The newsletterOnce or twice a week. 1 hot take, 2 tool suggestions, 3 best practices.
No. 002
Stop adding required fields to your CRM.
I was on a call a couple of weeks ago with a potential customer who was about to add six or seven (😂) required fields to their CRM during the deal close process. A rep would have to fill them out before closing a deal so the post-sale teams got the right context (feature interests, workflow challenges, etc).
I got asked about it again on a podcast (HabitStack, release coming soon) last week and here’s what I said instead.
If you were asking me six or seven years ago, I would have told you that’s absolutely the right approach. Now, I don’t think you should do it at all.
The transcript already has everything you need. Your CRM record has, at most, 40 or 50 fields you actually care about in a mature, detailed process. You can fill out hundreds from the transcript, and the rep never has to touch it.
And the transcript is more accurate than the rep. A rep gets off a demo, goes into four more meetings, and updates the CRM at the end of the day from memory. Human memory is bad. The transcript is what the customer actually said, not what the rep remembers them saying.
So have AI pull the things onboarding needs out of the transcript and drop them on the deal and ticket. And when onboarding has a follow-up question, they ask the transcript, not the rep.
Of course, required fields are still needed occasionally. But you can drastically reduce a lot of admin and increase accuracy with AI extracting from transcripts and reps reviewing the output.
Human memory in particular is extremely, extremely poor.
Two tools I'd buy. One I cancelled.
Composio
I added this for one reason. I wanted Google Search Console and Google Analytics inside Claude for the new website, and there didn’t seem to be a default connector. Composio is a free hosted gateway. You connect a tool once and Claude can call it from anywhere, through MCP, which is just the standard plug for hooking a tool up to Claude. Took about ten minutes.
Then I found the part that actually makes it worth recommending more broadly. It lets you connect multiple accounts for the same app to Claude. I hear a ton of complaining about not allowing multiple Gmail connections, for example. Many of us have multiple emails. Perfect solution. Tons of other situations where it would be valuable.
Quick note: you are giving Composio the access to your accounts, technically, not Claude (or whatever you’re connecting it to). They have SOC2 and all that, so I’m not super concerned about the risk. But generally I would go the route of a first-party Claude connector first unless you need something they have that Claude doesn’t or you need the multiple accounts feature.
Salesmsg
I’ve brought this one up on more calls in the last month than any other tool. It’s simply the best SMS tool I’ve used in recent years with the best HubSpot integration, in particular. In multiple cases, I’ve used it to implement one business number that starts in sales and carries through onboarding, billing, and support, and each reply routes to whoever owns that stage in the CRM.
Two reasons it keeps coming up. For many of you, your deal and onboarding threads are happening on reps’ personal phones and nobody else can see them. And in a lot of markets people answer texts and ignore email. I put it in an audit for a software client last month as the biggest single lever on time from close-to-value, because most of that time was customers not responding.
I run my own number on it. The text button at the bottom of the email version of this is Salesmsg, and my scheduled Claude and Gumloop runs text me when they finish. It also has pretty killer AI agents with tagging based on results that can go into the CRM (super useful for automations).
Full disclosure, it’s a referral link. I’m a big fan and am happy to help anyone set it up. Book with me here.
Gamma
Replacing it with
Three things I'd do this week
Ask what you're doing with your transcripts.
It’s the first question I ask any company that wants help with AI, and almost nobody has an answer. That’s not because they’re behind. For 15 years the data RevOps cared about was structured. Drop-downs, numbers, dates, whatever you could put in a report. The AI made unstructured data usable, and transcripts from sales, onboarding, and customer success are the richest source of it you’ve ever had.
You can probably fill out hundreds of different fields just with the transcript data if you’re using it correctly, and that requires absolutely no interaction from the sales rep in the CRM.
Fix the process before you point AI at it.
I said some version of this on three separate calls in four days last week. The person wants to add AI to sales, or support, or onboarding. And when we got into it, the process underneath wasn’t documented, the CRM data wasn’t accurate and was incomplete, and the tools didn’t talk to each other. Roughly 95 percent of the AI projects I quote has some element of RevOps optimization before we can even start.
That’s not a reason to wait on AI. It’s the order of operations. Map the work, clean the data, then automate.
AI just amplifies whatever’s already broken in your process.
Get the transcript without a bot joining the call.
None of the above works until the transcript is somewhere you can reach it. Use a local tool that runs on your machine, not a bot that joins the meeting. People act differently when a bot shows up and sometimes bots won’t join certain platforms’ calls. For me, Notion’s AI note taker is good enough and I’m already paying for other features. Krisp is better, generally, but Notion is consolidating tools for me. I’m looking forward to when WisprFlow’s note taker releases for Windows (I spend about 75% of time on Windows vs my Mac).
Thanks for reading. The first issue got a 50 percent open rate, which for a first send is wild. And many of you replied with positive feedback and a lot of love, so thank you! If you’re about to add a required field to the CRM this week, hit reply first. I’ll talk you out of it!
Kevin
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