Sales Systems in The Age of AI

As a startup co-founder, it was interesting to watch the recent sell-off in software stocks, driven by the idea that AI is coming for them.

Trust me, I get it.

When we started Teamwork Unlocked, I naturally became the de facto head of sales, and as someone with ADHD, having a proper CRM system was not optional. If something is not directly in front of me, it can very easily disappear. Leads I have not spoken to in a few weeks, even active deals, can… vanish and be gone in a puff of smoke.

Back at Google, I had a line that probably still haunts my team’s nightmares. “If it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist.”

I meant it. Every interaction went in, and every follow-up had a reminder. So when we started Teamwork Unlocked, even before we broke ground on the escape room, I went out and chose a CRM. While Tom Zacharski was on holiday, I spent two weeks loading in contacts, building workflows, and creating what I thought was a solid safety net for our pipeline.

Tom came back, and I showed him the system. His reaction was immediate and very clear. He hated it.

Tom doesn’t come from a sales background, so part of him didn't instinctively feel the need for a CRM the way I did, but more than that, he couldn't stand the UX. The interface annoyed him. The whole thing felt clunky, and he said, very casually, that he could probably build something better himself.

I was skeptical. A week later, he proved me wrong. We now have an internal tool, very creatively named UnlockedCRM, that manages our contacts, opportunities, and pipeline in a way that aligns with how we work.

The speed at which it evolves is what really changed my perspective. I told Tom I was struggling to invite people to our monthly demo events. I was manually sending messages via email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Sales Navigator, jumping between platforms and trying to keep track of who had been contacted where.

A few hours later, he built a module that lets me select a contact, choose a script, pick a platform, and send the message. What used to take me a week now takes me about two hours. A week after that, he built another system to help me schedule coffee chats with new contacts. That kind of iteration speed is not something you get from enterprise software.

That is where this all makes sense.

Our system is not enterprise-grade, but for us, and for thousands of small and mid-sized businesses, it is more than enough. It does exactly what we need, and it adapts as fast as we can think.

If founders can now build tools like this internally, quickly, cheaply, and tailored to their exact workflows, then I can understand why investors are starting to get nervous. Large software platforms are not going anywhere. Big companies rely on them too heavily, and the scale at which they operate is very different.

But there is a long tail of smaller companies like ours, and for that group, the equation is changing. This is also exactly how we think about teams. When you give people the right environment and constraints, they figure things out faster than you expect. If you want to see how your team adapts, solves problems, and builds under pressure, that is what we design for at Teamwork Unlocked.