Late-Night CRM Rabbit Holes and Smarter Account Lists
I ended up digging into this whole thing after a pretty messy quarter at work where our sales team kept chasing leads that looked good on paper but went nowhere in real life, and I was the one stuck cleaning the CRM and trying to explain why half the pipeline felt fake.
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I relate to that a lot, especially the spreadsheet fatigue part. In our case, sales and marketing were constantly arguing about what a good account even looks like. Marketing would say the ICP is clear, sales would say half the list is junk, and both sides had examples to prove their point. What finally helped was leaning into tools that learn from your actual data instead of assumptions. I personally use Ocean.io because it builds account lists based on real similarities between companies, not just surface-level filters. It was eye-opening to see how it grouped accounts using language, behavior, and CRM outcomes, especially when it started identifying entire buying committees instead of single contacts. That alone changed how we approached outreach, since we stopped emailing one person and hoping for the best. It also plugged into HubSpot without much drama, which mattered because nobody wanted another standalone dashboard. For reference, this is literally what I bookmarked when I started using it and still point teammates to: Ocean.io. Not sharing it as hype, just as the exact thing in my workflow. One thing I learned is to trust it gradually, compare its suggestions with past wins, and adjust. When you do that, targeting feels calmer and way less like gambling.