How Deep the CRM Data Problem Actually Goes with Anders Krohn

Anders Krohn spent years deploying AI into enterprise go-to-market organizations and kept hitting the same wall. The models weren't the problem. The data was. When his team anonymized and aggregated proof-of-concept data across dozens of companies, they found that 86% of CRM records had some kind of entity data error. Not missing fields or stale phone numbers. Structural errors at the entity layer: accounts mapped to the wrong parent companies, subsidiaries treated as headquarters, local offices confused with global entities because they share the same domain. And every enrichment tool, every territory plan, every AI agent built on top of that data inherits the same errors downstream. In this episode, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Anders Krohn, founder and CEO of Kernel, for a conversation on why the entity and hierarchy layer is the root cause of broken CRM data, how 20% of accounts assigned to reps are flat wrong, why companies spending millions on data providers are still unhappy, how AI exposed a problem that humans used to work around, and what it actually takes to fix the foundation before layering anything else on top of it. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 01:15 - Every revenue leader has had this moment 04:06 - Garbage in, garbage out: learning the hard way 05:49 - 86% of CRM records have entity data errors 08:18 - Spending millions on data and still unhappy 08:40 - Territory planning and AI: the two triggers that expose bad data 10:22 - How deep the entity layer problem actually goes 14:57 - 20% of accounts assigned to reps are wrong 20:21 - The domain problem: Starbucks HQ vs. Starbucks around the corner 21:13 - Two parts to solving a data problem 22:51 - Data governance vs. letting reps loose: when each makes sense 23:20 - Data debt and why it compounds as companies scale 39:21 - What this means for AI deployment right now _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok