The year was 2024, and the month was August. I was helping some family friends build their real estate broker business (also known as a channel partner business) from scratch. Even a typical mid-size real estate operation requires a sufficiently large sales team (30-100), especially if you are starting from scratch and want to expand at a relatively faster pace.
The problem: The Sales team was mainly hired based on their domain knowledge (real estate), experience, and at a breakneck speed. The result was a large team, but no efficient way to track its performance.
So the hunt for the right CRM began
I had previously led and indirectly managed a large sales team. Infact, most of my close friends belong to the sales profession, and hence, most of our discussions and brainstorming revolve around it. I knew that without proper tooling and technology, the problem was impossible to solve. I began evaluating the top CRMs on the market. Since the setup was new, we were also cost-conscious. I tried almost every CRM in the market. Free trial, paid trials - some of them we tried for months. There were some tactical and systemic issues like -
Per-user per-month costs skyrocketed when teams became large. Moreover, we had to renegotiate plans due to the changing size of the team, and almost everyone was trying to convert us to their yearly plan.
Most CRMs were damn slow, so nobody wanted to spend their lives watching that loader go on and on.
Most top CRMs had UI/UX that looked like it hadn't been updated in decades. It's like these folks completely missed the new UI/UX design principles.
Even after implementing the per-user, per-month pricing, we still had to upgrade plans or purchase credits for new features that were necessary for our operations. All AI features were add-ons and paid separately.
Many of the CRMs were not mobile-friendly, and notifications and reports were also unreliable.
Integrations used to break all the time. We had Meta, Google Lead, and other integrations. But the data was never in sync. Make.com turned out to be a huge help here — a big shoutout to them for creating a great platform.
We had to make trade-offs between features, reliability, speed, and pricing, and the decision was too exhausting.
However, the most significant problem of all was that none of those CRM were built for operational efficiency.
We wanted outcomes, not fancy reports and shoddy UIs
We had to create a sales ops department to run sales operations, and that's where it hit me. Someone needs to solve this problem. I had already written a few production-grade AI systems that were running at scale, and I knew what an AI-native and AI-first CRM could do to solve our problems.
See, the problems were simple -
Most people were not updating their CRM, which we later learned is a common problem among many companies. It resulted in poor-quality data in the CRM and no actionable insights at the organizational level. (will write another post on this). However, I wanted the tool to promote this data discipline within the team.
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I didn't have time to do micromanagement. Didn't have time to review the data of each manager, team lead, and sales executive. I just wanted the tool to do it for me. I wanted my CRM to provide me with insights into executives who are underperforming, engaging in fraud, or who require better training.
I didn't want to do lead ops, manual lead distributions, etc. So, I needed a tool that could automatically sync leads from several sources and
I also wanted the standard CRM functionalities, including pipeline management, stage management, user management with granular control over permissions, and integration with marketing tools.
After painfully evaluating several CRM over the next 4 months, I gave up and decided to build one from scratch. To solve my problems. At the time, I wasn't even considering creating a SaaS product. I wanted to fulfill my role and deliver on the promise made to the company. But the techie in me couldn't resist designing it as a SaaS solution. Because I knew I would be writing this blog at some point in the future.
Techie by trade and Entrepreneur by choice
Before I proceed, I would like to provide a brief overview of my background. Even though I have been an entrepreneur my whole life, I am a techie by training and at heart. Over the last 14 years, I've built some of the complex technology systems a techie can create, including media streaming, real-time communication using WebSockets and WebRTC at scale, code compilation engines, virtual currencies, and social networks. And I specialize in ultra-fast systems at a million-scale (things with less than 250 milliseconds speed for everything) with zero downtime and bugs. You can find all of it on my Linkedin. I have also led product, design, and operations teams (thanks to my experience in early-stage startups) and know exactly how to combine all of these to create practical technology-first solutions to business problems.
So it was time to flex the problem-solving muscle
I reimagined the most mundane piece of software in an AI-first world. And that led to the creation of smartbdm.ai. It is a CRM designed from the ground up to optimize for operational efficiency. The name Smartbdm stands for Smart Business Development Manager. And the reason is simple. I wanted AI to be my smart middle manager, who would run the team for me, so that I can save time and focus on growing the business further. It has all the features you expect from a modern CRM solution. Our AI is highly configurable, enabling it to understand the context of the organization, the products sold, and all the nuances of your sales operations. That's what makes all our AI agents highly effective, resulting in a direct impact on the middle and bottom of your funnel.
We are live and growing
We have been battle-testing this solution for the last 8 months. It was in private beta so far, and we have now completed a full rollout. Additionally, the most significant delta we have created is our advanced plug-and-play architecture design and refined AI layer, which is cost-effective. All our pricing plans offer unlimited users and teams, with granular control over each functionality, at a fixed price. Yes, we are eliminating per-user, per-month pricing once and for all. I will cover more on all the features we have, the reasons for specific pricing, technical, and product choices, as well as our future roadmap, in future blog posts.
Until then, please try out smartbdm.ai now and share your valuable feedback with us.