In this episode, Steve and Sam are joined by special guest Clint Oram, who recently left SugarCRM after exactly 21 years.
The group explores the future of CRM, the transformative power of AI, and how technology is reshaping the way organizations think about customer relationships, system design, and collaboration.
Listen to this episode here, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
STEVE: Welcome to CRM Talk, the show that brings you the latest in CRM and CRM-related news and information. This is Steve Chipman along with my co-host, Sam Biardo. Today we have a special guest, Clint Oram, co-founder of Sugar CRM, the most successful open-source CRM and a leading commercial CRM. And Clint recently left Sugar after exactly 21 years of being there. Welcome Clint.
CLINT: Thank you very much, Steve. Sam, good to see you again. Yeah, 21 years to the day.
STEVE: That sounds planned.
CLINT: It was a bit planned.
SAM: He had to get to that 21 year to get the watch, right?
CLINT: There you go. Yeah.
SAM: So today our goal is to talk a little bit about where CRM is going. And so what do we think CRM of the future will look like?
CLINT: I spend a lot of time thinking about this topic. Perfect. I think you’ve got the right guy. At least from, I spent time on it. I don’t know if I have all the right answers by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely spend a lot of time thinking about this topic.
SAM: Well, I’m starting out by asking about AI because everybody is talking about AI in everything. So let’s, how is AI going to influence CRM?
CLINT: Boy, you know, we just talked a moment ago how I left my company SugarCRM after 21 years just about eight weeks ago and all I’ve been doing is researching AI since then. Every single day, spending, listening to podcasts, digging into the topic, thinking about it. And I don’t think this is a CRM only topic, of course. This is the future of work. This is frankly, this is the future of human society. I think it spans everything that we’re thinking about. But when I really take a step back and I think about AI in the context of CRM, I know that I’ve always had a vision of CRM becoming my personal assistant. Tell me what to do next, tell me something I didn’t already know, do the easy things for me. And I think that’s where we’re ultimately heading towards. I think we’re looking to a very significant shift in the way that we do work as a whole and everything from the way we learn in school to the way we get our job done, to the way we get our personal life done with a personal assistant. And I think that’s where we’re going next.
SAM: It’s funny, about two nights ago, I was having dinner with some friends and someone asked the question, do you know anybody who has a personal assistant anymore?
CLINT: Yeah. That world is changing quickly. I know I had a personal assistant for or executive assistant for for many, many years and she and I talk occasionally and she wonders about what’s happening to my career. And I said, well, it’s time to evolve and think about how you take advantage of these tools. But yeah, the world of executive assistants the way we knew 10, 15, 20 years ago, I think is going to be taken over by AI.
STEVE: So specific to CRM, one of the things I think about is the fact that with a lot of companies, their CRM systems present a very limited data set. And AI in some use cases doesn’t start to get useful until you have much larger data sets. So as such, is the adoption and the benefit of AI going to be greater in enterprises and then eventually flow down to smaller organizations?
CLINT: I think I understand where you’re going with that, the thrust of that topic, Steve, certainly in the world of analytics and and predictive AI, large data sets is what drives accuracy. But a couple thoughts in here. So first off, email is by far the largest data set about your customer that has been forever divorced from CRM. No matter all the efforts we’ve done over the years of trying to do email plugins and connect the two together. But you’ve got so much data about your customers locked up inside of your email system. And then you’ve got so much data about your customers locked up inside of your CRM. And you’ve got so much data about your customers locked up inside of your ERP. If you think of those three different tools, and then just think about all the different word documents and PowerPoint presentations. There’s actually a large amount of data about your customers that isn’t in your CRM. And I think AI is going to knock down all those barriers, right? In fact, let me put a thought out on the table. I’m going to say in, I don’t know, let’s call it five years, 10 years, I’m not going to try and play Gartner and say 80% accurate, you know, 80% likelihood that in three to five years, at some point in the future, I don’t think we’ll be thinking about CRM or ERP or even email systems. I don’t think we’ll be consciously thinking about these discrete systems. My description, my analogy in there is my dad was a car guy. Is a car guy, right? Has always been a car guy, right? He was a mechanic as a kid, always cranking, he’s your classic wrench. And when he talks about cars, he talks about displacement, he talks about valves, he talks about torque, he talks about all these things about the engine of the car. What do I talk about cars? Cup holders, color, getting from point A to point B. I have an Audi TT, couldn’t tell you what the horsepower or torque is, it doesn’t matter. It goes fast, it’s fun, it’s zippy. It’s got one cup holder, kind of a little annoying. So I think the evolution of how we think about business systems is coming right in front of us in such a way that we won’t be thinking about discrete systems the way we think about today. Instead we’ll be thinking about getting business done. How do I make customers happy? How do I deliver the products or services that need to get delivered? How do I work with my personal assistant that then interfaces with these data stores in the background, whether it’s email, ERP, CRM and gives me the answers and the guidance that I need to get my job done and does the easy things for me. And I think that’s how I think about that question, Steve.
STEVE: So you’re saying that these will all under the hood be separate categories of product, but as the user, I will just lose the visibility to those different categories.
CLINT: I think that’ll be, much like engines and cup holders kind of define two different eras of cars, if you will, I think we’re going to go down that path. Not to say that CRM will just disappear. It’ll be a very important part of the back end of these systems, but the way we interface with them, the way we think about them is going to change dramatically. And in there, those data silos across the business are going to get knocked down to the point where you won’t even think about them. And all of that data about your customer that’s locked up inside of your Microsoft OneDrive and your Outlook and your QuickBooks and your Sugar CRM system, all that data is going to be pulled together into one AI interface that drives the way you get the business done. And that problem about volume of data that you started the question with Steve, is going to be solved that way.
STEVE: And how about, so the other question that pops to mind is the security. So now that you’re in this future state where you’re pulling data from all these sources, how do you make sure you protect your customer from some of the information they shared with you that might be confidential in an email thread? Or is that just another evolution of AI?
CLINT: I think that’s just another evolution of AI. I gotta tell you, I’m an apps guy. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about security. Security is one of those taxes that you have to pay in terms of getting the job done. I remember the very first feature that we built into the commercial version of Sugar, we had the free open source version of Sugar that did not have row-level security built into it and then we had that in the commercial version of the product. And that was a big deal 20 years ago. And I then found myself over the course of the next 20 years coaching customers like, just turn that feature off. Turn off the row-level security because the whole point of a CRM system is for people to collaborate and see what’s going on with customers. So I think security is going to continue to be a very important aspect in terms of making sure that people outside of your organization can’t see what’s going on inside of the organization, but I do think that we’re rapidly if not already in a rapidly approaching, if not already in a world where within an organization, you want to share as much as you can to get that synergy of collaboration happening.
STEVE: So let me ask one more AI related question, then Sam, I’ll let you chime in. So what about this concept of using these generative AI development tools? Like for example, I decided to test bolt.new and try to one shot a CRM app and it did a pretty good job.
CLINT: What did you do in Replit or Cursor or what did you use to do that?
STEVE: No, bolt.new.
CLINT: Oh, bolt.new. I haven’t tried that one out.
STEVE: Yeah, from StackBlitz.
CLINT: There’s a new one every couple of days it seems like. But so you were vibe coding.
STEVE: I guess before it was called that. This was a few months ago. And anyway, they just famously had the world’s biggest ever hackathon this past weekend. So they’re really making a name for themselves. But anyway, my point is is that we might get to this stage where someone can maybe not one shot, but iteratively develop an all-in-one solution that’s email, CRM, ERP, and then those vendors go away too, right?
CLINT: That is the world that we’re trending towards, 100%. It’s pretty amazing how quickly, the whole idea of, I joked about vibe coding, but I’ll double down on the idea. It’s how do you rapidly prototype a product, a code, a website inside of minutes instead of days, weeks, months. And how do you quickly try ideas and throw them away? That’s the world that we’re moving towards and how do we enable ourselves to get to these products so quickly that it’s less about the code and it’s more about the idea than ever before and the best ideas win as opposed to the best code wins. And I think, not to go too far off the rails, but I’ve been spending a lot of time the last couple weeks digging into this concept of vibe marketing and where vibe marketing is going. It’s amazing. It really for those of us that are, I’m a developer by by background, and those of us that are lazy developers, which I think is the definition of always has been the definition of a good developer is somebody who’s lazy, somebody who likes to take the shortest path to the answer and automate everything around you. The whole what AI-driven products or development environments can do for you today is got the opportunity to just massively explode the number of developers that are out there and unlock ideas in a way that we haven’t seen the the knee in the curve, if you will, the explosion of ideas since the late 1990s when we were going from client-server technology to web-based technology.
STEVE: Imagine if you had these tools 21 years ago.
CLINT: We were it seems like we were talking about it. We had a lot of great ideas back in 20 to 25 years ago at the front end of the internet and it seems like technology’s finally finally caught up with our stream of ideas.
SAM: I want to jump back about security though. I agree with you. I like everyone to see everything, but I think the purpose of having security is to protect fraud. And where I see this, I think this is going to be something the AI is going to do, right? Because what they’re really all concerned about is I’m working at a bank and I want to see how much my neighbor has in their bank account. And so the AI is going to protect it because that’s a query it won’t allow. And I think that’s the way you get around the security issues Steve that you were talking about.
CLINT: Yeah, Sugar has been very conscious about, as a bit glib about it a few minutes ago. Let me come kind of come back and rewind a little bit and point out that protecting yourself from fraud, protecting yourself from hacking, protecting yourself from the nefarious evildoers out there and there are plenty of them is critically important to the success of your business. And where I personally get a little where I see the tension come in is when security focus ends up inhibiting collaboration within a company such that the company slows down against its competitors or isn’t able to deliver the full experience to the customers that the customer is looking for. But all those topics aside, what we’ve seen in my experience working with OpenAI when I was at Sugar was they do a fantastic job of ensuring that their models are never leaking data out to others. If you think about that concern of lots of data being merged together into a multi-tenant environment and can it get leaked inappropriately to others. We’ve had that concern in cloud computing since day one and we’ve I think as an industry, we’ve learned to be very careful about that. But at the same time, remember, data leaks happen, exposure happens, it’s how you react to it that defines the difference between an immature organization and a mature organization. So no matter how careful you are, there will always end up being some leak somewhere, some hack somewhere that exposes data in some shape, way or form and it’s all about how you jump on it and how you manage it and how you communicate it in the end.
STEVE: Well, just as a sidebar, I was recently doing some marketing work for a security company that does dynamic encryption and we did a little research into the healthcare industry and we found that EMR systems, so the database systems are super safe. That’s not where the breaches are. The breaches are when spreadsheets as email attachments with patient data have come in from external organizations and get intercepted on the way to the EMR. So most of the insecure data, so for for we database guys, we’ve got the safe platform. The dangerous platform is all that free-flowing communication.
SAM: So let’s go back to what you were discussing, the no-code world or the design world. I remember early on, we used to have code generators where you’d paint out a screen and would generate a ton of code and then it would be almost impossible to maintain. And I think in the last few years, the combination of the technology of no-code along with AI has really made it easy to develop new applications. And so the question is, is that part of the future or is the no-code platform really not even necessary anymore? It’s just the AI that’s generating the solution.
CLINT: No code is here, absolutely. Enabling those who don’t have a computer science degree to be able to express their ideas in software is the nirvana that we’ve been working towards for for decades and it’s absolutely here and we’re absolutely expanding upon it. And so no code is definitely the reality of today and the future ahead of us more so than ever with AI. However, you made a great point in there, Sam, where it’s easy to create spaghetti code, right? It’s easy to spin up an idea really quickly on on Replit or any of these other code generation tools that will even go so far as to deploy it as a SAS service itself. Is that maintainable, right? Is that secure? Is it meet all the requirements of the midmarket, of any company that’s thinking about all the security issues that we just talked about? Probably not. I look at those tools as prototyping tools. I think the skills of a trained software engineer are needed more than ever. In fact, we need more and more software engineers who are going to be frankly helping to kind of clean up some of these these great prototypes that are getting built quickly and turning them into robust, maintainable, scalable, secure solutions that meet the needs of millions of people. So I think both worlds are exploding ahead of us. I don’t think code is going away. I don’t think code developers are going away, but I think we’re going to have more and more people generating more and more code through AI in the future. I think it’s a software world in front of us, no doubt about it.
SAM: Well, when no code first came out, we used to joke that the comma was missing. And the reality is now I don’t think that, I think it’s true. I think no code is really no code today.
CLINT: Well, I think one of the things that I know we’ve put a lot of time and effort at SugarCRM and I’m watching other companies do is start creating maintainable type systems. For instance, can I these these different workflow patterns that I’m creating, can I check them into a source code repository? Can I diff them against a previous version? Can I roll back to a previous version? There’s nothing more frustrating than spinning out 150 workflows that start conflicting with one another with no ability to unwind those workflows definitions and troubleshoot them and things like that. So I think even though we are rapidly in a world where people are thinking about Lego blocks instead of semicolons, if you will, how do I construct pieces together in a kind of a visual format? A lot of those lessons learned over the years of managing code apply directly to managing the Lego blocks.
STEVE: So I’ve got a a high-level question for you over your 21 years and as a mainly a product guy, what do you think were some of the most stellar features of CRM that maybe Sugar developed and really resulted in some of the greatest success among people who use CRM?
CLINT: Boy, there’s so many. It’s kind of hard to come up with a short list. I’ll go probably most recent first. When we at Sugar, when we enabled the new intelligence feature where we were taking data and passing it into OpenAI and getting a summary of an opportunity, getting a summary of an account. That was just fascinating. I got to tell you, for those of us that are well-trained in the world of CRM, we’ve all gotten good at being able to glance around a screen, click at the right sub panel and pull together a story about the customer in your head after maybe 30, 60, 90 seconds of click, click, click, click, click. Okay, this is what’s going on. And to have the system just spit it out as part of the screen. Here’s the summary and here’s exactly what’s going on. Oh, I’m not sure if I trust that. Let me go click around. Oh, wait, it’s absolutely accurate. That was probably the coolest, most recent feature, Steve, that I can think of. If I kind of go back in time, certainly the first mobile apps were were horrible, but when you got to that first really usable mobile app and being able to get to your customer data on the road while you’re driving or just leaving a customer site visit and dictate your notes directly into the phone. That was that was super cool. I’ll call out a Salesforce feature that, I’ve spent my whole career competing against Salesforce, but I have to acknowledge the fact that they build some good products. They had an early on feature that I always just thought was so darn clever. With a click of a button, you can send an email out to a contact and ask them to update their contact information. Having the CRM be something where it’s more than just a pipeline management tool, but you can actually clean up your contacts by reaching out to your contacts directly and ask them to give you their latest title. I thought that was a really cool feature back in, I think that was era 2005 or something like that. Those are some of the ones that come to mind. I could go calculated fields. I got to tell you for those of us that spend a lot of time in reports, calculated fields are really freaking cool. But yeah, there we go. I’ll stop it there before I go through a list of every feature of the last 20 years.
STEVE: Okay, so another high-level question, since part of my current business is helping mid-market companies choose the best CRM system, usually multi-departmental. In your mind for our listeners, for a company that’s say mid-market or larger that’s considering a new CRM, what are some of the top things they should be thinking about, questions they should be asking the vendors before they commit to a specific solution?
CLINT: I think over the last 20 years, a lot of the CRM capabilities have really gotten kind of the same, right? They’re not that different. And I think that’s probably been one of the biggest challenges in the CRM industry over this last 5, 10 years is knowing when to choose a vendor when the feature lists, at a high-level view, kind of all look the same. Where my view’s been and was a big part of what I was driving when I was at Sugar as chief strategy officer is industry expertise. I think we’re now in that era of the long tail where the value of just a vanilla horizontal software solution, whether it’s CRM, whether it’s ERP, go supply chain, go through your list of all the different enterprise apps that are out there. If you don’t know your customer’s industry intimately and have application capabilities that are tuned to that specific industry, I think you’re going to get left behind. And I think the especially in a world where where you just described Steve earlier, where an average Joe can just describe a CRM application into a prompt and AI will spit out the application directly there. I think, yeah, that’s kind of in a nutshell is I think industry expertise is critically important. Know my company, right? Don’t just deliver great software, deliver great software for me, the size of company I am, the industry that I am, the challenges that I deal with. Because you got to remember and I’m stealing a quote from from somebody who who said this to me a few years ago that used to work for me many years ago, a guy named Charles Hicks. He said something very insightful. People don’t want to buy software. They want to buy outcomes. Software just happens to be the path to get there. So, think about the outcomes and think about the outcomes that are relevant to your customer as opposed to thinking about building that cool feature that happens to excite you as the product manager at a company. To me, that’s always been the definition of success and I think in today’s world of hyper competition, it’s more real than ever.
STEVE: Yeah, and that means demonstrating to outcomes. So if you’re the vendor, you don’t want to show off the latest features, you want to demonstrate to those outcomes.
CLINT: Exactly.
SAM: I was going to talk, first of all, I totally agree. It’s no longer about verticals, it’s about the micro-verticals. And the way I was telling someone recently about this is we used to build verticals for like consumer packaged goods. But now and then it was like, well, consumer packaged goods for perishables, but now it’s like consumer packaged goods for people who bake cookies. Because and AI can do that now. Because between the combination of no code and the AI, we can get to that level. And that’s what, by the way, when you’re talking to that cookie guy, that’s all he wants to see. He doesn’t really care if you can sell electronics through Best Buy through your application because it means nothing to them. It’s all about how you can personalize it.
CLINT: You know, Sam, you were the first person to be preaching the value of verticalization to me maybe a decade ago, right? Saying, hey Clint, Sugar should really go down this path and really focus in on some key verticals and I know inside of your own business that you had done a lot of effort to focus on a set of specific verticals as well. And I brushed you off. I really did. In my mind, success was about building the biggest horizontal juggernaut possible. And the reality is that I think you were right and I was wrong. I’ve come around to your point of view. But a big part of why I was leery of that idea Sam a decade ago when you were bringing it to me was, I didn’t have personal knowledge of all these different verticals, right? However, as you just said a moment ago, you can sit down with with Claude, Chat GPT, Grok, whatever and start asking questions about these micro verticals. What are the key financial metrics for the cooking baking industry, right? And you can start asking all these questions and within the course of a few hours get pretty darn good workable knowledge about these different verticals in a way that you can start guiding your product development appropriately. And instead of having to pay somebody to go off and do research, a $20,000 research report on a vertical that you may or may not be right about, you can do it yourself and I’ve been doing it myself over the last two years since I started more heavily using Chat GPT and I find it amazing how quickly you can get up to speed on those different verticals in a way that allows you to be extremely effective.
SAM: Yeah, you know about five years ago, we built a solution for an ice cream manufacturer and about two years after that, we were talking to a bakery and they wanted a reference. And so we gave them the reference of the ice cream manufacturer and even showed some of the features and their selling models were identical, their marketing models were identical and the guy goes, but they’re selling ice cream.
CLINT: That’s an ice cream company. They’re worlds apart. Not really, but okay.
STEVE: All right. So I have a wrap-up question unless Sam, you have any other specific things you want to discuss?
SAM: I’m good.
STEVE: So what would you, if there’s a tech founder today, any not just CRM, any industry that wanted to enter an industry that had some established incumbents, what would be your advice to them other than don’t do it?
CLINT: Actually I have the, I’m an entrepreneur at heart in everything I do, every aspect of my life. I encourage people to do it. I think disruption is fun, it’s exciting, it’s a different mindset. And it ultimately can be extremely lucrative along the way. So you got to have a key capability that’s different, right? I think 20 years ago, if you were selling differently, if you were being more, if your go-to market was different, you could differentiate on your go-to market in a way that allowed you to stand out. But I think in today’s world of the flat earth that’s around us with every piece of knowledge at your fingertips, the only thing slowing you down is your imagination of what questions you can ask Chat GPT. It’s more than just go-to market. You do need to build a great go-to market engine that’s highly efficient and builds a great customer experience, but I think you need to have something that’s from a product perspective, unique and different that you can build a wedge position around. And I think that’s my key piece of advice. But I got to tell you, just use your favorite AI as a product coach. Give it the prompt, act as a product coach and the ideas are limitless. I really this is if there’s one thing I’ve really learned over the last eight weeks as I’ve immersed myself into the world of AI and all the different LLM tools that are out there, the ideas are limitless. They are there. You just need to know what questions to ask.
STEVE: Yeah, and I like what you said, it’s the equivalent to in marketing you talk about building a moat and you’re referring to really building some sort of product moat. So you’ve got something that people can’t just replicate in a few weeks.
CLINT: Well, it’s an interesting point Steve. I’m going to hit that one just a little bit longer. Keep in mind, no moat is entirely defensible in perpetuity. Whatever moat you have today will be gone because somebody’s going to come along and say, hey, that’s a great idea, let me go ahead and copy that. So the idea of a moat being this fixed moat that you just need to continue to invest in one piece of technology, what you need to be showing is innovation. You need to be showing that you’re pushing the envelope. The software is never about the software you have today. Customers don’t come to you today about the software they might come to you because of the software that you have today. They won’t stay with you because of the software you have. They will stay with you because of the software that you have tomorrow. So you need to be keep investing in those in those great ideas and your moat might go away and that’s okay, right? Because you need to build the next moat. So there you go. There’s my philosophy on moats.
STEVE: No, that’s great. And if you look at the AI space, you look at bolt.new which I referenced earlier, you look at 11 Labs which I’ve been digging into and if these guys don’t keep innovating, they’re going to get steamrolled by Google or someone else. They just have to be super innovators and keep bringing new stuff to market.
CLINT: Well, if they’re lucky, they’ll get, I think they will get steamrolled by the juggernauts later. If they’re lucky, they’ll get bought, right? And their technology will become the technology of AWS or Azure or GCP.
STEVE: You’re right, you’re right. All right. Well, Clint, thanks for your insights. We won’t wait what is it, 12 years for our next episode. I don’t know what either of us are going to be doing in 12 years. So it’s got to be sooner than that.
SAM: I remember that we talked about we needed an episode on autonomous vehicles if I remember our last episode together. So maybe we can think about planning that.
STEVE: Yeah, and in fact, now that you’re spending time digging into AI, we should probably schedule a follow-up sooner rather than later because probably in a few months, you’ll have a lot of new info for us.
CLINT: Yeah, I’ve got some stuff I’m cooking on right now. Looking forward to picking up the discussion in a couple of months when I’ll be ready to share what I’ve been working on these past couple of months.
STEVE: That sounds great. Thanks, thanks a bunch, Clint.
SAM: Yeah, great connecting with you.
CLINT: You too, guys. Have a great one.