--- title: "Twenty nine years of static." description: "The future of agentic go-to-market, told through the five CRMs John Serrantino typed into, built, sold, vended and now cleans. What each one kept of the customer, what it threw away, and what the next ten years sound like now that the record can hear the whole call." canonical: https://kesey.agency/notes/agentic-gtm author: John Serrantino publisher: Kesey date: 2026-11-05 --- > Markdown twin of https://kesey.agency/notes/agentic-gtm. The page is the version with the drawings; this is the same words for a reader that wants text. Part of [Notes from the highway](https://kesey.agency/notes/). Kesey · [notes from the highway](https://kesey.agency/notes/) # Twenty nine years of static. Every CRM I have typed into, built, sold or run since 1997 heard the customer the way a cheap radio hears a far away station: mostly noise, with a few words in it. It kept the words. This is what each one kept, what it threw away, and what I think the next ten years sound like now that the record can hear the whole call. November 2026 · John Serrantino · the janitor at Kesey · Day.ai Solutions Partner *Five stations in twenty nine years, and a seat at every one of them. The needle is past all five. For the first time what comes out of the speaker is the customer's voice and not a summary of it.* - **1997 · The User** Whatever survived the trip from a rep's memory to a thirteen year old's keyboard. - **2006 · The Builder** Whatever had a field. We decided the fields before we had heard the customers. - **2012 · The Seller** Whatever the rep remembered at 4:45 on a Friday. - **2018 · The Vendor** Whatever the form asked for, at a scale and a polish I had not seen before. Still the form. - **2024 · The Janitor** Going back for what the other four threw away. Seven miles · two new pictures · no van this time Mile 1 · 1997 ## Static I was thirteen, and the summer job was typing other people's phone calls into a database. A rep took the call. The rep wrote down what they remembered. I typed what they wrote. By the time a customer's sentence reached the record it had been through two people and a form, and the record got whatever survived the trip. It taught me discipline, because F10 saved it and nothing else did. It also taught me what the record was. It was not a memory of the customer. It was a memory of what a busy person remembered about the customer, trimmed to fit a screen. > Static is what a conversation sounds like to a form. I did not have that sentence at thirteen. I had F10. The sentence took another twenty eight years and every station on the dial. Mile 2 · 2006 ## The fields Nine years later I was employee four at a company in Philadelphia that grew fast enough to make the business journal's list two years running. I went from first customer service rep to running a team of fifteen, and somewhere in the middle I helped architect the company's own CRM from nothing. Over a hundred and fifty people ran on it. Building one shows you where the static comes from. A field exists because somebody decided it should, usually for a reason nobody wrote down. We argued about fields for weeks, and every argument was a guess about what a customer would say before any customer had said it. Then the customers said other things, and the record had no place to put them, so the other things went in the notes box or nowhere. Here is my first prediction, and it is the one I am surest of. **The fields stop being designed in advance.** The record keeps the sentence and works out the field afterwards. Reason lost stops being a dropdown somebody fills in and becomes a question you ask, answered with the thing the customer said, quoted. I spent 2006 deciding what customers would be allowed to mean. That job is ending, and I am fine with it. Mile 3 · 2010 ## Eighteen months Then I was employee one at a venture stood up with somebody else's money to compete with the company I had just left. I hired eight people. At month eighteen the fund pulled the money, and I sat down with all eight and told them they no longer had jobs. I had made the promises. I do not tell that story for sympathy. I tell it because of what it cost to find out. In 2010 the only way to learn whether a sales motion worked was to hire the people, pay them for a year and a half, and read the answer off the pipeline. Eight salaries was the price of one answer. What changes is the price of the answer. A company starting this year can put agents on the first version of the motion, reading the inbox, drafting the first notes, watching who replies, and learn in a quarter what took me eighteen months and eight people's rent. I would still have to make the hard calls. There would be fewer of them, and they would come earlier, which is the only mercy there is in that job. Mile 4 · 2012 ## The list and the drawing In 2012 I was employee five at Pipeline CRM, an account executive. The growth win I remember best was dull: every morning, a list of the people who had signed up for a trial the day before, and a rep reading the list and calling them before lunch. Signups were the signal. Somebody had to read it and pick up the phone before it went cold. Nothing fancier than that, and it was one of the best decisions the company made while I was there. I also closed the largest deal in the company's history there, $1.5M and 750 users, off wireframes I drew myself because the product did not do the thing the buyer needed yet and nobody was going to build it on a promise. No deal team. Me and a drawing. Those are the two halves of selling, and they are not going to the same place. **Reading the list is the agent's job now.** It reads every signup, every reply and every call, tells you who to call and why, and never gets bored on a Thursday. The drawing is still mine. Listening to a buyer, seeing the half of the product that does not exist yet, and promising it with your name on the promise. I have not met the software that does that and I am not holding my breath. Mile 5 · 2018 ## Finished HubSpot was my only corporate job. Three years working with agencies as a channel manager, three as an enterprise account executive, two President's Clubs. What six years inside a product at that scale teaches you is what finished looks like, and how little of anything is finished. Two things from those years point at where this goes. The first is the channel. HubSpot built the software, and thousands of agencies did the setup, the training and the fixing afterwards. The agencies that did well understood the customer's business. The ones that knew the most menus did not last. That split survives. The platforms will build the agents, HubSpot included. Somebody still has to write down what each agent is for, in plain words, decide what it is not allowed to touch, and read what it did on Monday. That is the partner's half now, and it is the half I kept. The second is the seat. Everything I sold at HubSpot was priced by the person who logs in. The newer platforms price by the agent, or by the work the agent does. That sounds like a billing detail. It is the whole shape of what comes next: **a team of three with ten agents behind it was not a thing you could buy in 2018.** You can buy it now. Mile 6 · 2020 to now ## The road, and the janitor I told the road and highway story in [the first note](https://kesey.agency/notes/on-ramp). The short version: I co-founded a recruiting company and ran it alongside the HubSpot years, I built the systems, my partner handled the customers, and the thing we fought about most was that he would not stop driving to type. He was right. Since 2024 the job has had a plainer name. I am the janitor. I go into revenue systems and clean up years of decisions nobody wrote down, and then I build what the business should have had. The first thing I did with the new tools was use them on myself: a status board for every client, scheduled runs that read my calls and my email, and then all of it moved into Day in an afternoon, with an agent named Doug who opens the deal when a proposal goes out and closes it when the agreement is signed. I wrote that down once, in plain words, and he does it. What surprised me is what the janitor's job turned into. It did not go away. It moved. A record that writes itself will write a duplicate, and it will do it at two in the morning. An agent with a vague job description will do a vague job, confidently. Somebody has to read what the record built this week and decide what is wrong. That is cleaning, same as it ever was. The mess is new and the broom is a sentence. Mile 7 · the next ten years ## What it sounds like Predictions from a guy with a flag, so hold them loosely. I am sure of the direction, because I have watched the road refuse to type for twenty nine years and it has finally won. The details are in pencil. - Wanted, 1997 **Someone to type the call into the record.** *No longer hiring* - Wanted **Someone to listen to every call and remember all of it.** *Filled: an agent* - Wanted **Someone to read the signups every morning and say who to call, and why.** *Filled: an agent* - Wanted **Someone to draft the first email in our voice.** *An agent writes, a person signs* - Wanted **Someone to decide what each agent is for, and what it may not touch.** *A person* - Wanted **Someone to pick up the phone on a Friday.** *A person. Always was.* The board at the truck stop, 2030. Violet pins are jobs an agent took. Lime pins still need a person. The torn one is my first job. - **Nobody types.** Data entry stops being a job. The thirteen year old gets a different summer. - **Nobody demos a CRM.** You connect an inbox for a week and judge what it built. The screens stop mattering, because nobody is going to be looking at them all day. - **Fields are found, not designed.** You ask the record a question and it answers with the sentence it heard. - **Headcount and pipeline come apart.** A five person firm runs a dozen agents and pays for the work, not the logins. - **Approving becomes the job, and the trap is approving two hundred things a day,** which is typing with extra steps. An agent that needs you every day has its line drawn in the wrong place, and fixing that is the builder's job, not yours. - **Every number gets a source.** The forecast says which calls it came from, and a manager can click one. [I wrote about why that matters](https://kesey.agency/notes/prove-your-pipeline-numbers) before the tools could do it. - **The record writes things nobody decided.** Duplicates, a company from a newsletter, a deal from a reply that was a polite no. Hygiene becomes a standing job and stops being a spring cleaning. - **The call does not change.** A customer with a problem on a Friday still wants a person, and whose money it is on the other side is still a question only a person can get answered. Where I am probably wrong: everything above assumes the products keep their footing, and they are young. Features ship weekly. Anyone drawing a line around what an agent cannot do is drawing in pencil, me included. The one line I will draw in ink is the direction. For twenty nine years the fix on offer was a nicer form. The fix now is no form. The dates, the deal and the team sizes are mine and are on [the about page](https://kesey.agency/about-john). The predictions are mine too, and they carry no date, because the honest version of a prediction is that it has not happened yet. ## Tell me what your record has been hearing. Thirty minutes, on the phone or on a video call, whichever you hate less. You tell me how a conversation gets into your CRM today, and I tell you how much of it is static. If the answer is most of it, I will say what the first month of fixing that looks like. If it is not, I will say that instead, and you will have spent half an hour and gained a straight answer. [Book a call](https://kesey.agency/book) [Who is writing these](https://kesey.agency/about-john) No sequence, nothing automated. One personal follow-up from me after the call, and the word "no" ends it.