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All right. Tom, finally we made it.
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It's great to have you here and that we can finally talk, and I think we have an interesting topic because we want to discuss why CRM managers actually feel undervalued and how we can solve that. Absolutely. Yeah.
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Great to be with you, Jessica, and sort of do this joint podcast on both of our platforms, the Inside CRM podcast and the Customer Retention Show.
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I'm, I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you about, about CRM teams and their, and their profile and how they feel about their roles. Do you...
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Uh, I, I mean, for my listeners, would you just introduce yourself and what you do and, and- Yeah, of course. Yeah. My expertise is within CRM for 12 years.
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I'm based in Berlin, and have been there around a bit in the startup scene, but also, uh, corporate world, so to say.
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I've worked for Zalando, for example, which is a bit more known in Europe for seven years, and basically learned there like the operational, but also the strategic work, and then went into consulting different industries, tried to transfer my knowledge there.
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And yeah, so really different places I have been with CRM and started meetups a year ago in Berlin to really share knowledge more across the peer, and also started the platform Inside CRM because of that.
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That's my background. Yeah, you've got a great, you've got a great newsletter, haven't you? Um, it's, it's got a lot of, um, a lot of interest, a lot of traction. It's great content in there every week as well.
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And, uh, I've seen like lots of, um, good feedback about the meetups in Berlin, and next time I'm over I'd love to come and join one. Hope soon. [chuckles] Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. How about you?
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I also read your newsletter because it's great. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a newsletter as well, uh, the Retention Blueprint.
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I spent a long time in retention, so just, uh, two and a half decades and, and eight years client side, Man United, DAZN recently.
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And then, and then prior to that I spent a long time in agencies, and particularly as global CRM director at a big, uh, big digitas agency, and then a bit in telcos as an analyst. Before that, customer CRM analyst.
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So a long time in CRM and retention and marketing and, you know, CRM's always been kind of my focus area really.
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But, but yeah, so I set up as an independent consultant about a year ago and, yeah, it's been good so far and I love writing the newsletter.
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And I think for me it's also amazing to have been at Manchester United and DAZN. That must have been like really different worlds, uh, in comparison- Yeah, definitely, yeah... when you look at the concept.
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Yeah, definitely, definitely. Like DAZN's,
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yeah, a big technology company, the biggest sort of streamer outside of Silicon Valley, and then Man United always appears on the outside to be incredibly sophisticated, but when you get under the skin, you know, uh, a lot of sports brands are, are not particularly.
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So yeah, but it's quite, quite interesting, you know, both, both bases, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so let's get into the topic.
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As said, we want to look at the point why CRM m- managers actually feel undervalued and how they can solve it. Um, so what do you think, why are they actually feeling that way? I think this is a great question.
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I, I think I've...
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There's research, I think it's Plink did some research, I can send to anyone who's listening if they're interested, that showed that 75% of teams in the UK, customer marketing and CRM teams in the UK feel undervalued.
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And it's kind of a problem, right? Because it's not just that they feel undervalued, it's just... And because they feel undervalued, they don't get the support and the investment.
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They often don't get the data and analytics support they need to drive, you know, high value CRM interactions.
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And then, and then it's sort of a self-fulfilling cycle because you don't get the support and the data and the tech, and even the tech investment that you need in order to drive great quality work, then the work's not as good as it could be.
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And then, and then you bec- you, you, you're undervalued, so it becomes kind of quite a negative cycle.
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So I think it's, you know, it's quite important in, for organizations to realize that CRM marketing is not a, it's not ju- it's not a nice to have, right?
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It's so fundamental to driving, driving revenue, particularly in the subscription space and, and the recurring revenue businesses. But beyond that, that if you don't value that CRM marketing function, then it actually,
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part of it is of those people and maybe not be particularly happy, and that is important 'cause we care about people.
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But the key is like, if you don't value your CRM marketing function, then you're gonna be damaging your business, right?
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Because the opportunity from CRM marketing, when done well, is huge, and you can really see it in the P&L.
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So yeah, I mean, I, I, I then maybe we can move on more, more later in the conversation about why they feel undervalued, but I think the, the, the, the fact that they do and are in many organizations is actually to the detriment of the organization itself rather than to the detriment of the people themselves, or in addition to, I should say.
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I mean, a pa- part, I guess partly it sort of is to do with misconceptions, right, about what CRM is. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think the struggle is, and probably you've been there as well, that
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often we are seen as those people who are sending emails, and that can be that hard, right? Everyone is doing it. If the signs around you cannot be that difficult.
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And when I was thinking more about this topic, I also set up like a LinkedIn poll on my profile to get feedback from other people if they have experienced misconceptions and what kind of misconceptions were there.
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And 72% actually responded that the most or the biggest misconception is that it's just about sending emails, which is really not the case. We know that.
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Um, and some even say that was around 21, that others believe there's no re- team needed to do this. This is not really- That's crazy... work. Yeah.
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And I think when you think about what we do on a daily basis and how diverse our skill set is, right?
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So we need to be analytical, we need to look at reportings and analyze what we do and optimize it.We need to be creative in finding solutions, how we tackle customer pain points, but we need to do a lot of communication and stakeholder management, right?
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To get the setups right with different teams to understand how we can really manage the customer experience along the journey and improve it.
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And also throughout the years, as I experienced it, it got also more and more technical, right? It really understanding how you can, um, get more data in to personalize it.
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Also thinking about AI, how to leverage different models there for our case. And yeah, a bit of infrastructures, right? I also had to do quite a few tool migrations.
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I enjoyed that part, but it's also something that became more and more heavily part of the job throughout the years. And then also we do a lot of organizational work around campaign planning, project management.
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So I feel it's often not seen how much is going on there in the background, and I, I assume you have a similar experience on that. Totally. I totally agree. Yeah, 100% right.
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Like, so I actually did a LinkedIn post and a lot survey, but I did one, um, about a year ago with the kind of two pie charts, which is one was like what people think CRM is, which is kind of subject lines, images and copy and open rates and click-through rates.
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But like you just said, like the reality is it's data, it's data engineering, it's technology, it's marketing automation, it's organizational alignment, it's like branding, it's creative, it's...
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And I think that's kind of what makes it so exciting in a way, like as a CRM practice practitioner and someone that's interested in that space, it's, you know, it's you're working, you're working with creative, you're working with da-data, you're working with technology.
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You can influence many aspects of, of the customer's relationship with the brand. Like retention isn't a result of CRM, but CRM can play a massive role in driving retention.
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So it's, it's, that-that's why it's great, right? But it's...
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That's why it can be quite frustrating I think for CRM folk, because like leadership don't always see like all the effort that goes into creating something that they see in their inbox, and the maybe the 10,000 other versions of that same thing that were sent to, you know, 150,000 other different customers, you know, when you go into the world of hyper-personalization and how much effort it takes to deliver that and, and the incrementality that you're generating off the back of doing something like that.
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And, and, and that's why it can be quite frustrating I think for CRM folk, like where they feel that kind of they don't feel appreciated for the work that they're doing and they don't feel that value. Yeah.
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They are juggling so many topics. We are juggling so many topics, and then it feels like it's not really seen.
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Why do you think that actually, especially leadership then struggles to understand this value that we are bringing to the table?
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I, I think you kind of said it like a, a little bit before, like because we send emails every day, because we're all sending emails every day, right?
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Then it is a sort of a perception if you don't understand like all the work that goes into this discipline that, you know, it's not that hard, right?
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Can't be that hard to send like a HTML email with, you know, imagery and copy. It's not that hard, right?
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And then I think the other side of it is often CRM marketing doesn't have like a seat at the top tables and is reporting into a CMO.
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And probably rightly, most CMOs come from a performance background, like 50% I think, Forrester said 50% of CMOs come from performance, and most of the rest are coming from brand, and then you have a few that come from like a customer marketing CRM background.
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And I'd say probably rightly, because if you're in a big organization that's spending millions and millions of dollars on performance marketing, then you probably want a CMO that kind of has a handle on that discipline.
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And but the, but the kind of the impact for, for CRM marketers is you end up with leadership that also don't understand the discipline in really any great deal of detail and, and therefore are not very good at kind of representing the function at the very highest levels within the organization.
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And I think the last point I'd say is, is a bit nuanced actually. I think in my experience, CRM marketing as a kind of driver of revenue or value off the back of delivering great customer experience is,
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as a marketing channel, is the highest ROI channel there is, right? Because you've got your tech costs and then it's resource basically, right? There's usually not much beyond that. Um, um,
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and as a result of that, you get very, very high, high ROIs because you don't have to be spending, you know, dollars and dollars on meta or, um, any other kind of marketing, you know, versus, versus acquisition.
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And because it's so high ROI, I feel like sometimes as well you can see even CRM marketers that are pri- quite tenured getting a pretty good result, and then the business being pretty happy with that result.
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But it's not necessarily as good as it could be. And then when it's not going to necessarily as good as it could be, then sometimes you have senior folk going, "Well, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?"
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A-and you see CRM folk being like, "Oh, yeah," right? And then it, and it can be... And then, and then that becomes part of this kind of attitude of like self-fulfilment. "I know how to send an email.
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I'm telling you how you should be doing it." Yes, you're driving a good ROI, but you're not driving as good an ROI a-as it could be. And I think that the,
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the key really is like brilliant CRM marketing is actually not easy. Like you can drive a good ROI. Like I, I had a client recently, I don't work with them anymore, but they had a...
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They didn't have an onboarding program, or they were sending like two emails in the first month, and then they started sending like fifteen emails in the first month to help their subscribers to get a better use of their service.
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And of course, they had great ROI, right? But the pro- big, you know, drove a big uplift. But the program was poor, right? It was just all about proximity.
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It was just about sending more meant that the customer was more likely to use the service as a result of sending more.
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And, and so I, I think, you know, if you think about creativity and you think about how you leverage data and you think about data engineering and smart use of data science and analytics and using the right tech, you talked to it already, and I know you've been through quite a big...
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a few big tech transformations, using the right tech for your particular context or-How you apply behavioral science, all of these things, like they can all have like an increment- add an incremental value to the output and the-- what you achieve from your activity.
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And, and I think that sometimes CRM marketing teams because they're not, they're, they're not making a loss, they're doing, you know, they're delivering a,
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you know, a few hundred thousand increments or they've got a, you know, two to one ROI, they don't push it to where it could be, right?
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And then, and then, you know, leadership see that it could be better and then, then the undervalue cycle continues. So I think, I think the, the, the problem with the effectiveness of the channel is
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can mean that people could-- don't try as hard as they possibly could do, right? And this is not to be negative on CRM marketing folk, but it's just to think about always learning, right?
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Always try and grow, always try and think about how you, how you, you can improve what you're doing every day. Yeah. That would be my suggestion at least. Yeah. Yeah. But what is your experience?
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When I went to a couple of c- of companies, I can also see that they don't invest heavily in CRM seniority and rather get like a junior in or someone coming from a different field, like for example, content creators that get moved over to, to CRM, and then they say, "You can do the newsletter."
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And of course, they don't have any experience before on how to do this. And then I noticed that they kind of left with it on their own, and they have to try to figure it out on their own. And- Yeah, got it... um,
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I think that's also one part of the issue then what you said, right?
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It, it's a channel where you can easily get a positive ROI, but then also if you don't get the experience in, it's also hard to really leverage it to the peak quickly. Exactly.
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And you don't know what you don't know, do you? Yeah.
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And I know, you know, at Project A, you work with a lot of like small businesses that probably have that kind of profile of CRM person that's doing content and doing digital marketing and actually doing CRM as well, which is why, you know, it's really good that they get to access to you and, and you can coach and mentor them.
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And I think-- but I think you're right though, because you don't know what you don't know, and then you're doing something that's delivering a positive ROI, you know, and maybe you've got loads of other responsibilities.
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But I think even like seasoned tenured folk as well, like I think, I think you should ne- uh, put my advice is just never stop learning and just, you know, try and make it the best it possibly can be.
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You know, I've, as I said, I was working with quite a tenured, uh, head of CRM recently, and their program could have been, could have been far better than it was, you know? Yeah. Totally with you.
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[chuckles] It totally makes sense.
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I think as I'm doing it 12 years and you're also doing it for such a long sp- uh, time, I think then you really need to search for resources that give you impulses and new ideas how, how to look at this.
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And that's why I also en-enjoy your newsletter to get your perspective on things and really have through these kind of formats or also meetups exchange to get new input in and, and try and really try new perspectives on this.
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Yeah, definitely. I agree, and I, and that's why I love yours as well. I, I learn a hell of a lot from your, uh, deliverability guide, I have to say. So recommend it to anybody.
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But yeah, look, and also I'd suggest like to folk as well that do wanna kinda... who are, are working in CRM, maybe they're, you know, new to the discipline or wanna just improve.
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They've been ar- they've been doing it for a while. It's just, it's not just kinda like the CRM resources as well. It's like look beyond that.
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Like, you know, like customer experience strategy, you know, creative strategy.
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Rory Sutherland's great on, on like things like behavioral science, even organizational stuff like, you know, Simon Sinek and desi- uh, Start with Why.
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And there's a lot of like product people as well that do like great stuff around like product onboarding journeys. And there's a guy, Ramli John, who I know who's, does, does a great job on that.
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And then there's like a lot of material out on personalization as well, like Rasmus Hoyland's got a great book on that.
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And there's-- so yeah, I, I, um, I encourage everyone to sort of read your newsletter, but also kind of be beyond, go beyond it as well, right?
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Like think about what, about, about resources that can impact their day-to-day that, that, that may not be immediately obviously CRM. Yeah.
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So when the person has done the job as well and for, but still at the struggling with the leadership is seeing the value, what kind of approach have you done in the past to really show them this is the impact CRM is having?
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Yeah, I think, um, what I'll say is probably there's, there's different level of folk that are listening to this call, right? So, um, also this podcast, so there'll be, you know, more junior folks.
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So if you don't have a super control group and you don't know what that is, then... or universal control group or fallow cell or whatever you wanna call it, like Google it and definitely get that in place, right?
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It's effectively a proportion of your ba- your base that don't get any of your, your CRM marketing activity, and then that's obviously the clear way to look at the relationship between the two.
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But sometimes even that doesn't work, right? So I've, I've recently started working with a company who had that, where the C-suite are challenging
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even the results of the super control group 'cause they don't see the value that's played into the P&L.
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And I've had this challenge myself actually when I was in, in client side where I had a super control group, and these guys aren't getting anything else. All they're exposed to is the,
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the, um, above the line activity and through the line activity, but there still was a lack of trust in the, uh, output.
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And I think sometimes it's also part to do with this kinda definition of value, but if you start claiming, you know, a hundred million of incremental revenue, and then the P&L hasn't jumped year to year, then people are like going, "Are you sure?"
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Right? And so it can be quite, it can, could be quite a, quite an interesting conversation.
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And I ha-- and then when we had this problem where I, I had an eight figure incremental on the, on a, on an annualized basis versus a super control group. And basically what we did is we worked with the finance team.
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We built a CLV model, and then we identified the customer lifetime value of the cohort that are in the super control group and the cohort that are in the treatment group, and that would allow, allowed us to understand the incrementality versus of the, the two cohorts, and we saw a difference, and then we can map that back into the P&L.
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And then I think the, honestly the maths behind it was like, it was pr- almost secondary really, right? Yeah. The maths behind it was kind of important, but it, it kinda sounded-Good.
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And we did do it, you know, very robustly using the customer lifetime value calculations.
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But the, I think the real, real reason that got the CEOs buy into the outcome was, or to the, to the analysis was involving finance, right?
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If you involve finance and finance are nodding and they're, and their senior, you know, commercial finance agree that this is the right way of doing things, then, you know, and they're, they're showing the CEOs, "Well, it's not just you," right?
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Then I, I think that's where you get the, the, the value because...
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So there is-- I, I always really just encourage my teams to, like, work closely with finance teams and, and, um, and try and, and try as much as possible to relate what we're doing in CRM back to the P&L, 'cause that's where, that's where you start to be valued.
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And if there's trust in the impact on the P&L, then y- this issue of being undervalued goes away. And actually, that's where you can start to get investment and support and the resources you need to do things better.
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Should we qui- quickly say what's in P&L for people that don't know? Yeah. This is basically just, like, how much money the company's making. That's, that's what we mean by P&L. So, like, the profit- Right... basically.
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Yeah. The best definition ever. Yeah, exactly. Straight to the point. So, no, no, that's cool. Cool. Yeah, no, so obviously, yeah, there's, there's people from different countries in this listening in, isn't there?
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So I'm, uh, very UK-centric in my terms. What would you... Well, what's, what's your take on the, on the visibility problem for CRM teams? What's your, what's your experience and what have you seen? Yeah. I think, um,
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it's a bit, uh, difficult because we do a lot behind the scenes, and we were talking about that before. And, um, necessarily CRM people are not the ones that really showcase all they've done, their impact.
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Feel like, and I had that conversation on one of my podcast episodes with Moritz Kerlinger,
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and, uh, we were talking about that fact that, like, other, uh, people in the marketing team, especially if you have ads or social campaign, um, these are often like tiny products that they present and say, "Here, see what I've done, and I spent this budget-" Yeah...
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"and this is what I got out." What, what I've noticed in the past is that, yeah, we as CRM people
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tend to not be that, uh, proactive in communicating what we've done, and I think that's something that we need to work on, that we are also more visible in, in, in meeting, communicating what's the impact, what we're driving there.
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Mm-hmm.
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And I think what you also mentioned before, when we look at C-level leadership who gets promoted into CMO positions, as you said, that tend to be rather like, uh, people with performance background because they spend the whole lot of the budget, right?
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And of course, as you said, some situations it makes sense then to say this person should be on that seat.
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But also when you look stronger into profit, it might be better to actually lean towards with someone with a CRM background, because we are the ones that are really looking to optimize- Making the money... yeah. Exactly.
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Exactly. Making the money. Yes. It's like- I, I think, I totally agree with that.
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And, um, the, the, I guess the, the, um, the thing about acquisition as well, which is, like, versus CRM, particularly if you're thinking about, like, measuring against a super control and life cycle marketing for active customers and so on.
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Acquisition, it, like, provides immediate hit. You spend £100,000 one weekend, and then Monday you can see how much you've got, right? And, and that can, uh, even drive dopamine, right? Like, CMO's happy, CMO...
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CEO's happy, whereas, like, you may spend £100,000 on some tech for CRM.
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You've gotta fig- plug it in, you've gotta configure it all, you've gotta then build the programs, and then, and then, you know, after six months or so, you're showing incrementality versus a super control group.
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There's not that same, like, hit in terms of, like, the, you know, how it, I think necessarily feels for senior leadership.
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And but yeah, that, I mean, there's a guy actually call it craquisition, like people get addicted to this acquisition cycle. You know, they just kind of love the acquisition cycle.
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But, but yeah, there's a House of Kaizen, I think it's the guy from House of Kaizen mentioned that. Yeah. But, but yeah. Cool.
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Like, I mean, like this, this kind of lack of a value and appreciation, what do, what sort of, kind of, what impact does it have, do you think, like on, on a psychological level on CRM folk?
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I think there is a bit of tendency that people get imposter syndrome over time, that they feel like what they are doing, it's not so much worth mentioning compared to others. I even see that with the meetup.
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I'm trying to convince people then to go on stage and it's under the MPIR, so it's not even... Yeah, exactly. It's like a safe social space.
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But then people say, "I'm not sure if I have any- anything interesting to share."
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So there's the, this hesitation going on, and I think that also limits the ambition to, to show off their cases, what they've done, uh, what impact they had, and also the idea to go more for leadership po- positions.
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And I think I can also talk there from my personal experience that, um, in the beginning of my career, I got promoted into leadership pro- uh, positions, was not something that I personally pushed for.
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Just done my job, and then it happened. Um, and also back in the days, I was really struggling with getting in front of people and talking about what I've done.
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I even had discussions with my former boss, and she was like, "You need to be more present and out there of what you're doing. You're making so much," and, "Well, you're doing so much."
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And I was like, "As long as the product is working, who cares?" Yeah. That was my, my, my mindset back in the days.
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And what I've lear- learned over time that it's important to make it visible what you've done to alsoUm, showcase yourself and show what you're worth.
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I understand that's a journey, like a personal journey to everyone, but you can really see the, the benefits. I, I see it now with the meetups as well.
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We have then people that are talking for the first time in front of people and get, like, really, uh, great feedback for that, and then feel super good about it. And I think that's- Yeah...
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the feeling we should have instead of the cycle that you were mentioning also before, right? That you feel undervalue and therefore you're not mentioning what you've done, and then like- Exactly... a repetition.
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Becomes a vicious cycle.
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And then because you feel undervalued, you're not mentioning what you've done, then when you need something, you don't get the support, and then you feel undervalued 'cause you're not getting support, and it just, it's an endless- Yeah...
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cycle. You can break that cycle, like you said, by raising your profile, showing the impact you made. If it gets questioned, proving it, right? Work with finance- Yeah... to do that. And then just- Yeah...
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then go take the cycle up rather than, you know, on the cycle down. I, I think you're right. I know you sort of alluded to it as well.
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I think you're right about a lot of CRM folk are kind of introverted as well, just by nature, aren't they?
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That's just the way it is, like I've seen it myself, and I know I was definitely when I was younger, but less so now, but definitely when I was younger, like you said as well. Like, and yeah. But yeah, cool.
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Like, so how, how do you think that beyond, like you said, showcasing the work and having more visibility, is there any other things that you think can help change this narrative and help raise the profile of CRM folk?
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Yeah. Yeah, I think being concrete about how, how to be visible, I think try really to make your case in every marketing meeting or whatever you have, like on a weekly base, think about what you can share.
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It doesn't always need to be this big, bold presentation. It can also be like, "Listen, I did this campaign last week, and I got this revenue out of it. This is the profit." So just showcase your number- Yeah...
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that is mentioned. And I think a- as you said, CRM often takes time to, to show really the impact compared to acquisitions.
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I think w- what I've learned a lot in, in consulting was the case to map out what is the impact over the last or over the next 12 months to show like a wider range of when I do this aut- automation over 12 months, it will generate this impact.
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Instead of just focusing on a small amount of time, this can really emphasize what is happening there. What you said around
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you need to start speaking the language of the C level, I think your example was perfect for that, that you really think about how can I map this to the P&L statement that also they understand if I make this happen, you will look good because [chuckles] I can make an impact for you.
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Exactly. Um, I just, yeah, in the end of the game, we all want to look better. Show them how, how you- Yeah, and also b- business is just about making money really at the end of the day, and you can do that. Yeah.
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It's not... That doesn't mean it's always about sales. It's also about great customer experiences, and CRM can play a role in mapping that as well.
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But yeah, so if you can show your impact, that's where, you know, and then map it to the language that leadership understand. I totally agree with what you said there.
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I think it's, uh, that's what, that's where, that's where sometimes CRM folk fail, I think, and that's where there's an opportunity. Yeah. Yeah.
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And also what I've seen that actually, like in standard reporting, it's not showing up correctly, right?
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That then it's not so much in, in a focus like you think, "Okay, I've got my CRM reports and the standards reports not really showing up. Who care?" But it's so important that you are on the map. If your- 100%...
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CMO looks on a specific r- report every day, CRM should be on there.
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And also make sure that the, the tracking is, is correct and that, that you play a part in the attribution model, because I've also seen with clients that CRM was not attributed at all in the model.
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I was like, "That shouldn't happen." Right. And they had tracking issues, and therefore the lum- numbers were not re- liable.
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And then people said, "Yeah, if it stands in there or not doesn't matter because the numbers are wrong, so we don't really know what impact CRM is having." Yes.
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So I think it's important to, to fix that and have reliable data. Really important. You have to have reliable data, yeah. And that takes time- Yeah... doesn't it?
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And I think what you said about attribution models is right as well. Like I've seen what you, you've seen as well before, but also like even without an attribution model, like this is not like a,
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a criticism of performance folk, but they quite often wanna take like last click, and they wanna take attribution for every single sale or conversion because they need to, right? To justify the media investment. Yeah.
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Um, but one of the simple ways to do it, and which we did at DAZN as well, which really helped a lot with the profile of the CRM team in the boxing markets, was just have CRM influence conversions.
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'Cause quite often people like get an email from us 'cause they've, they've purchased a fight from us before or been this c- customer for a little while before and canceled.
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They'll get an email from us when there's a fight on, and then they'll look at it and read it and think, "That's great." And then a few hours before the fight, they'll go to Google and click on a paid ad, right?
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And then the reporting was just attributing all of those sales to that paid ad. Mm-hmm. But when we looked at that CRM influenced conversions, we saw there was like m- multi-million impacts in like- Yeah...
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big fight night, right? In terms of revenue, like on a pay-per-view event. So just things like that, right?
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Just look at very simply, attribution model's obviously the best way to go, but very simply, if, if you're struggling with this and you think you're influencing a conversion, but you're not getting credit for it because the business, like many businesses, is still measuring on last click, to just, just understand like of those that converted, just how many are, are, did you send the email to?
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'Cause even just a subject line and not opened could drive a conversion. And also like fight tonight, for example.
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Or, or, um, also looking at, um, the c- the, the volume that opened, the volume that clicked.And then the revenue attributes of those as well, and y-you can share, share the performance with the performance guys rather than taking 100% of the credit, right?
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Yeah Yeah And I think also then sit at the table who are discussing attribution because- Yes... I often seen like CRM is not involved when it's about this. Um, we should be involved. Without a doubt, we should be.
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There needs to be in th- they need to be in those conversations, those performance conversations, particularly if the CRM is a channel that's used to drive conversion. I think it's absolutely critical, yeah.
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Is th- Are there any other technical challenges you see on, on that area- Yeah. Technology-wise-... apart from attribution? [chuckles] Yeah, attribution, yeah, attribution's a big problem.
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But also like loads and loads and teams that through...
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It goes back to the valid point, but also it's kinda complex as well, and then there's obviously often org- other organizational priorities in brands that, you know, have like a big product organization, for example.
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And I think quite often there's like gaps in, in data availability can be scattered across different silos.
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I worked with one client many years ago, and they had 250 customer databases, all with different elements, data all sitting on different systems, like a massive, ginormous mess like.
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And, and, you know, in those days, there wasn't such a thing as a CDP, so it's kinda quite hard to kinda integrate all of that, um, at the time.
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But nowadays, the CDPs are like, they're the marketer's toolkit, and particularly the CRM marketer's toolkit, because it allows you to pull in the data you need from different silos.
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So I would, you know, massively champion that, um, and if you are looking at your tech stack, look at brands that have like inbuilt CDPs for CRM marketers as part of the overall marketing automation toolkit.
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But then when you do that, [chuckles] you-you've got a lot of experience in this.
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When you do that, it's really, really careful about your project plan, 'cause o-often I think C-suite will invest a few hundred thousand pounds or euros in a new piece of kit, and then it's like, "Where's the value?"
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Yeah. "We implemented it last week, guys." Give it, give, give us a bit while, we got... We'll, we'll be IP first.
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So just really setting expectations and real clarity on that and having like a rock solid project plan of how you're gonna execute it because, 'cause it can take a while.
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You know, I've, I have a client recently, it's took them a year to implement their CDP and MarTech platform, and they're quite a complicated business, but, you know, it's, it's, it, it's just not, it's not as fast as, as C-suite would like it to be, I think, versus, you know.
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What's your experience with that? What... How, how have you seen like tech implementations? I know you said you've done quite a few, haven't you?
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General, it's set three to six months, but as you said, it really depends on, on the company and how complex their setup is.
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Because you, you need to understand what's the existing infrastructure and how do you build it in, and what are the resources that you get to, to make that happen. Yes. So, um- That's key, resources.
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The resource support you're gonna get from like data engineering is critical, right? It doesn't- Yeah... you don't just turn it on. It's not like when you s- open Microsoft Word. No. No.
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And from my experience, what I really go hard for is like really communicating, "I need those resources. I need the priority on this project, otherwise it's gonna fail." And really be clear about it.
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I've done implementations that took like around, um, three months, but I've also done some that took more than half a year. Um- Yeah... so it, it depends how complex is your setup.
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I think there's not always this one answer to it. You need to evaluate it and then make an educated guess what makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, three months seems, seems pretty good, I think.
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If you can do it in three months, that's, that's, that's excellent, isn't it? Even in frame for a smaller business, you know, with all the IP warm-up, getting the data in place, templates, et cetera, et cetera.
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I think that's a great, yeah, to do that. Let's se- so sort of switching tracks slightly, what, what sort of advice would you give to, to leadership to...
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If you were, you know, f- if you're talking to some of your clients at, um, project day, like what would you, what, what advice would you give to, to the, to the leadership at, at your clients around supporting CRM teams?
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The leadership teams need to shift their perspective anyway because they see that acquisition costs are rising, and they still are for a couple of years. So they- Usually... they need to shift. Yes. Um,
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and I think they also, it's a bit of misconception around growth because it's often connected to getting a lot of leads and revenue and not so much around profit.
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And I think that's maybe also connected to the time when I joined Sia in the years I learned because that was a huge scaling phase, right? I was at Zalando. We had hyper-growth phase, right? They were with the- Yeah...
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in-investing in everything into the company, and we were going into different countries, in countries.
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There was a lot of budget going into acquisition, but now companies are fa- facing this challenge that they don't get investments that easily anymore, right? We are in a different phase now- Absolutely...
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economically. Um, and I, I looked at some stats. Apparently,
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2021 we had the peak, and then until last year it went down by 50%, like the amount of value that went in or amount of money that went into investments in the gears was going down by 37% according to VentureBeat.
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So you need to change if you leave... see these numbers, right? You cannot expect that you get investments and, and grow via that. Um,
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so I think that's a natural shift and therefore like really looking into CM talent and invest in it as well as like a good setup, which often is also connected to technology.
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I think that's really important to support that setup and add value to CRM in that case.Totally. Yeah. Totally agree.
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And like the ac-- yeah, the acquisition, I think people are starting to place more emphasis on CRM more recently, yeah, somehow because of the, the, the huge increase in costs on platforms like Meta.
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And but I, I think it's, you know, like retention is key to growth, but often people just think when they think growth, they just think acquisition.
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But actually- Yeah...if you're in a recurring revenue business or even if you're not, right? But if you're in a subscription or recurring revenue business, you start with like a,
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a baseline of customers at the start of each year, and then you expect to lose some, and then you expect to acquire some, right?
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And, and if you lose more than you planned for, then your acquisition needs to increase more. So you could lose-- If you lose like ten percent of the customers that...
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You lose ten-- You expect to lose-- You had a hundred percent of customers, you expect to lose ten in the year, but you lose twenty of those customers or twenty percent of those customers, then suddenly you need way more acquisition budget to hit the same number, right?
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To hit the same end of your target. Yeah. So actually-- And then it works the other way around as well.
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Like if you, if you do better than you expected in terms of retention, then you can spend less on acquisition to hit your targets, and therefore the business can be much more profitable.
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And there was some research that was done by Bain and the Harvard Business Review, so like a five to ten percent improvement in customer retention drives between a twenty-five to a hundred percent increase in profits.
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And they, in their paper, they didn't actually break down the numbers, but so I actually wanted to put it to the test. So I did a load of maths around it, and I broke it down actually in one of my newsletters.
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And I think what, what you, what you see is like companies like Amazon, where Jeff Bezos said in two thousand and five, like why he implemented Prime was 'cause he wanted to put a, a, a moat around his best customers.
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'Cause actually when you think about it logically, you would only use Amazon Prime... Like the people who'd use Amazon Prime are the people already getting lots of deliveries.
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Why would you pay ninety pound a year to have faster deliveries? Only the people who are already getting lots of deliveries would pay that.
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So it, it-- The, the lo- the logic and at the board at Amazon at the time was, "What's the point in doing this, Jeff? This, this doesn't work right."
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And now we see Amazon was worth thirty billion in two thousand and five, now it's worth three hundred billion. Uh, eBay was worth thirty billion in two thousand and five, and it's still worth thirty billion, right?
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So it's kinda like it, it-- you can see why it's been so effective.
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And brands like Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, they understand intuitively that, that their business growth hinges on great retention, and CRM marketing plays a massive part of that.
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And it's not just the CRM marketing, of course. It's your product. It's your how you handle customer service. It's all, you know, different components of the relationship.
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But, but CRM plays a massive role in like what I call like moments of truth, like those first,
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those first experiences of the app, like through in-app pop-ups and other content that you can d-deliver to help customers have a, a great first experience, or onboarding the customer into, into the brand, or when like usage declines, when you see kinda like behaviors trickle off, like, or, or transactions trickle off in a, in a non-recurring revenue business.
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Like how do you-- CRM plays a vital role in kind of re-engaging the customer or in service issues or, you know, likely problems.
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There's loads and loads of ways that CRM can contribute to, um, you know, driving better customer experience that then translates into customers, um, being more likely to stay with the brand, and which then translates into reduced churn, which then translates into growth.
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And, um, and I think it's, um, like we said right at the start of the call, I think it's like it's... There's so, there's so-- The, the-- Because teams are undervalued, they don't get the focus.
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They don't get the support and actually, you know, actually some leaders are actually shooting theirselves in the foot with that.
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That actually if they i-i-if they really understood the nuance around it and put the right investment and focus within w-within with CRM and around, you know, sales and growth driving initiatives, but also customer experience type initiatives as well, they would without a doubt see the benefit of it.
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So we need to break through the cycle. We, we do. Absolutely. That's the key message. We're on a crusade, you and I, Jessica. [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah. All right. Lovely, lovely speaking with you.
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I really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for having me on your show, and I'll, I'll, and I'm delighted to have you on mine. So it's, it's been a great, it's been a great chat. Yeah. Thank you so much.
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It w- it was amazing. I, I enjoy talking to you. We've done that before. [chuckles] It's always great to talk to you. So I think- Yeah, likewise. Yeah. It was good to have your point on this as well.
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It was great to have your point of view. I love ta- talking to you, Jessica, always whenever we connect, and, um, I'd love to come see one of your meetups in Berlin, um, sometime soon. Yeah, I hope gonna happen.
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And maybe you do another one in London. Yeah, that'd be great. We could do one in London. We could do inside CRM in London, couldn't we? That'd be good. Yeah. Would be amazing. There we go. All right. Cool. Thank you.
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See-- Thanks a lot, Jessica. I'll see you next time.
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All right. Tom, finally we made it.
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It's great to have you here and that we can finally talk, and I think we have an interesting topic because we want to discuss why CRM managers actually feel undervalued and how we can solve that. Absolutely. Yeah.
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Great to be with you, Jessica, and sort of do this joint podcast on both of our platforms, the Inside CRM podcast and the Customer Retention Show.
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I'm, I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you about, about CRM teams and their, and their profile and how they feel about their roles. Do you...
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Uh, I, I mean, for my listeners, would you just introduce yourself and what you do and, and- Yeah, of course. Yeah. My expertise is within CRM for 12 years.
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I'm based in Berlin, and have been there around a bit in the startup scene, but also, uh, corporate world, so to say.
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I've worked for Zalando, for example, which is a bit more known in Europe for seven years, and basically learned there like the operational, but also the strategic work, and then went into consulting different industries, tried to transfer my knowledge there.
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And yeah, so really different places I have been with CRM and started meetups a year ago in Berlin to really share knowledge more across the peer, and also started the platform Inside CRM because of that.
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That's my background. Yeah, you've got a great, you've got a great newsletter, haven't you? Um, it's, it's got a lot of, um, a lot of interest, a lot of traction. It's great content in there every week as well.
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And, uh, I've seen like lots of, um, good feedback about the meetups in Berlin, and next time I'm over I'd love to come and join one. Hope soon. [chuckles] Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. How about you?
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I also read your newsletter because it's great. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a newsletter as well, uh, the Retention Blueprint.
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I spent a long time in retention, so just, uh, two and a half decades and, and eight years client side, Man United, DAZN recently.
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And then, and then prior to that I spent a long time in agencies, and particularly as global CRM director at a big, uh, big digitas agency, and then a bit in telcos as an analyst. Before that, customer CRM analyst.
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So a long time in CRM and retention and marketing and, you know, CRM's always been kind of my focus area really.
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But, but yeah, so I set up as an independent consultant about a year ago and, yeah, it's been good so far and I love writing the newsletter.
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And I think for me it's also amazing to have been at Manchester United and DAZN. That must have been like really different worlds, uh, in comparison- Yeah, definitely, yeah... when you look at the concept.
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Yeah, definitely, definitely. Like DAZN's,
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yeah, a big technology company, the biggest sort of streamer outside of Silicon Valley, and then Man United always appears on the outside to be incredibly sophisticated, but when you get under the skin, you know, uh, a lot of sports brands are, are not particularly.
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So yeah, but it's quite, quite interesting, you know, both, both bases, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so let's get into the topic.
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As said, we want to look at the point why CRM m- managers actually feel undervalued and how they can solve it. Um, so what do you think, why are they actually feeling that way? I think this is a great question.
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I, I think I've...
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There's research, I think it's Plink did some research, I can send to anyone who's listening if they're interested, that showed that 75% of teams in the UK, customer marketing and CRM teams in the UK feel undervalued.
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And it's kind of a problem, right? Because it's not just that they feel undervalued, it's just... And because they feel undervalued, they don't get the support and the investment.
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They often don't get the data and analytics support they need to drive, you know, high value CRM interactions.
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And then, and then it's sort of a self-fulfilling cycle because you don't get the support and the data and the tech, and even the tech investment that you need in order to drive great quality work, then the work's not as good as it could be.
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And then, and then you bec- you, you, you're undervalued, so it becomes kind of quite a negative cycle.
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So I think it's, you know, it's quite important in, for organizations to realize that CRM marketing is not a, it's not ju- it's not a nice to have, right?
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It's so fundamental to driving, driving revenue, particularly in the subscription space and, and the recurring revenue businesses. But beyond that, that if you don't value that CRM marketing function, then it actually,
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part of it is of those people and maybe not be particularly happy, and that is important 'cause we care about people.
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But the key is like, if you don't value your CRM marketing function, then you're gonna be damaging your business, right?
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Because the opportunity from CRM marketing, when done well, is huge, and you can really see it in the P&L.
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So yeah, I mean, I, I, I then maybe we can move on more, more later in the conversation about why they feel undervalued, but I think the, the, the, the fact that they do and are in many organizations is actually to the detriment of the organization itself rather than to the detriment of the people themselves, or in addition to, I should say.
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I mean, a pa- part, I guess partly it sort of is to do with misconceptions, right, about what CRM is. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think the struggle is, and probably you've been there as well, that
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often we are seen as those people who are sending emails, and that can be that hard, right? Everyone is doing it. If the signs around you cannot be that difficult.
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And when I was thinking more about this topic, I also set up like a LinkedIn poll on my profile to get feedback from other people if they have experienced misconceptions and what kind of misconceptions were there.
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And 72% actually responded that the most or the biggest misconception is that it's just about sending emails, which is really not the case. We know that.
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Um, and some even say that was around 21, that others believe there's no re- team needed to do this. This is not really- That's crazy... work. Yeah.
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And I think when you think about what we do on a daily basis and how diverse our skill set is, right?
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So we need to be analytical, we need to look at reportings and analyze what we do and optimize it.We need to be creative in finding solutions, how we tackle customer pain points, but we need to do a lot of communication and stakeholder management, right?
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To get the setups right with different teams to understand how we can really manage the customer experience along the journey and improve it.
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And also throughout the years, as I experienced it, it got also more and more technical, right? It really understanding how you can, um, get more data in to personalize it.
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Also thinking about AI, how to leverage different models there for our case. And yeah, a bit of infrastructures, right? I also had to do quite a few tool migrations.
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I enjoyed that part, but it's also something that became more and more heavily part of the job throughout the years. And then also we do a lot of organizational work around campaign planning, project management.
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So I feel it's often not seen how much is going on there in the background, and I, I assume you have a similar experience on that. Totally. I totally agree. Yeah, 100% right.
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Like, so I actually did a LinkedIn post and a lot survey, but I did one, um, about a year ago with the kind of two pie charts, which is one was like what people think CRM is, which is kind of subject lines, images and copy and open rates and click-through rates.
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But like you just said, like the reality is it's data, it's data engineering, it's technology, it's marketing automation, it's organizational alignment, it's like branding, it's creative, it's...
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And I think that's kind of what makes it so exciting in a way, like as a CRM practice practitioner and someone that's interested in that space, it's, you know, it's you're working, you're working with creative, you're working with da-data, you're working with technology.
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You can influence many aspects of, of the customer's relationship with the brand. Like retention isn't a result of CRM, but CRM can play a massive role in driving retention.
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So it's, it's, that-that's why it's great, right? But it's...
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That's why it can be quite frustrating I think for CRM folk, because like leadership don't always see like all the effort that goes into creating something that they see in their inbox, and the maybe the 10,000 other versions of that same thing that were sent to, you know, 150,000 other different customers, you know, when you go into the world of hyper-personalization and how much effort it takes to deliver that and, and the incrementality that you're generating off the back of doing something like that.
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And, and, and that's why it can be quite frustrating I think for CRM folk, like where they feel that kind of they don't feel appreciated for the work that they're doing and they don't feel that value. Yeah.
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They are juggling so many topics. We are juggling so many topics, and then it feels like it's not really seen.
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Why do you think that actually, especially leadership then struggles to understand this value that we are bringing to the table?
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I, I think you kind of said it like a, a little bit before, like because we send emails every day, because we're all sending emails every day, right?
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Then it is a sort of a perception if you don't understand like all the work that goes into this discipline that, you know, it's not that hard, right?
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Can't be that hard to send like a HTML email with, you know, imagery and copy. It's not that hard, right?
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And then I think the other side of it is often CRM marketing doesn't have like a seat at the top tables and is reporting into a CMO.
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And probably rightly, most CMOs come from a performance background, like 50% I think, Forrester said 50% of CMOs come from performance, and most of the rest are coming from brand, and then you have a few that come from like a customer marketing CRM background.
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And I'd say probably rightly, because if you're in a big organization that's spending millions and millions of dollars on performance marketing, then you probably want a CMO that kind of has a handle on that discipline.
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And but the, but the kind of the impact for, for CRM marketers is you end up with leadership that also don't understand the discipline in really any great deal of detail and, and therefore are not very good at kind of representing the function at the very highest levels within the organization.
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And I think the last point I'd say is, is a bit nuanced actually. I think in my experience, CRM marketing as a kind of driver of revenue or value off the back of delivering great customer experience is,
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as a marketing channel, is the highest ROI channel there is, right? Because you've got your tech costs and then it's resource basically, right? There's usually not much beyond that. Um, um,
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and as a result of that, you get very, very high, high ROIs because you don't have to be spending, you know, dollars and dollars on meta or, um, any other kind of marketing, you know, versus, versus acquisition.
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And because it's so high ROI, I feel like sometimes as well you can see even CRM marketers that are pri- quite tenured getting a pretty good result, and then the business being pretty happy with that result.
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But it's not necessarily as good as it could be. And then when it's not going to necessarily as good as it could be, then sometimes you have senior folk going, "Well, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?"
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A-and you see CRM folk being like, "Oh, yeah," right? And then it, and it can be... And then, and then that becomes part of this kind of attitude of like self-fulfilment. "I know how to send an email.
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I'm telling you how you should be doing it." Yes, you're driving a good ROI, but you're not driving as good an ROI a-as it could be. And I think that the,
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the key really is like brilliant CRM marketing is actually not easy. Like you can drive a good ROI. Like I, I had a client recently, I don't work with them anymore, but they had a...
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They didn't have an onboarding program, or they were sending like two emails in the first month, and then they started sending like fifteen emails in the first month to help their subscribers to get a better use of their service.
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And of course, they had great ROI, right? But the pro- big, you know, drove a big uplift. But the program was poor, right? It was just all about proximity.
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It was just about sending more meant that the customer was more likely to use the service as a result of sending more.
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And, and so I, I think, you know, if you think about creativity and you think about how you leverage data and you think about data engineering and smart use of data science and analytics and using the right tech, you talked to it already, and I know you've been through quite a big...
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a few big tech transformations, using the right tech for your particular context or-How you apply behavioral science, all of these things, like they can all have like an increment- add an incremental value to the output and the-- what you achieve from your activity.
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And, and I think that sometimes CRM marketing teams because they're not, they're, they're not making a loss, they're doing, you know, they're delivering a,
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you know, a few hundred thousand increments or they've got a, you know, two to one ROI, they don't push it to where it could be, right?
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And then, and then, you know, leadership see that it could be better and then, then the undervalue cycle continues. So I think, I think the, the, the problem with the effectiveness of the channel is
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can mean that people could-- don't try as hard as they possibly could do, right? And this is not to be negative on CRM marketing folk, but it's just to think about always learning, right?
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Always try and grow, always try and think about how you, how you, you can improve what you're doing every day. Yeah. That would be my suggestion at least. Yeah. Yeah. But what is your experience?
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When I went to a couple of c- of companies, I can also see that they don't invest heavily in CRM seniority and rather get like a junior in or someone coming from a different field, like for example, content creators that get moved over to, to CRM, and then they say, "You can do the newsletter."
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And of course, they don't have any experience before on how to do this. And then I noticed that they kind of left with it on their own, and they have to try to figure it out on their own. And- Yeah, got it... um,
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I think that's also one part of the issue then what you said, right?
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It, it's a channel where you can easily get a positive ROI, but then also if you don't get the experience in, it's also hard to really leverage it to the peak quickly. Exactly.
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And you don't know what you don't know, do you? Yeah.
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And I know, you know, at Project A, you work with a lot of like small businesses that probably have that kind of profile of CRM person that's doing content and doing digital marketing and actually doing CRM as well, which is why, you know, it's really good that they get to access to you and, and you can coach and mentor them.
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And I think-- but I think you're right though, because you don't know what you don't know, and then you're doing something that's delivering a positive ROI, you know, and maybe you've got loads of other responsibilities.
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But I think even like seasoned tenured folk as well, like I think, I think you should ne- uh, put my advice is just never stop learning and just, you know, try and make it the best it possibly can be.
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You know, I've, as I said, I was working with quite a tenured, uh, head of CRM recently, and their program could have been, could have been far better than it was, you know? Yeah. Totally with you.
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[chuckles] It totally makes sense.
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I think as I'm doing it 12 years and you're also doing it for such a long sp- uh, time, I think then you really need to search for resources that give you impulses and new ideas how, how to look at this.
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And that's why I also en-enjoy your newsletter to get your perspective on things and really have through these kind of formats or also meetups exchange to get new input in and, and try and really try new perspectives on this.
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Yeah, definitely. I agree, and I, and that's why I love yours as well. I, I learn a hell of a lot from your, uh, deliverability guide, I have to say. So recommend it to anybody.
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But yeah, look, and also I'd suggest like to folk as well that do wanna kinda... who are, are working in CRM, maybe they're, you know, new to the discipline or wanna just improve.
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They've been ar- they've been doing it for a while. It's just, it's not just kinda like the CRM resources as well. It's like look beyond that.
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Like, you know, like customer experience strategy, you know, creative strategy.
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Rory Sutherland's great on, on like things like behavioral science, even organizational stuff like, you know, Simon Sinek and desi- uh, Start with Why.
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And there's a lot of like product people as well that do like great stuff around like product onboarding journeys. And there's a guy, Ramli John, who I know who's, does, does a great job on that.
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And then there's like a lot of material out on personalization as well, like Rasmus Hoyland's got a great book on that.
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And there's-- so yeah, I, I, um, I encourage everyone to sort of read your newsletter, but also kind of be beyond, go beyond it as well, right?
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Like think about what, about, about resources that can impact their day-to-day that, that, that may not be immediately obviously CRM. Yeah.
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So when the person has done the job as well and for, but still at the struggling with the leadership is seeing the value, what kind of approach have you done in the past to really show them this is the impact CRM is having?
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Yeah, I think, um, what I'll say is probably there's, there's different level of folk that are listening to this call, right? So, um, also this podcast, so there'll be, you know, more junior folks.
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So if you don't have a super control group and you don't know what that is, then... or universal control group or fallow cell or whatever you wanna call it, like Google it and definitely get that in place, right?
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It's effectively a proportion of your ba- your base that don't get any of your, your CRM marketing activity, and then that's obviously the clear way to look at the relationship between the two.
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But sometimes even that doesn't work, right? So I've, I've recently started working with a company who had that, where the C-suite are challenging
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even the results of the super control group 'cause they don't see the value that's played into the P&L.
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And I've had this challenge myself actually when I was in, in client side where I had a super control group, and these guys aren't getting anything else. All they're exposed to is the,
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the, um, above the line activity and through the line activity, but there still was a lack of trust in the, uh, output.
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And I think sometimes it's also part to do with this kinda definition of value, but if you start claiming, you know, a hundred million of incremental revenue, and then the P&L hasn't jumped year to year, then people are like going, "Are you sure?"
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Right? And so it can be quite, it can, could be quite a, quite an interesting conversation.
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And I ha-- and then when we had this problem where I, I had an eight figure incremental on the, on a, on an annualized basis versus a super control group. And basically what we did is we worked with the finance team.
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We built a CLV model, and then we identified the customer lifetime value of the cohort that are in the super control group and the cohort that are in the treatment group, and that would allow, allowed us to understand the incrementality versus of the, the two cohorts, and we saw a difference, and then we can map that back into the P&L.
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And then I think the, honestly the maths behind it was like, it was pr- almost secondary really, right? Yeah. The maths behind it was kind of important, but it, it kinda sounded-Good.
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And we did do it, you know, very robustly using the customer lifetime value calculations.
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But the, I think the real, real reason that got the CEOs buy into the outcome was, or to the, to the analysis was involving finance, right?
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If you involve finance and finance are nodding and they're, and their senior, you know, commercial finance agree that this is the right way of doing things, then, you know, and they're, they're showing the CEOs, "Well, it's not just you," right?
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Then I, I think that's where you get the, the, the value because...
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So there is-- I, I always really just encourage my teams to, like, work closely with finance teams and, and, um, and try and, and try as much as possible to relate what we're doing in CRM back to the P&L, 'cause that's where, that's where you start to be valued.
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And if there's trust in the impact on the P&L, then y- this issue of being undervalued goes away. And actually, that's where you can start to get investment and support and the resources you need to do things better.
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Should we qui- quickly say what's in P&L for people that don't know? Yeah. This is basically just, like, how much money the company's making. That's, that's what we mean by P&L. So, like, the profit- Right... basically.
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Yeah. The best definition ever. Yeah, exactly. Straight to the point. So, no, no, that's cool. Cool. Yeah, no, so obviously, yeah, there's, there's people from different countries in this listening in, isn't there?
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So I'm, uh, very UK-centric in my terms. What would you... Well, what's, what's your take on the, on the visibility problem for CRM teams? What's your, what's your experience and what have you seen? Yeah. I think, um,
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it's a bit, uh, difficult because we do a lot behind the scenes, and we were talking about that before. And, um, necessarily CRM people are not the ones that really showcase all they've done, their impact.
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Feel like, and I had that conversation on one of my podcast episodes with Moritz Kerlinger,
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and, uh, we were talking about that fact that, like, other, uh, people in the marketing team, especially if you have ads or social campaign, um, these are often like tiny products that they present and say, "Here, see what I've done, and I spent this budget-" Yeah...
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"and this is what I got out." What, what I've noticed in the past is that, yeah, we as CRM people
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tend to not be that, uh, proactive in communicating what we've done, and I think that's something that we need to work on, that we are also more visible in, in, in meeting, communicating what's the impact, what we're driving there.
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Mm-hmm.
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And I think what you also mentioned before, when we look at C-level leadership who gets promoted into CMO positions, as you said, that tend to be rather like, uh, people with performance background because they spend the whole lot of the budget, right?
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And of course, as you said, some situations it makes sense then to say this person should be on that seat.
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But also when you look stronger into profit, it might be better to actually lean towards with someone with a CRM background, because we are the ones that are really looking to optimize- Making the money... yeah. Exactly.
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Exactly. Making the money. Yes. It's like- I, I think, I totally agree with that.
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And, um, the, the, I guess the, the, um, the thing about acquisition as well, which is, like, versus CRM, particularly if you're thinking about, like, measuring against a super control and life cycle marketing for active customers and so on.
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Acquisition, it, like, provides immediate hit. You spend £100,000 one weekend, and then Monday you can see how much you've got, right? And, and that can, uh, even drive dopamine, right? Like, CMO's happy, CMO...
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CEO's happy, whereas, like, you may spend £100,000 on some tech for CRM.
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You've gotta fig- plug it in, you've gotta configure it all, you've gotta then build the programs, and then, and then, you know, after six months or so, you're showing incrementality versus a super control group.
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There's not that same, like, hit in terms of, like, the, you know, how it, I think necessarily feels for senior leadership.
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And but yeah, that, I mean, there's a guy actually call it craquisition, like people get addicted to this acquisition cycle. You know, they just kind of love the acquisition cycle.
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But, but yeah, there's a House of Kaizen, I think it's the guy from House of Kaizen mentioned that. Yeah. But, but yeah. Cool.
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Like, I mean, like this, this kind of lack of a value and appreciation, what do, what sort of, kind of, what impact does it have, do you think, like on, on a psychological level on CRM folk?
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I think there is a bit of tendency that people get imposter syndrome over time, that they feel like what they are doing, it's not so much worth mentioning compared to others. I even see that with the meetup.
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I'm trying to convince people then to go on stage and it's under the MPIR, so it's not even... Yeah, exactly. It's like a safe social space.
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But then people say, "I'm not sure if I have any- anything interesting to share."
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So there's the, this hesitation going on, and I think that also limits the ambition to, to show off their cases, what they've done, uh, what impact they had, and also the idea to go more for leadership po- positions.
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And I think I can also talk there from my personal experience that, um, in the beginning of my career, I got promoted into leadership pro- uh, positions, was not something that I personally pushed for.
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Just done my job, and then it happened. Um, and also back in the days, I was really struggling with getting in front of people and talking about what I've done.
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I even had discussions with my former boss, and she was like, "You need to be more present and out there of what you're doing. You're making so much," and, "Well, you're doing so much."
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And I was like, "As long as the product is working, who cares?" Yeah. That was my, my, my mindset back in the days.
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And what I've lear- learned over time that it's important to make it visible what you've done to alsoUm, showcase yourself and show what you're worth.
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I understand that's a journey, like a personal journey to everyone, but you can really see the, the benefits. I, I see it now with the meetups as well.
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We have then people that are talking for the first time in front of people and get, like, really, uh, great feedback for that, and then feel super good about it. And I think that's- Yeah...
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the feeling we should have instead of the cycle that you were mentioning also before, right? That you feel undervalue and therefore you're not mentioning what you've done, and then like- Exactly... a repetition.
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Becomes a vicious cycle.
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And then because you feel undervalued, you're not mentioning what you've done, then when you need something, you don't get the support, and then you feel undervalued 'cause you're not getting support, and it just, it's an endless- Yeah...
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cycle. You can break that cycle, like you said, by raising your profile, showing the impact you made. If it gets questioned, proving it, right? Work with finance- Yeah... to do that. And then just- Yeah...
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then go take the cycle up rather than, you know, on the cycle down. I, I think you're right. I know you sort of alluded to it as well.
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I think you're right about a lot of CRM folk are kind of introverted as well, just by nature, aren't they?
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That's just the way it is, like I've seen it myself, and I know I was definitely when I was younger, but less so now, but definitely when I was younger, like you said as well. Like, and yeah. But yeah, cool.
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Like, so how, how do you think that beyond, like you said, showcasing the work and having more visibility, is there any other things that you think can help change this narrative and help raise the profile of CRM folk?
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Yeah. Yeah, I think being concrete about how, how to be visible, I think try really to make your case in every marketing meeting or whatever you have, like on a weekly base, think about what you can share.
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It doesn't always need to be this big, bold presentation. It can also be like, "Listen, I did this campaign last week, and I got this revenue out of it. This is the profit." So just showcase your number- Yeah...
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that is mentioned. And I think a- as you said, CRM often takes time to, to show really the impact compared to acquisitions.
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I think w- what I've learned a lot in, in consulting was the case to map out what is the impact over the last or over the next 12 months to show like a wider range of when I do this aut- automation over 12 months, it will generate this impact.
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Instead of just focusing on a small amount of time, this can really emphasize what is happening there. What you said around
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you need to start speaking the language of the C level, I think your example was perfect for that, that you really think about how can I map this to the P&L statement that also they understand if I make this happen, you will look good because [chuckles] I can make an impact for you.
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Exactly. Um, I just, yeah, in the end of the game, we all want to look better. Show them how, how you- Yeah, and also b- business is just about making money really at the end of the day, and you can do that. Yeah.
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It's not... That doesn't mean it's always about sales. It's also about great customer experiences, and CRM can play a role in mapping that as well.
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But yeah, so if you can show your impact, that's where, you know, and then map it to the language that leadership understand. I totally agree with what you said there.
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I think it's, uh, that's what, that's where, that's where sometimes CRM folk fail, I think, and that's where there's an opportunity. Yeah. Yeah.
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And also what I've seen that actually, like in standard reporting, it's not showing up correctly, right?
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That then it's not so much in, in a focus like you think, "Okay, I've got my CRM reports and the standards reports not really showing up. Who care?" But it's so important that you are on the map. If your- 100%...
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CMO looks on a specific r- report every day, CRM should be on there.
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And also make sure that the, the tracking is, is correct and that, that you play a part in the attribution model, because I've also seen with clients that CRM was not attributed at all in the model.
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I was like, "That shouldn't happen." Right. And they had tracking issues, and therefore the lum- numbers were not re- liable.
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And then people said, "Yeah, if it stands in there or not doesn't matter because the numbers are wrong, so we don't really know what impact CRM is having." Yes.
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So I think it's important to, to fix that and have reliable data. Really important. You have to have reliable data, yeah. And that takes time- Yeah... doesn't it?
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And I think what you said about attribution models is right as well. Like I've seen what you, you've seen as well before, but also like even without an attribution model, like this is not like a,
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a criticism of performance folk, but they quite often wanna take like last click, and they wanna take attribution for every single sale or conversion because they need to, right? To justify the media investment. Yeah.
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Um, but one of the simple ways to do it, and which we did at DAZN as well, which really helped a lot with the profile of the CRM team in the boxing markets, was just have CRM influence conversions.
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'Cause quite often people like get an email from us 'cause they've, they've purchased a fight from us before or been this c- customer for a little while before and canceled.
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They'll get an email from us when there's a fight on, and then they'll look at it and read it and think, "That's great." And then a few hours before the fight, they'll go to Google and click on a paid ad, right?
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And then the reporting was just attributing all of those sales to that paid ad. Mm-hmm. But when we looked at that CRM influenced conversions, we saw there was like m- multi-million impacts in like- Yeah...
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big fight night, right? In terms of revenue, like on a pay-per-view event. So just things like that, right?
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Just look at very simply, attribution model's obviously the best way to go, but very simply, if, if you're struggling with this and you think you're influencing a conversion, but you're not getting credit for it because the business, like many businesses, is still measuring on last click, to just, just understand like of those that converted, just how many are, are, did you send the email to?
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'Cause even just a subject line and not opened could drive a conversion. And also like fight tonight, for example.
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Or, or, um, also looking at, um, the c- the, the volume that opened, the volume that clicked.And then the revenue attributes of those as well, and y-you can share, share the performance with the performance guys rather than taking 100% of the credit, right?
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Yeah Yeah And I think also then sit at the table who are discussing attribution because- Yes... I often seen like CRM is not involved when it's about this. Um, we should be involved. Without a doubt, we should be.
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There needs to be in th- they need to be in those conversations, those performance conversations, particularly if the CRM is a channel that's used to drive conversion. I think it's absolutely critical, yeah.
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Is th- Are there any other technical challenges you see on, on that area- Yeah. Technology-wise-... apart from attribution? [chuckles] Yeah, attribution, yeah, attribution's a big problem.
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But also like loads and loads and teams that through...
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It goes back to the valid point, but also it's kinda complex as well, and then there's obviously often org- other organizational priorities in brands that, you know, have like a big product organization, for example.
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And I think quite often there's like gaps in, in data availability can be scattered across different silos.
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I worked with one client many years ago, and they had 250 customer databases, all with different elements, data all sitting on different systems, like a massive, ginormous mess like.
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And, and, you know, in those days, there wasn't such a thing as a CDP, so it's kinda quite hard to kinda integrate all of that, um, at the time.
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But nowadays, the CDPs are like, they're the marketer's toolkit, and particularly the CRM marketer's toolkit, because it allows you to pull in the data you need from different silos.
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So I would, you know, massively champion that, um, and if you are looking at your tech stack, look at brands that have like inbuilt CDPs for CRM marketers as part of the overall marketing automation toolkit.
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But then when you do that, [chuckles] you-you've got a lot of experience in this.
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When you do that, it's really, really careful about your project plan, 'cause o-often I think C-suite will invest a few hundred thousand pounds or euros in a new piece of kit, and then it's like, "Where's the value?"
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Yeah. "We implemented it last week, guys." Give it, give, give us a bit while, we got... We'll, we'll be IP first.
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So just really setting expectations and real clarity on that and having like a rock solid project plan of how you're gonna execute it because, 'cause it can take a while.
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You know, I've, I have a client recently, it's took them a year to implement their CDP and MarTech platform, and they're quite a complicated business, but, you know, it's, it's, it, it's just not, it's not as fast as, as C-suite would like it to be, I think, versus, you know.
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What's your experience with that? What... How, how have you seen like tech implementations? I know you said you've done quite a few, haven't you?
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General, it's set three to six months, but as you said, it really depends on, on the company and how complex their setup is.
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Because you, you need to understand what's the existing infrastructure and how do you build it in, and what are the resources that you get to, to make that happen. Yes. So, um- That's key, resources.
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The resource support you're gonna get from like data engineering is critical, right? It doesn't- Yeah... you don't just turn it on. It's not like when you s- open Microsoft Word. No. No.
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And from my experience, what I really go hard for is like really communicating, "I need those resources. I need the priority on this project, otherwise it's gonna fail." And really be clear about it.
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I've done implementations that took like around, um, three months, but I've also done some that took more than half a year. Um- Yeah... so it, it depends how complex is your setup.
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I think there's not always this one answer to it. You need to evaluate it and then make an educated guess what makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, three months seems, seems pretty good, I think.
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If you can do it in three months, that's, that's, that's excellent, isn't it? Even in frame for a smaller business, you know, with all the IP warm-up, getting the data in place, templates, et cetera, et cetera.
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I think that's a great, yeah, to do that. Let's se- so sort of switching tracks slightly, what, what sort of advice would you give to, to leadership to...
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If you were, you know, f- if you're talking to some of your clients at, um, project day, like what would you, what, what advice would you give to, to the, to the leadership at, at your clients around supporting CRM teams?
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The leadership teams need to shift their perspective anyway because they see that acquisition costs are rising, and they still are for a couple of years. So they- Usually... they need to shift. Yes. Um,
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and I think they also, it's a bit of misconception around growth because it's often connected to getting a lot of leads and revenue and not so much around profit.
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And I think that's maybe also connected to the time when I joined Sia in the years I learned because that was a huge scaling phase, right? I was at Zalando. We had hyper-growth phase, right? They were with the- Yeah...
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in-investing in everything into the company, and we were going into different countries, in countries.
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There was a lot of budget going into acquisition, but now companies are fa- facing this challenge that they don't get investments that easily anymore, right? We are in a different phase now- Absolutely...
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economically. Um, and I, I looked at some stats. Apparently,
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2021 we had the peak, and then until last year it went down by 50%, like the amount of value that went in or amount of money that went into investments in the gears was going down by 37% according to VentureBeat.
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So you need to change if you leave... see these numbers, right? You cannot expect that you get investments and, and grow via that. Um,
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so I think that's a natural shift and therefore like really looking into CM talent and invest in it as well as like a good setup, which often is also connected to technology.
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I think that's really important to support that setup and add value to CRM in that case.Totally. Yeah. Totally agree.
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And like the ac-- yeah, the acquisition, I think people are starting to place more emphasis on CRM more recently, yeah, somehow because of the, the, the huge increase in costs on platforms like Meta.
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And but I, I think it's, you know, like retention is key to growth, but often people just think when they think growth, they just think acquisition.
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But actually- Yeah...if you're in a recurring revenue business or even if you're not, right? But if you're in a subscription or recurring revenue business, you start with like a,
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a baseline of customers at the start of each year, and then you expect to lose some, and then you expect to acquire some, right?
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And, and if you lose more than you planned for, then your acquisition needs to increase more. So you could lose-- If you lose like ten percent of the customers that...
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You lose ten-- You expect to lose-- You had a hundred percent of customers, you expect to lose ten in the year, but you lose twenty of those customers or twenty percent of those customers, then suddenly you need way more acquisition budget to hit the same number, right?
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To hit the same end of your target. Yeah. So actually-- And then it works the other way around as well.
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Like if you, if you do better than you expected in terms of retention, then you can spend less on acquisition to hit your targets, and therefore the business can be much more profitable.
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And there was some research that was done by Bain and the Harvard Business Review, so like a five to ten percent improvement in customer retention drives between a twenty-five to a hundred percent increase in profits.
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And they, in their paper, they didn't actually break down the numbers, but so I actually wanted to put it to the test. So I did a load of maths around it, and I broke it down actually in one of my newsletters.
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And I think what, what you, what you see is like companies like Amazon, where Jeff Bezos said in two thousand and five, like why he implemented Prime was 'cause he wanted to put a, a, a moat around his best customers.
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'Cause actually when you think about it logically, you would only use Amazon Prime... Like the people who'd use Amazon Prime are the people already getting lots of deliveries.
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Why would you pay ninety pound a year to have faster deliveries? Only the people who are already getting lots of deliveries would pay that.
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So it, it-- The, the lo- the logic and at the board at Amazon at the time was, "What's the point in doing this, Jeff? This, this doesn't work right."
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And now we see Amazon was worth thirty billion in two thousand and five, now it's worth three hundred billion. Uh, eBay was worth thirty billion in two thousand and five, and it's still worth thirty billion, right?
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So it's kinda like it, it-- you can see why it's been so effective.
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And brands like Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, they understand intuitively that, that their business growth hinges on great retention, and CRM marketing plays a massive part of that.
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And it's not just the CRM marketing, of course. It's your product. It's your how you handle customer service. It's all, you know, different components of the relationship.
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But, but CRM plays a massive role in like what I call like moments of truth, like those first,
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those first experiences of the app, like through in-app pop-ups and other content that you can d-deliver to help customers have a, a great first experience, or onboarding the customer into, into the brand, or when like usage declines, when you see kinda like behaviors trickle off, like, or, or transactions trickle off in a, in a non-recurring revenue business.
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Like how do you-- CRM plays a vital role in kind of re-engaging the customer or in service issues or, you know, likely problems.
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There's loads and loads of ways that CRM can contribute to, um, you know, driving better customer experience that then translates into customers, um, being more likely to stay with the brand, and which then translates into reduced churn, which then translates into growth.
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And, um, and I think it's, um, like we said right at the start of the call, I think it's like it's... There's so, there's so-- The, the-- Because teams are undervalued, they don't get the focus.
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They don't get the support and actually, you know, actually some leaders are actually shooting theirselves in the foot with that.
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That actually if they i-i-if they really understood the nuance around it and put the right investment and focus within w-within with CRM and around, you know, sales and growth driving initiatives, but also customer experience type initiatives as well, they would without a doubt see the benefit of it.
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So we need to break through the cycle. We, we do. Absolutely. That's the key message. We're on a crusade, you and I, Jessica. [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah. All right. Lovely, lovely speaking with you.
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I really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for having me on your show, and I'll, I'll, and I'm delighted to have you on mine. So it's, it's been a great, it's been a great chat. Yeah. Thank you so much.
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It w- it was amazing. I, I enjoy talking to you. We've done that before. [chuckles] It's always great to talk to you. So I think- Yeah, likewise. Yeah. It was good to have your point on this as well.
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It was great to have your point of view. I love ta- talking to you, Jessica, always whenever we connect, and, um, I'd love to come see one of your meetups in Berlin, um, sometime soon. Yeah, I hope gonna happen.
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And maybe you do another one in London. Yeah, that'd be great. We could do one in London. We could do inside CRM in London, couldn't we? That'd be good. Yeah. Would be amazing. There we go. All right. Cool. Thank you.
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See-- Thanks a lot, Jessica. I'll see you next time.
