About
About John Serrantino
Twenty nine years inside the machine. Now the machine can remember on its own, and my job is making sure what it remembers is true.
The same problem, at every scale.
I have been working inside CRM since 1997, when I was thirteen years old, doing data entry at AccessCRM through the summers of high school and college. It taught me discipline, and it taught me what it is like to be the person who has to type the record in. Most software is designed by people who have never been that person.
Then came four years of philosophy, which is closer to this work than it sounds. A philosophy degree is four years of being made to say exactly what you mean and then defend it. Most of a broken CRM is people using the same word for four different things.
Since then I have sold CRM, built it, run it, founded a company on it, and now I operate it for a small roster of clients at Kesey. The roster is small on purpose, so the person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
AccessCRM: discipline.
ReminderMedia: the power of sound process.
Front Center Media: failure is how you grow.
PipelineCRM: innovation is listening, then bootstrapping the answer.
HubSpot: how it works at scale.
Kesey: most of it is cleaning up.
Every seat at the table
One problem, six vantage points.
This is the part a resume cannot show, and it is the part a client is actually hiring.
The user
What it is to be the person who actually has to type it in. Every system I have built since answers to that.
The builder
Why a thing does what it does. A field exists because somebody decided it should, usually for a reason nobody wrote down.
The seller
What a buyer will and will not sit through. I closed a $1.5M, 750 user deal on wireframes I drew myself.
The vendor
What finished looks like. Six years inside a product at that scale is how I calibrate what good actually is.
The founder
What it costs. Making payroll out of revenue you brought in changes how you price and how fast you say no.
The janitor
That most of it is cleaning up. Pricing nobody can explain, a pipeline that is a guess, numbers nobody believes. Somebody has to sort that out first.
Said plainly
What I take on, and what I do not.
What I take on
- Revenue systems end to end: CRM architecture, pipeline discipline, lifecycle, and the measurement layer underneath.
- Building. The first phase produces working assets, not a document about working assets.
- Coaching the person who has to run it after I am gone. Portability is a design constraint.
What I do not
- Paid media at enterprise budget.
- Deep platform work outside HubSpot, Day.ai and BrandJet without saying it is a ramp.
- Anything at a scale that needs a team. If it needs an agency, it needs an agency.
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Art is long, life is short. The one line out of four years of philosophy that stuck. The craft is bigger than the time anyone gets, so you start early, you stay put, and you accept that you will not finish it. Twenty nine years in and I am nowhere near done.
Next stop
Tell me about your mess.
Most of what I do starts with a half hour conversation about a CRM nobody trusts. No pitch on the call unless you ask for one.