What if CRM workflows got out of the way?

Ivano Gangemi left a comment on my LinkedIn post that discussed the two issues I see in CRM today:

1. people spending all their time on building automation workflows, and
2. that leads to people NOT spending time on what is arguably even more important. The actual content that goes out!

Ivano works in sportsbook casino VIP CRM, so he knows what he's talking about. He neatly summarised it as:

"We've perfected the delivery, but we've neglected the deliverable."

I couldn't agree more, and it's a really nice summary of where we seem to be as digital marketers in 2026.

Teams across Braze, Insider, Iterable, Klaviyo aren't producing great marketing, and it's not because the data's wrong or the platforms are weak. Having to build all the automations and triggers is where they are spending their time, leaving little for the output that is sent. A team might spend a month wiring up a flow and then a week to write one email for it.

If we could build flows faster, or skip them entirely for big chunks of CRM, where does that time go? My answer is into the deliverable. Into the actual piece of content. And I think that's where CRM is headed. Fewer rigid flows, more effort poured into messages that are reasoned out for this customer, this moment, this thing they're actually doing.

If the deliverable gets good, the rest follows. The marketing's more engaging. More customers come back. More of them convert. More revenue at the end of the month.

Now, what does a 'good' deliverable actually look like? I don't think it is necessarily all about design (for example, a push message or SMS doesn't really have much design to it) although that is a part.

It's a combination of:

• Design (particularly for emails, paid ads, on-site personalisation)
• Copy. The words you use should be different for each user. How do you sell product A to user B in a different way to user C? You can only do that if you can infer how and WHY they are looking at it in the first place.
• Timing. The classic 'right place, right time'. CRM currently focuses on the best hour of the day, but I want something cleverer. What about realtime notifications on a website based on what someone is doing on that page?
• Channel. Another classic. Paid media and display and social can't be 1-2-1 personalised, but we can get to the nearest 1,000 users in a segment. Email, SMS, Push and on-site CAN be 1-2-1, although how practical that is is yet to be seen.

Some workflows and triggered comms should stay. Welcome series, post-purchase, transactional flows. They exist for a reason. But I do believe the DELIVERABLE at the end of those flows can be much, MUCH improved for the vast majority of e-commerce retailers.

They just don't have the time or energy to sift the data, then build the creative, then plumb it all together.