never dictate the business process. So let's get to something that actually really mattered. Nobody adopts technology. Nobody adopts technology. They adopt behaviors. They adopt business processes. The question is, are they adopting the business process? And does the CRM enable the adoption of the business process to be easier? Does it make following the process easier? Does it make it better? Do I get more juice for the squeeze? The only way I've ever seen any salesperson, especially, but really any user, use a technology on an ongoing basis the right way is when there's juice for the squeeze.
Janis Zech: So I think this is super interesting because, like, again, we talked about it in the beginning. I'm talking about it now again. I would think that ninety five percent of salespeople say, I hate the CRM. I don't wanna update the CRM. It's only costing me time. It's not making me better. I have to do it because of the reporting function. Right? So how do you turn that notion, you know, into something you're describing? Right? It's a business process. It helps me stay on top of, let's say, the SQLs. Right? Like, to know that they are there and I can actually follow up and it helps me do that in a timely manner and I stay on top of it, or I know exactly what are the right next steps. Because I think most of the implementations I've seen, they're just not like that. And most people on the field don't feel like that.
Doug Davidoff: Yep. A hundred percent. Now, first off, the first problem is in ninety eight point nine percent of the situations, it's got it almost reversed. There's no clear business process. Right? I mean, I come in all the time — our CRM is not working. I mean, here's the thing that's interesting. I've looked at — I've seen in the last eighteen months easily a hundred and fifty CRM requirement documents. With the exception of areas around data security, which have some new elements to them, the technical requirements for CRM — Salesforce met them in two thousand two. I don't know a reasonable CRM that doesn't meet the technical requirements.
Janis Zech: Yeah. It's gonna be a huge challenge.
Doug Davidoff: Right. Yeah. So first off, what am I supposed to be doing? And by the way, is the business process actually designed to enable salespeople to maximize their productivity? So the problem — like, technology, CRM is not a solution. It's an enabler. It's an accelerator. So map your business process. How do you get it so that it's used? The mantra is actually really simple. Hard to get there, but really simple. Don't make me think. Right? The moment I have to think about the CRM, we've got a problem. And I'm not telling you that with our CRM implementation, sales reps never have to think about the CRM. What I can tell you is every time we find them thinking about the CRM, we go, how do we fix that? How do we make that so that in essence, the CRM is queuing them? So as an example, one of the things that I used to do — who are my SQLs? Who are my top one hundred? Who are the people I haven't talked to in what amount of time? I don't think reps have the kind of time to do that. We're in such a reactive loop that even when we think we're being proactive, we're actually being reactive. Now it doesn't take a lot of time to look at that, but it does take a lot of bandwidth and energy. I gotta take a look at who do I have? Okay. What do I wanna talk to that person about? And just as I'm thinking about it, my phone rings or I get an email from a customer who wants to know something, or the prospect that's at the end stage. So here's what we do. Let's map our process. Let's map our scenarios. Let's map the conversations that we're having. Right? Those conversations turn into plays. Right? So you're the person who has an initiative in twenty twenty five. You're finishing up this initiative, and you've got your big show here. I've got a play for that. Right? So this is a part of the journey where I want to maintain this type of contact level. I want to sprinkle in my underlying content from others. And so what I get to do is I can spend — I like to spend like an hour every Monday morning, and I go through and I look at it. By the way, you can actually centralize this if you map it out fully. Right? So you can have a RevOps person that's actually looking at, based on context, puts people in their appropriate place. And now I come in and proactively, the system's telling me, here's the people that you're calling about this item. Right? You know, about this message, and here's the call. Here's the emails. And so I kinda come in and I don't have to — I get to go home at night. This is my favorite thing about how we've configured it for us. I get to go to the rest of the night and I don't have to think about, okay, who do I need to call tomorrow? Because when I come in in the morning, I go to my command central. It tells me, okay, here's who you're talking to. Here's what you're talking to them about. And I'm able to manage that. And then my CRM says, oh, here's three pieces of content you can share with them.
Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Doug Davidoff: It doesn't make me go look for it. That's how — now you start giving me that. I don't know a lot of people who don't start using that because they begin to realize, hey, as I'm putting information in — oh, by the way, I don't have to have seventeen conversations via email and Slack to know what's going on. My manager no longer keeps bugging me about the deal. Because guess what? If I keep the CRM updated and it's in the CRM, you don't ask me about it. If you ask me about it and it's in the CRM, then what you're telling me is I don't have to use the CRM. Your choice.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, it's not a cultural issue. Right? I mean, if you put the work in, and then you get asked about the same thing that you could actually look at asynchronously and just read up on it — I mean, I think there's a variety of things. Right? It's from, you know, simplification. I mean, how many clicks and fields do I actually need to update? Right? Like, do I have required fields that block me, but I don't have the information? Right? I mean, you talked about it in your podcast as well. Right? Like, what do I do if there's a required field and I just don't know? Which I think, going back to the idea of a complex flow, right, which isn't always linear — which I think is the reality that we're living in — is really hard to do. So yeah, I mean, I think there are so many aspects to this. I feel like we could actually continue talking about this. We maybe have to do like a v two, you know, of this where we go higher, then we go lower, lower, lower, lower.
Doug Davidoff: I'd love to. That would be fun. That would be good.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I agree with you. So, like, one thing we ask every guest — the closing question. I'm super curious. Like, if you were starting now back in the days, what would you tell your younger self to get into this space and, you know, to be successful in this space?
Doug Davidoff: So a couple things come to mind. So the first thing is I think I would probably tell my younger self everything's gonna be okay. I think I would tell that to my older self too sometimes. The biggest lesson that I've learned that I would probably tell — actually, this would probably have had the biggest impact on me. I would have spilled a whole lot less blood. Success is in the plumbing. It's not the idea. It's not even the quote unquote strategy. So I've always been a big idea guy. Best idea. And what I've learned is you don't need to have — I mean, just think about it. You only need one great idea, and the idea doesn't even have to be that great. It just has to be incrementally better than something else that just consistently grinds at it. So today, I take pride that I'm a grinder. I like to think of myself as a grinder. I know when I'm hiring people, and the biggest compliment I can give to somebody on my team is you're a grinder. And that I think is what I would go back and tell myself — it's not how big the step is. It's how consistent.
Janis Zech: I love that. Very much resonates as a fellow entrepreneur. Doug, thank you so much for being here. Really, really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, stay tuned for part two.
Doug Davidoff: Thank you so much. Here we go. Thank you.
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