From Address Books to Identity Graphs
Startup CMO on the data models underpinning CRMs
The real weakness here is that Salesforce was built to track a person inside a company, not to keep following that person as their identity and context change. In practice, sales teams often end up with separate lead, contact, and account records, plus enrichment tools layered on top, while newer systems win by keeping one living customer profile that updates from product, commerce, and support data continuously.
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Klaviyo won in ecommerce because it made customer data usable inside the app, not trapped in CSV exports and spreadsheet work. Merchants could segment people by purchases, subscription status, and behavior in near real time, which made the customer record feel alive instead of static.
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The closest sales world answer is usually not a new system of record replacing Salesforce, but an enrichment and sync layer on top of it. That fits the pattern that the sales stack keeps Salesforce as the database of record, then adds outside data to refresh job changes, company data, and routing logic.
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Klaviyo can win this in B2C because consumer brands have a simpler identity model than enterprise sales teams. A shopper is usually tied to email, phone, orders, subscriptions, returns, and support history, while B2B sales has messier person to company relationships, territory rules, and account ownership across many reps.
This is heading toward CRM systems that behave more like identity graphs than address books. In B2C, Klaviyo is already moving there by bundling marketing, analytics, service, and a built in data platform. In B2B sales, the likely path is Salesforce staying in place while data vendors and AI layers make its records more continuously updated and portable.