Every modern company has a CRM. Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho—pick your flavor. Billions of dollars flow into these platforms annually. Entire careers are built around implementing and optimizing them.
And for sales teams, they're transformational.
But here's the uncomfortable truth nobody in enterprise software wants to acknowledge: CRM serves roughly 20% of your company. The other 80% is on their own.
The CRM Origin Story
To understand why CRM fails most of your organization, you need to understand what it was built for.
CRM—Customer Relationship Management—emerged in the late 1990s as a tool to help sales teams track their pipeline. The core premise: if salespeople could systematically manage their prospects and opportunities, they'd close more deals.
This premise was correct. CRM revolutionized sales operations. What was once a chaos of business cards and notebook scribbles became a structured database with stages, probabilities, and forecasting.
But notice the assumption baked into the very name: Customer Relationship Management. Not Professional Relationship Management. Not Business Contact Management. CRM was designed for one specific relationship type—the salesperson-to-prospect relationship—and one specific workflow—the sales pipeline.
Twenty-five years later, we've dramatically expanded CRM's capabilities. Marketing automation. Customer service ticketing. Complex integration ecosystems.
What we haven't done is question the fundamental premise: should one tool, designed for sales, be responsible for all professional relationship management across an organization?
The 80% Who Don't Use CRM
Walk through a typical company and ask each department what they use to manage their external professional contacts:
Finance: "We have a few key contacts in Outlook. Some stuff in a shared spreadsheet. But honestly, Tom knows all the good accountants and auditors. Ask Tom."
Legal: "We track matters in our legal management system, but contacts? That's mainly individual attorneys' rolodexes. Which is a problem because Sarah just left and she knew everyone at our key firms."
HR: "Our ATS has candidates. But references? Executive recruiters we've used? The consultants who did our compensation study? That's scattered everywhere."
Operations: "We have vendors in the ERP system. But that's just purchase order history. The relationships—who to call when something goes wrong, who's actually responsive—that's tribal knowledge."
R&D: "Contacts? [Laughs.] Our engineers know people. Good luck finding out who."
Procurement: "We've tried to create a vendor database three times. It's never up to date because nobody's job is to maintain it."
Now walk into Sales and ask the same question: "Salesforce. Everything's in Salesforce. If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist."
See the gap?
Sales has a systematic, company-wide approach to contact management. Everyone else has a patchwork of personal systems, shared drives, and tribal knowledge.
Why "Just Put It In the CRM" Doesn't Work
The obvious suggestion: make everyone use the CRM.
This sounds logical. You already pay for it. It's already integrated with your systems. Why not just expand its scope?
This approach fails for several reasons:
1. CRM Architecture Assumes Sales Workflows
CRM is built around the concept of leads that become opportunities that move through stages toward closed won or closed lost.
This model makes perfect sense for sales. It makes no sense for:
- Legal tracking law firms they might need for various specialties
- HR maintaining relationships with executive recruiters
- Finance managing banking and accounting contacts
- Operations tracking service providers across categories
Trying to force these relationships into sales pipeline stages is like using a spreadsheet as a word processor. Technically possible. Practically miserable.
2. CRM Data Belongs to the Company, Not the Individual
When a salesperson adds a contact to Salesforce, it becomes company property. That's appropriate for sales leads—the company paid to generate them, the company should retain them.
But this model breaks down for broader professional relationships. When your R&D director adds a brilliant researcher she met at a conference, she's adding someone from her personal professional network. The expectation that this contact now "belongs" to the company—that she might lose access if she changes jobs—fundamentally changes her willingness to contribute.
The result: people don't add their contacts to company systems. They keep them private, in their phones and personal LinkedIn connections, precisely because they don't want to surrender ownership.
3. CRM Requires Sales-Level Discipline
Sales teams maintain CRM hygiene because their compensation depends on it. Opportunities not in Salesforce don't count toward quota. Pipeline reviews happen weekly. Management enforces data quality because forecasting depends on it.
No other department has this forcing function. Legal doesn't lose commission for failing to log a law firm contact. Finance doesn't face pipeline reviews. Without the incentive structure, CRM discipline decays rapidly.
4. CRM Wasn't Built for Discovery
The most valuable use of organizational contacts is discovery: "Who do we know who can help with X?" or "Does anyone in our company have a connection to this target company?"
CRM isn't designed for this. It's designed to track known opportunities, not discover hidden relationships. You can search for a specific contact, but you can't ask "who in our organization knows someone who works at Google?" because CRM doesn't map relationship networks.
The Real Cost of the 80% Gap
When 80% of your organization lacks systematic contact management, several things happen:
Duplicate effort compounds. Each department independently solves the same problems. The translator that Sales has used for years remains invisible to Legal, who spends a week finding their own. The consultant who helped HR with compensation research could help Finance with benchmarking, but Finance doesn't know she exists.
Quality becomes inconsistent. Sales has vetted, proven contacts with performance history. Everyone else makes decisions with incomplete information. The procurement team might hire a worse vendor than the one Operations has already qualified, simply because there's no way to surface that qualification.
Knowledge concentrates in individuals. When systems fail, humans compensate. The result is key employees who become "go-to" people for certain contact categories. "Ask Tom about accountants." "Sarah knows all the patent attorneys." This works until Tom retires or Sarah joins a competitor. Then years of relationship knowledge vanishes overnight.
Onboarding takes longer. New hires in non-sales roles have no way to see the organization's existing professional network. They build from scratch, not knowing that colleagues have already solved the problems they're facing.
What a Real Solution Looks Like
The answer isn't CRM for everyone. It's a different category of tool built for different requirements:
Designed for all professional relationships, not just sales. The tool needs to accommodate the lawyer's need to track litigation counsel, the HR director's recruiting contacts, the CFO's banking relationships, and the engineer's academic network—without forcing any of them into sales pipeline stages.
Individual ownership with organizational benefit. People need to own their contacts—they built those relationships over their careers—while the organization benefits from seeing the aggregate network. This isn't contradictory; it's complementary. People share more freely when they know they retain ownership.
Discovery-first architecture. The primary use case isn't "track this specific contact" but rather "who do we know who can help with X?" The system should surface hidden connections, enable warm introductions, and answer network questions.
Appropriate for all departments. Legal, HR, Finance, Operations, R&D, and Procurement all have external contacts worth tracking. The tool should work for all of them, not just the 20% in Sales.
Realistic about human behavior. People won't maintain data if it's purely for the company's benefit. The tool needs to provide individual value—a better way to organize and access your professional network—that happens to create organizational value as a byproduct.
The Emerging Category
This isn't a theoretical discussion. A new category of tools is emerging to address exactly this gap.
These tools sit alongside CRM, not replacing it. Sales keeps using Salesforce for sales. But the 80%—Legal, HR, Finance, Operations, R&D, Procurement, executives—finally gets purpose-built software for their contact management needs.
The key characteristics:
- Private layer (your contacts, your career, always portable)
- Company layer (shared contacts visible across departments)
- Explicit consent for sharing (you control what the company sees)
- Cross-departmental discovery (find contacts anywhere in the organization)
- Context preservation (not just names, but history and insights)
Think of it as the professional relationship layer that CRM was never designed to be.
Questions for Your Organization
If you recognize this gap in your organization, here are questions worth exploring:
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What percentage of your employees have access to your CRM? In most organizations, it's 15-25%. What are the others using?
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Where do your non-sales departments store their professional contacts? Map it honestly. You'll likely find a fragmented landscape of Outlook, spreadsheets, phones, and heads.
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When someone outside of Sales leaves, what happens to their contacts? If the answer is "they leave with them," you're continuously losing institutional knowledge.
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How would a new hire in Finance discover what banking relationships already exist in your company? If the answer requires asking multiple people or digging through SharePoint, you have a systemic problem.
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Could your Procurement team find out if anyone in Sales has worked with a particular vendor? Probably not. The silos are real.
The Path Forward
CRM was a revolution for sales teams. It's time for the rest of the organization to have their own revolution.
This doesn't mean abandoning CRM—it means complementing it. Sales continues to live in Salesforce. But Legal, HR, Finance, Operations, R&D, and Procurement—the 80%—get a tool built for their actual needs.
The companies that figure this out first will compound their advantage. Every contact shared creates value. Every silo broken enables collaboration. Every departure that doesn't drain institutional knowledge makes the organization more resilient.
The companies that don't will continue paying the hidden tax: duplicate effort, quality inconsistency, knowledge concentration, and onboarding friction.
The CRM revolution happened 25 years ago. The professional relationship management revolution is happening now.
