INBOX INSIGHTS: No One Hires a Framework, CRM Data Rot (2026-11-11)

INBOX INSIGHTS: No One Hires a Framework, CRM Data Rot (2026-11-11) :: View in browser

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Why would anyone hire a framework?

Last week John Wall, our head of business development, told me something about the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ that I had also been thinking about. He articulated it better than I could have and it was incredibly helpful to hear from someone else. His point was that it’s a framework (duh). This means that it’s a methodology, not a solution. It’s speaking to the wrong pain point because most leaders believe they’re already pretty good at people and process. Why would they pay us for it?

I’ve been talking for years about how the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ can get you organized and solve your problems, but I’ve been falling short on what that actually means in practice.

To get a better sense of what this meant, we pulled every sales call we recorded this year with a prospective client (22 calls with 17 organizations) and counted what the people on the other side of the table actually said.

Not one of them asked for a framework.

They told us what hurts, and it wasn’t “I need a framework”

In 18 of the 22 calls, the prospect described at least one of the same few problems, often in nearly the same words.

“Where do we start?” was the most common, coming up in 8 calls. One marketing leader described her team being handed enterprise AI licenses with no idea what to do with them first, or what not to do.
“We don’t have time to learn it” came up in 7. One company had surveyed its own team, and the top barrier was “lack of time, lack of bandwidth to experiment.”
“I’m not sure we’re doing it right” showed up in 6, and one business owner put it plainly: “As far as AI is concerned, I’m in kindergarten.”
“I can’t prove it to the board” came up in 5. As one leader told us, “What our board wants to know is that this person at this level has saved X amount of time.”

None of these teams were starting from zero. They had the licenses, and their people were already using AI, mostly on their own, with no plan, no shared way of working, and nothing to show leadership.

That’s the problem they’ll pay to solve.

The framework is the diagnosis, not the treatment

Here’s where I think we got it wrong. We built the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ to look at every place an AI effort can get stuck, so you don’t fix the wrong thing. That’s still its job. But nobody wants the detailed diagnosis; they want to know what’s wrong and what to do about it. Period.

Our AI Readiness Assessment asks 20 questions, four for each P. When I lined those questions up against the calls, every pain point we heard was already in there. We just asked about it in our words instead of theirs.

Purpose asks whether you have a specific, documented business problem and a measurable definition of success. On the calls, that sounded like “where do we start?” and “I can’t prove it to the board.”

Once Purpose tells you who this is for, People is where most of the work hides. The assessment asks whether your future users understand the change and aren’t resistant, and whether your project lead has time. Prospects described half their team refusing to touch AI while the other half wanted every guardrail gone, with nobody having the hours to sort it out.

Prospects used the word Process themselves in 7 of the 22 calls, more than any other P. One leader wants AI to become “part of our culture and our process,” not one more task bolted on. The assessment asks whether your workflow is documented and whether a person reviews what the AI produces.

What buyers asked about Platform came out as “What other tools do we need?” and “How do we make sure it’s accessing only our data?” The assessment covers the same ground (tool access, data, and security approval), and the answer usually starts with what you already own. That’s a tech stack audit, not a shopping trip.

Performance is the one the board is waiting on. The assessment asks whether you have a baseline and a review on the calendar, because without both you have nothing to show them when they ask whether it worked. (And they will ask.)

What I’m changing in 2027

I’m leading with the problem, not the method. When someone asks what we do, the answer is that we help teams make AI adoption stick, and prove that it worked. The 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ is how we find where you’re stuck, and it doesn’t need to be the first thing you hear.

I’m using our buyers’ words. Nobody on those 22 calls said “organizational behavior” or “project management.” They said “where do we start” and “we don’t have time,” and that’s how we should sound too.

I’m keeping the framework. It’s how I think and it’s how we deliver; it just belongs in the work we do with you, not in the first sentence you hear from us.

Try this with your own expertise

Pull your last ten sales calls, or ten emails from people asking for help, and write down the exact words they used to describe their problem. Then read the first line of your website.

If the two don’t match, your prospects are doing the translating for you, and most of them won’t bother.

People don’t hire a framework. They hire the person who heard their problem and knows how to find the fix.

Where are you leading with your method instead of your buyer’s problem?

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss how you will reduce customer relationship management (CRM) data rot and turn neglected internal records into stronger business decisions. You’ll learn how to separate the decay you can control from the changes you cannot, so you can focus your effort where it protects revenue. You’ll discover how you can combine simple workflows with artificial intelligence (AI) to recover missing context and reduce the burden of manual updates. You’ll also learn how clear expectations and useful incentives can help your team maintain accurate customer records so you can make confident decisions.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we covered key takeaways from MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2026. Catch the episode replay here!

This week on So What? we’ll explore how to reduce CRM data decay and rot with agentic AI. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about the two forms of CRM data rot. On the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and I covered internal rot at length, which is where we don’t provide enough or correct information in our CRM. That’s largely a process and governance problem that tech won’t fix. As Katie frequently says, new tech doesn’t solve old problems.

But what about the second form of rot, which is where external data goes bad? On average, in any given year, 25-30% of your data just goes bad. People leave jobs. Companies get acquired or go out of business. Times change. How do we keep our data fresh?

This is where new technology can solve old problems, IF the old problems are ALSO technology problems. (new tech generally doesn’t solve people and process problems) In the past, entire B2B companies were founded to try to solve the problem of data freshness, correctness, and creating target account lists and contacts of people that sales should go chase, often called data aggregators or data appending services.

It should be thoroughly unsurprising that today’s agentic AI tools can perform that role very capably, given access to the right underlying data sources. What are those data sources?

Search engines: ask any search engine to find you the LinkedIn profile URL of a public person, and they can usually do it instantly.
Corporate/company emails: almost every company follows one of half a dozen email formats, which can be tested with basic verification tools. If you know the person, chances are you know their company email.
Personagraphics: all the basics, like demographics, psychographics, technographics, firmographics, etc. are easily researched or found with web, social, and public data search

Here’s a trivial example:

What we see here is the search engine DuckDuckGo asked for who the CEO of Trust Insights is, which is of course Katie, and the LinkedIn profile URL.

If you have access to any kind of AI agent like Claude Desktop, Claude Code, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT/OpenAI Dots, etc., and you can connect it to your CRM, you can have it walk through your CRM and audit or refresh record information automatically. It might not be as fast as a paid service, but it will fit within your existing AI budget (or be almost free, if you’re using local AI) and you can save a ton of money on appending services.

On this week’s Trust Insights livestream, you’ll see an example of how this might work.

The bottom line is that you can reduce CRM data rot with the tools and AI you already have, on an ongoing basis rather than in big, infrequent batch tasks. Think of it like regular maintenance – it’s much easier to keep a car tuned up than it is to take it in for heavy maintenance once a year.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our capstone course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

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