January 2025 Recap: Trends, Conversations, and Reader Responses

It's been a quieter week than usual as I've been battling a toddler-induced cold, although that's not stopping me today from starting a new, end-of-month recap that will continue as a series through 2025 (and maybe beyond).

My intent with this recap is to share with you the:

1. Trends I see across clients
2. Conversations with practitioners
3. Responses to the past month's newsletters from readers like you

Trends I see across clients
While AI was a focus in the second half of 2024, it has taken a back seat to focusing on data and automation.

First, clients are looking into how to get more from the existing data within their systems, which includes those data that are naturally emitted (i.e. not requiring users to do extra work).

In practice, there are many different activities involved, ranging from:

• Reorganizing data to ensure that it is scalable and usable
• Auditing how existing processes are creating and consuming data to make them more efficient
• Deciding on alternative paths for how to integrate data across systems to reduce manual intervention or unlock data that was previously unavailable

Second, clients are interested in understanding how and where automation is baked into the systems stack and determining whether there are gains available to increase maintainability and agility based on what is available.

Using a tangible example, an enterprise client is currently focused on:

• Restructuring the way that data is stored and transformed for downstream activities like marketing campaigns
• Understanding how and when their data is being processed (i.e. real time, near real time async, scheduled async)
• Looking at their utilization of different features and services to determine the appropriate systems mix for their future state

Conversations with practitioners
AI agents, namely Salesforce's Agentforce feature, have been discussed largely as organizations attempt to build familiarity. A rare few are using it in production for their internal users (i.e. not sharing it to their prospects and customers) around use cases for HR and sales.

The general sentiment is that to do this well requires a decent knowledge in prompt engineering, which is essentially telling AI what to do given your desired outcome, a set of inputs, and what outputs it should produce.

My take on this is remains unchanged; either:

• Explore other platforms that do not have the same degree of lock in and likely have higher adoption
• Wait if you're entirely committed to only using Salesforce's products

Within the nonprofit ecosystem, the recent decision and reversal of pausing federal funds for tons of programs caused a ruckus. Some are concerned about beyond first order effects, which could impact the vendors that provide services to nonprofits. However, this was not mentioned in discussions with the few enterprise nonprofit clients that I advise.

My take on this is that many nonprofits (and businesses, for that matter) have operated without discipline around how to ensure they have a stronger immunity than their peers to external forces. Hopefully, this volatility serves as a wakeup call to be more robust in how they market and source revenue.

Responses to the past month's newsletters
A huge motivator for writing the Only Done Right newsletter is to share insights and my perspective with folks like you with the hopes that we can have a conversation about it.

Here is a summary of these conversations from this month grouped by newsletter:

• Predictions for 2025: AI Partners, CRM Shift, and a Timeless Tactic received an inquiry about whether it has become cheaper to clean data as well, which to some extent, it has, although the need for data governance (with people) still exists
• Every Process & System Deserves an Owner received feedback that it's also critical to have a budget and the resources to maintain, plus know where the exit is; I have touched on these here and here in past newsletters
• How Enneagram Helps to Identify Motivations, Communication Styles, and Conflict Triggers (part of a series) sparked multiple meetings with clients and received responses with folks sharing their affinity to Enneagram over other frameworks like Myers-Briggs; I am still firmly a believer that it's worth exploring this or using a vendor like Culture Index to better understand how people fit within your organization
• Does Your Organization Really Need a CRM System? prompted a reader to ask what incentive exists for senior employees in highly relationship driven businesses to participate in CRM, for which the answer is "it depends" on power dynamics and culture within the organization

As always, if there's something you'd like to read about or a perspective that you have, speak up and hit reply!

I hope you have a lovely weekend, and thank you for being a subscriber 🙏🏼

P.S. While I don't often ask anything from you, if you know just one person that you think could benefit from my newsletter, I would love it if you forward this along so they can subscribe.