I spent four years at Gorgias building the RevOps team and helping the company grow from $10M to over $70M. As we crossed the 60 GTM member mark, our CRM was increasingly unusable.
- Marketing was fighting an uphill battle wrestling formatting issues and inaccurate data while building automated outbound
- Partnerships team was wrangling duplicates and outdated ownership
- Sales team was trying to keep all of the properties updated that were critical for product feedback and legal
It was a mess. And RevOps? We spent a good chunk of our time scrambling to resolve the "CRM is a mess" Slack pings and Linear tickets submitted as GTM teams were blocked from doing their jobs properly. My team grew as we fielded an ever-growing backlog of CRM craziness. We wanted to be working on the fun, revenue-driving initiatives, but instead woke up in the mornings to find thousands of duplicates were randomly created overnight or that key fields were missing causing the numbers for the board meeting later that week to significantly change the business conclusion.
I hated the CRM cleanup part of my job. And I hated how variable it was. I never knew the full extent of the issues, and spent a mind-numbing amount of time fixing them whack-a-mole style as they popped up.
While the GTM teams and the RevOps team at Gorgias were super smart and found hacky ways of making it work, I ended up leaving to start a RevOps agency and get away from the ad-hoc interrupt-y CRM cleanup tasks, focusing more on the "fun stuff."
When I got my first client, I was relieved and excited to change it up and help them build some proactive & revenue-generating process, automation, and analytics. But before we could even start on the projects, I was met with the harsh discovery that there were massive CRM data quality issues that significantly stunted our ability to operate. Here I was, quite literally running away from these familiar problems only to discover them haunting me again under a different logo.
It felt like a pit in my stomach as I saw all of the cleanup work that would be required to create useful analytics & repeatable processes, and slowly realized that this problem wasn't just scoped to Gorgias and this new client — this must be everywhere
And it makes unfortunate sense - as GTM teams scale, they add new people, change process, add requirements and those all result in additional mess. While the GTM increasingly depends on the CRM as the central record of truth for growth — informing growth headcount planning, board reporting, and management activities spanning teams across the customer journey, it ironically gets less and less useful.
So I pivoted my RevOps consulting agency to build Axon, a tool that solves these issues for B2B companies like Gorgias, my first client, and anyone else that struggles with CRM quality. We use AI and hardcore data engineering to check for 27 (and counting) issues I experienced at Gorgias on every single record in your CRM.
I understand first-hand how hellish maintaining a CRM can be. And I literally tried to run away from doing the cleanup work. But it's too pervasive, and affects so many GTM leaders and operators at all sizes of B2B company. For that reason, it's a problem that I deeply care about and feel at Axon, we are uniquely equipped to solve. There is so much power in what a clean CRM can unlock for teams, and tapping into that power is tremendously motivating. If this is what it takes to save people the mental burden and give peace-of-mind trust in the CRM - let's do it.
