Headless CRMs, What Happens When Your CRM Loses Its Head?

A headless CRM is essentially a piece of software that handles things like data retrieval, entry, updates and other backend processes without interacting with the UI at all. You can approve actions via e-mail, Slack, Teams, or wherever is most convenient for you. Headless is a relatively new term but if you strip away the hype and marketing fluff you'll quickly discover that many CRM systems, like Super Easy CRM, have been walking around without a head for years.

What Is a Headless CRM Really?

Headless architecture requires a decoupling of the backend processes like APIs, databases, and business logic from the front end. It gives users the flexibility to interact with the CRM from wherever they choose. Since users are no longer bound by vendor defined entry points, it opens up endless possibilities when it comes to automation and scaling.

Data pipelines can be kicked off via voice command or by simply moving a file into a designated folder in your Google Drive.

How Is a Headless CRM Useful?

The obvious answer to that question is it can help with the normal salesy stuff. Updating leads, enriching contacts and accounts and so on. But that's just scratching the surface. Beyond your standard pipeline data a truly headless CRM can make the application feel like it's alive. Here are some use cases that either use in my own business or that I've built for clients.

The Job Finder

Job hunting sucks nowadays. If you're not dealing with fake job postings then it's ridiculously long interviews with take home projects. And most of those postings are added and reviewed by robots so why not employ your own to counter them by running your job search through your CRM?

Within Super Easy CRM job seekers can define what they are looking for in a job and an agent will scour the Internet for prospects. Then once it finds a prospect, it can score it for you based on your skills, desired salary, and more. Next up, utilizing the CRM's API companies and contacts are curated for outreach.

The job seeker is then sent an email with a draft outreach and the latest copy of their resume. If all looks well and they approve, an email is sent with the resume to the target company.

The Content Creator and Backlink Prospecter

I manage multiple sites including this one and one of the most time consuming parts of my day is trying to get back links and get content ideas. I used to pay a few hundred dollars a month for SEMRush until I passed the task over to my CRM.

Everyday I receive content ideas in the form of tasks. These tasks are assigned to me after my CRM's agent takes what it knows about my site and hits the Internet to find keyword ideas, topics, collaboration opportunities, and content inspiration. The only thing it can't accurately do is gauge domain authority.

After the tasks are created, topics discovered, and backlink prospecting done, a draft is created using a Google Doc in my Google Drive. I review the draft, add my content and images then move the document to my Ready to Publish folder.

There it is picked up and hits my CMS. And after the content is readable on my site map, the task in the CRM is closed. And, at the same time, the prospective collaborators are sent an email to kickstart the backlink outreach process. This all happens without me logging into the CRM a single time.

The Drug Tiering Machine

This is one I built for a pharmacy benefit management company. Essentially, the team was reviewing 10s of thousands of medications in an enormous spreadsheet. If drugs were expensive and had cheaper alternatives, they would fall into one of four possible tiers. Then, if they needed review prior to approval, they were assessed a prior authorization flag.

To be transparent, this process did not live in Super Easy CRM, rather the company's own self hosted platform. But, it was as headless as a horseman on Halloween nonetheless. The process worked like this:

Automation / Integration vs Headless

Some things are simply automations while others are truly headless. The main way to tell the differences is to ask yourself this simple question: where is the 'head'? If the head is the vendor's UI, then you've got automation or integration on your hands. But, if the 'head' exists wherever you find it convenient like Slack, Google Chat (all 12 of you that use it), or e-mail, then it's effectively headless.

Do You Need a Headless CRM?

Now, this may sound strange coming from a guy selling headless CRM solutions, but most small businesses don't really need a headless CRM. In fact most will do just fine with some solid integrations, automations, and AI orchestrations . The main types of companies I see benefiting from headless are those in heavily regulated industries with massive data sprawl.

Healthcare, financial services, and insurance are the main victims of data sprawl in my opinion. With healthcare in particular, I've consulted in places where a user started in one system to pull up patient demographic info, went to another to find information about their condition, then another one to pull up medical records. And it didn't stop there, once medical records were found they'd have to pull up a CRM-like system to find job aids for certain actions, then where warranted go into another EHR to allow claims to process for medications.

Chaotic environments like that benefit greatly from headless because there is no reliance on a single vendor's UI. Instead, the tech meets you wherever you are and kicks off processes that save you precious time.