The Lost Strategy: What CRM Was Supposed to Be

CRM at its very origin, was a strategy. With the advent of systems that support the execution of this strategy, the term more and more got shifted to describe a system. This shift can get seen in the words of CRM GodfatherPaul Greenberg. His pre-2009 definition of CRM was “a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology designed to improve human interaction in a business environment.” This changed to "Customer Relationship Management is a technology and system that sustains sales, marketing and customer service activities. It is designed to capture and interpret customer data, both structured and unstructured, and to sustain the management of the business side of customer related operations. CRM technology automates processes and workflows and helps organize and interpret data to support a company in engaging its customers more effectively" in acceptance of this change (emphasis by me). These days, people often even mean a sales force automation system, when they say “CRM”.

In another dimension, the systems themselves more and more turned into systems of record. Implementations often were management-oriented as opposed to team-oriented, which led to increasing dissatisfaction and the creation of new terms and categories like social CRM, system of engagement, customer data platform, customer engagement, customer experience management, and so on.

There is much more, but in consequence, CRM lost both, the “C” and the “R”. CRM turned from a strategy into a glorified rolodex and a tool to manage teams, in particular sales teams, instead of helping organizations and teams to manage and improve the customer relationship.

The Great Divide: The Gap Between Sales and Marketing

As CRM turned into a sales tool, obviously marketing and customer service needed their own tools. Which vendors happily supplied, up to an extent that the 2025 Martech Landscape Supergraphic counts well above 15,000 applications. This marks a 100x growth since 2011. The number of sales or service-oriented SaaS applications is similarly substantial.

In the era of on-premises software, technology purchasing was centralized. The CIO controlled the strings of the wallet. But the rise of SaaS brought with it the era of decentralized budgets. Suddenly, a VP of Marketing could swipe a corporate credit card and purchase a Marketing Automation Platform without consulting IT or Sales. Simultaneously, the VP of Sales was buying their own "best-of-breed" tools for outreach, forecasting, and enablement.

Shadow IT raised its ugly head.

The Accelerant: SaaS and the Era of Shadow IT

If the reduction of CRM to a sales tool created a crack between Marketing and Sales, this combination of decentralized purchasing with the explosion of the SaaS model turned that crack into a chasm.

This “democratization” of technology happened without operational guardrails.

Marketing bought tools to generate leads.

Sales bought tools to close deals.

Customer Success bought tools to manage tickets.

None of these systems were designed to talk to one another natively. Integration became an afterthought. We traded a unified strategy for a "frankenstack" of disconnected applications. This technological anarchy created disjointed processes and solidified organizational and data silos. It meant that "Marketing Ops" and "Sales Ops" spent their days managing their specific tools, optimizing their own KPIs, rather than improving the customer journey and lifecycle. The proverbial shouting match between the VP of Sales claiming that sales doesn’t get any leads from marketing with the VP of Marketing countering that sales just doesn’t use them is a visible sign of this result.

The Emergence of Revenue Operations (RevOps)

RevOps emerged out of the necessity to overcome this. It “is the strategic integration of sales, marketing and service departments to provide a better end-to-end view to administration and management, while leaving day-to-day processes within the departments. The holistic approach of RevOps is designed to break down silos between departments.”  RevOps’ objective is not just to align people, but to reign in the chaos of a decentralized tech stack that had spiraled out of control.

And importantly, RevOps is not a software tool, although there is an increasing number of RevOps and RevTech vendors. Still, it is mostly asking the wrong question. It asks “How can we align our teams to reduce friction?” While RevOps uses outside signals, it is still about fixing the machinery to be able to increase business, improve the margin, reduce cost, etc. It looks from the inside out. The key levers are organizational alignment, improved data flows, better integration and last, but not least, in-depth analytics and dashboards. In short, it establishes the operational backbone, the plumbing that enables inter-departmental cooperation based on shared data.

The Paradigm Shift: Why RevOps is a Part of CRM

The real question to ask is “How can we better help the customer become successful (and thereby become more successful ourselves)?”

In the rush to adopt the latest buzzwords, we, the tech industry, have made a critical error. Driven by vendors, analysts and consultants, we have started treating Revenue Operations as the successor to CRM. We look at RevOps as the "new and improved" version of CRM that makes the old concept obsolete. And just to be clear, RevOps is even more about the transaction than CRM ever was. Look at Gartner’s infographic titled “Is it time for RevOps?” as a good example for this (free, but behind a registration).

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what CRM actually is.

If we accept Paul Greenberg’s original definition that CRM is a business strategy designed to manage relationships, then the hierarchy becomes clear. RevOps does not replace CRM; it serves it, improves it. And yes, to do this, it needs technology and systems.

Inside-Out vs. Outside-In

To better understand why RevOps supports CRM, we have to look at the main thinking flow of these two concepts.

CRM starts with the customer and helps us identify what we need to do to make the customer successful within the constraints that our business has. It is "Outside-In." It asks: What does the customer need? How do they want to engage with us? How do we solve their specific problem? CRM is a market-facing philosophy that puts the customer at the center of the company and dictates how the company sets itself up to better serve this customer. The customer is the way.

RevOps, on the other side, is "Inside-Out." Revenue Operations, by definition, focuses on the machinery of the business. It looks at the fragmented mess of departments, sales, marketing, customer success, finance, etc. and asks “How is our data flowing? Are our APIs connected? Do our KPIs align?” RevOps is the harmonization of internal processes to remove friction. But "removing friction" is not a strategy in itself; it is an operational challenge. RevOps is a philosophy that helps optimizing internal processes so that the business can become more successful. The customer is the means.

The Engine Room of Strategy

For the last decade, companies have failed at CRM strategy because they lacked the necessary outside-in thinking to support it.

The strategy (CRM) promised a 360-degree view of the customer that helps businesses serve them better.

The reality (SFA) delivered a disconnected database where Marketing data didn't match Sales data.

This is where RevOps enters the picture. RevOps is the "how" to CRM’s "why."

When Marketing Ops and Sales Ops emerged, they were band-aids to fix department issues. They optimized locally. RevOps unifies these functions to optimize globally. It constructs the internal plumbing, the unified data model, the shared technology stack, the handoff SLAs, etc., that finally makes the outside-in promise of CRM possible.

But that’s it. RevOps does not replace CRM.

The Verdict

We must stop viewing Revenue Operations as the silver bullet that makes CRM irrelevant. Instead, we must recognize the dependency:

CRM is the destination: A business strategy that puts the customer at the center of all business operations.

RevOps is more of a tactic: it provides the operational infrastructure that is required to get there.

RevOps is therefore not the new CRM. RevOps is the operational backbone that allows CRM to function as a strategy, instead of just being a piece of software.

Restoring the Promise

For the past thirty or so years, businesses have been chasing a ghost. They spent billions on CRM software and made CRM the biggest market in enterprise software. They were made believe that all it needs to unlock customer loyalty and revenue growth is a license key or a subscription. Instead, they ended up with expensive digital rolodexes, systems that are geared for management, dismal adoption, and teams that speak different languages.

We, as an industry, failed because we confused the map with the terrain.

CRM is the terrain. It is the strategy. It is the outside-in philosophy that says the customer relationship is the single most important asset a company owns, and that this asset appreciates the more the company helps the customer be successful.

RevOps is the map and the compass. It is an inside-out discipline. It is the tool that provides the operational framework, the harmonized data, the integrated tech stack, and the aligned KPIs that are required to navigate that terrain.

Revenue Operations is not a replacement for CRM; it is a tool that helps linking internal processes to customer experience. One could say that it is the acknowledgment that you cannot have a seamless external customer experience if your internal operations are fractured by siloed tools and competing metrics.

So, stop looking for the next piece of software to save your sales numbers. The solution isn't in the tool; it's in the wiring. If you want to realize the strengths of the strategy of Customer Relationship Management, you must first build the engine of Revenue Operations. Want help? Contact me!

The news

On October 1, 2025, Conga announced its intent to acquire the B2B business of PROS, following PRO’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo. At the same time, ThomaBravo and PROS announced that PRO’s travel business segment will be run as a standalone business.

The bigger picture

Revenue operations, revenue management and revenue lifecycle management have become a thing in the past years, as evidenced by the number of specialized companies that solve parts of the overall problem of optimizing revenue. It also got abused to some extent (e.g., surge pricing models) when the users of the corresponding capabilities consider optimizing being the same as maximizing.

Reality check: It is not.

While optimizing involves a bit of identifying how much a customer is willing to pay, it also involves the thought of repeat business, or in other words customer loyalty, even without a formal loyalty program. And that involves the customer experience, part of which the speed of creating a quote with matching scope and a price that is acceptable for both parties is an important element in B2B. So, the combination of CPQ and price optimization makes perfect sense. As an example, already in 2019, I was involved in a project that in part targeted at combining CPQ and price optimization to get to a good quote, fast. And it worked, although the solution looked different in the end than anticipated at the start of the project.

My analysis and point of view

Already when the original news of Thoma Bravo acquiring PROS broke I have seen quite some synergies with Conga but also some other players in the Thoma Bravo portfolio.

This merger certainly elevates the CPQ game and brings Conga closer to do revenue lifecycle management. At the bare minimum, it enables Conga to not only do configure – price – quote but configure – optimize price – quote. It certainly removes fragmentation in the revenue optimization lifecycle by combining Conga’s strengths in CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), contract lifecycle management (CLM), and document automation with PROS’ advanced B2B pricing, quoting, and revenue management capabilities. Including PROS’ algorithms for elasticity, segmentation, and willingness-to-pay (WTP) into Conga capabilities extends them models that are proven at enterprise scale. PRO’s AI capabilities are something that is very hard to replicate using generic LLM’s. Embedding PROS into Conga workflows promises to lift win-rates and margins simultaneously. This is a value proposition that should make Heads of Sales, CFOs’ and not in the least CEOs’ eyes glaze over. At the same time, there is a considerable cross-sell opportunity for Conga/PROS as probably not many businesses rung both solutions, although

From a competition point of view, I am sure that all of enterprise CRM vendors, business suite vendors and vendors of price optimization software now do some homework.

Many CRM vendors offer CLM and CPQ, also with AI support. None of them offers the same level of pricing science that is offered by PROS. This includes the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft. Business Suite vendors like Oracle or SAP have the access to the ERP but also lack the power of PRO’s price optimization engine although they have powerful pricing engines.

Pricing specialists like Vendavo or PriceFx all of the sudden seem a bit sidelined, as they are bolt-on solutions as opposed to being a core part of the revenue lifecycle management solution.

So, I’d expect a bit of roadmap realignment, strategic partnering and perhaps some M&A activity. Let’s wait for the corresponding announcements.

The good news for all these vendors is that this type of merger that Conga and PROS go through now takes some time, too. There is some functional overlap that should get resolved, the combined GTM needs to be set up and last, but not least the systems need to be deeply integrated, particularly on the data level as pricing optimization works best on clean, harmonized transactional data – as any other analytics and AI software.

But what about the “rest” of PROS business?

As per the second announcement about the PROS travel business – let’s wait and see. It shall be run as an own platform. However, there is no notion about the retail part of PROS business. Not only airlines run price optimization. And that business just got serious competition e.g., from Fetcherr. So, I would be quite surprised if this part stays confined to the travel business, which it isn’t now as per my best knowledge. And looking at the Thoma Bravo portfolio, there are a couple of companies outside the airline and travel sectors that could benefit from PROS B2C magic. Correct me when I am wrong.

If you want to improve your customer facing processes and systems or, being a vendor of business solutions, your product portfolio, I might be able to help you. Get in touch.