Like many early-stage startups, Baton held off on adopting a CRM as long as they could because of the complexity and slow time-to-value typically associated with traditional CRMs. 

“Finding and then setting up a CRM is usually a huge ordeal. It’s a really big buying decision and you get locked in,” says Chat. “Making them work for your business in a way that drives growth is very difficult. We knew we had to get a CRM at some point, but we wanted to push that out for as long as possible.”

Baton instead integrated a variety of tools together, including Airtable, Retool and Notion, to track their customer relationships. This worked initially, but like all DIY, stitched together systems it was cumbersome, manual, and incredibly hard to scale. Ensuring that the data stored in each of these different tools was correct and consistent was an increasingly large burden for the team.

“Our biggest challenge by far was making sure that data was up-to-date and consistent across all of our tools,” says Chat. “What stage were people at? Had they given us their data via our onboarding flow? We would actually go to Retool, which we use as our admin dashboard, and manually copy and paste each of those things into Airtable. That took hours of our customer success and sales reps’ time.”

The surging volume of administrative tasks was soon taking up multiple hours a day. This threatened the team’s productivity and scaling potential, leading Baton to urgently search for a CRM solution.