I looked to my left and saw a tense, frustrated RevOps exec. His eyes were 5 inches from his screen as he manually updated opportunities in a new CRM.

The CRO asked about the board deck. He was covering for sales reps who couldn’t handle the new sales motion and busy UI. A deck built on stale data wasn’t going to hold up.

The VP knew the fix and booked it with IT: simpler screens, guided training. The board deadline wouldn’t wait.

The work he was grinding through by hand takes ninety seconds.

In a chat, I use the same content to anchor pre-call prep and post-call planning. The conversation absorbs information like prior transcripts, company context, and contact profiles. It measures the call against my plan and adds sentiment, pipeline progress, and next steps.

I type one command that launches a skill which drafts the activity note and updates the system. I edit and approve.

I’ve almost forgotten how to update my CRM.

Salespeople are skilled communicators. Now, they can explain what they want a system to do, and the data gets richer for it.

Knowing what their tools can do matters more than learning how to use them.

When your people type “create opportunity,” a skill packages the right information from the chat and sends it to the CRM through a connector (MCP). The same conversation drives other post-call work through plug-ins, like drafting a thank-you note and sending it through email.

The capabilities already exist. How fast you get there depends on how quickly IT and Risk teams let you light them up.

The friction that kept great salespeople from being great CRM users isn’t a personality problem. It’s a software problem. And it’s solvable right now, not on some IT roadmap two years out.

The VP next to me didn’t need simpler software. He needed software that already spoke his language.

Originally published on LinkedIn