Building a CRM Strategy Brick by Brick
During ZohoDay26, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down and talking CRM with Julie Lloyd from Acme Brick in beautiful Austin, Texas,. Naturally, the topic of the day was Acme Brick’s fascinating journey into the Zoho ecosystem. As a CRM analyst and consultant, I’ve seen countless software deployments crash and burn because organizations focus entirely on the technology rather than the people actually using it. That is why talking with Julie was such a breath of fresh air; her focus is entirely on the human element of Acme Brick’s digital transformation. For those who aren’t familiar, Acme Brick isn’t just any company; they are the largest US-owned manufacturer of brick. They deal in a wide gamut of materials, including manufactured block, stone, tile, and various other wall cladding. It is a sizeable operation with around 1,700 employees spread across 13 states. This coming April, Acme Brick is celebrating a its 135th birthday. When a company with that much history decides to overhaul its CRM technology, you know there’s a good story behind it. Even more so, if it is a system replacement story, Julie has been with Acme Brick for two years, and what keeps her up at night is CRM training and ensuring user adoption. TL;DR If you do not want to read, here’s the full video interview. For everyone else, read on. Having said all this, let’s dive into why they made the switch and how they are making it work this time. The Square Peg, Round Hole CRM Disaster Before migrating to Zoho, Acme Brick used another CRM system. We won’t name names here, but...The New Enterprise Moat? Zoho’s AppOS and Stack Sovereignty Signal the End of Fragmented SaaS
ZohoDay 2026 is in the books, and it has again been an intense two days of information and discussions, starting off with some impressive statistics. In time for its 30th anniversary, Zoho crossed the milestones of one million paying customers and an eye watering 150 million users. All this while not having raised a single dollar of external capital or buying technology or users. The company stays fiercely independent and continues to grow very profitably since it crossed the threshold of an annual revenue of $1bn back in November 2022. If I wanted to boil this event down to a few key messages, it would be value, independence, platform, and, of course, AI. The conference in a nutshell: Value is the result of the smart use of automation with AI that works on top of the corporate system of record, powered by a platform that is built on an independently owned stack. This is also the secret sauce of Zoho, a philosophy that the company follows since its inception. And here is how Zoho brings this to work. Zoho owns and continuously improves its stack Coming from the angle of sovereignty, Zoho extends this thought of independence to its customers now in an answer to Raju Vegesna’s not so rhetoric question “what will happen if someone can pull the plug?” on any of your essential systems. All of the sudden, the thought of local deployments or hybrid deployments with cloud apps operating on local data becomes very interesting, valuable, again. It is mitigating risk. According to Vegesna, clients of different sizes are asking for this model. Another part of this equation is...
The Algorithmic Bazaar
The digital commerce industry has spent the last twenty-five or so years optimizing a single, unit of measurement: the session. We built cathedrals of conversion rate optimization (CRO), obsessed over pixel-perfect hero images, and deployed armies of “customer success” bots that were little more than glorified FAQ routers. We tracked users from the moment they landed on the homepage, watched them struggle through navigational hierarchies, and celebrated when 3% of them actually bought something. Anywhere else, a 97% failure rate would be grounds for executive termination. In e-commerce, it was the benchmark for success. We can safely say that the era of the session comes to an end, thanks to conversational and then agentic commerce, which put the “homepage” on life support. What comes more and more into the foreground is the intent, whichis what the session was supposed to help derive. And crucially, the entity expressing that intent is increasingly likely to be a machine, not a human. What we are seeing now is the transition from browser-based commerce, where humans operate interfaces, to agentic Commerce, where AI agents operate APIs. This isn’t just a channel expansion like conversational commerce; it is a fundamental inversion of the retail power dynamic. In the browser era, the retailer controlled the environment. In the agentic era, the customer (or their proxy) controls the context. This is quite similar to what happened in the 2000s with the advent of social media. And it will likely be countered by vendors as fast as the power shift back then, e.g., using GEO instead of SEO. The demise of the search box Since the rise of Google, the...