#9 Tom Burrell I Why do CRM managers feel undervalued and how to fix it?

INSIDE CRM with Tom Burrell: Why do CRM managers feel undervalued? How can it be solved?

In this insightful episode of the Inside CRM Podcast and the Customer Retention Show, Jessica and Tom discuss the often overlooked value and challenges faced by CRM managers. They explore why CRM teams feel undervalued, referencing research showing 75% of UK CRM teams feel underappreciated, creating a negative cycle affecting both morale and business performance. The conversation covers career journeys, ranging from startup experiences to large corporate roles, highlighting the importance of visibility, proper attribution models, and support from leadership. They also tackle technological implementations, data reliability, the rise of acquisition costs, and how retention strategies impact business growth. Both hosts agree on the need for CRM teams to elevate their profile and demonstrate their impact on revenue and customer experience. They conclude with practical advice for CRM professionals and leadership on how to bridge the understanding and appreciation gap. The episode is a valuable resource for anyone in or aspiring to be in the CRM field.

00:00 Introduction and Welcoming Tom
00:39 Jessica's Background in CRM
01:47 Tom's Background and Experience
02:49 Diving into the Topic: Why CRM Managers Feel Undervalued
04:49 Misconceptions About CRM
05:54 The Diverse Skill Set of CRM Professionals
08:40 Challenges in Leadership Understanding CRM Value
19:37 The Importance of Visibility and Communication
22:39 Psychological Impact on CRM Professionals
25:39 Advice for CRM Teams and Leadership
31:14 The Role of Technology in CRM
40:20 Final Thoughts and Conclusion

P.S. Tom is sharing great CRM strategy insights every week which often land in my must-reads. 👉 Sign up here: https://theretentionblueprint.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=www.insidecrm.io&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes&_bhlid=6cd94ae47ca8c6afc209ddade9a70bb4faf5fdf0

Transcript

Jessica 0:00

All right, Tom. Finally, we made it. It's great to have you here and that we can finally talk. And I think we have an interesting topic we want to discuss why CRM managers actually feel undervalued and how we can solve that.

Tom Burrell 0:17

Absolutely. Yeah. 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. 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, I mean, for my listeners, would you just introduce yourself and what you do and

Jessica 0:38

Yeah, of course. Yeah, my expertise is within CIM for 12 years. I'm based in Berlin and have been there around a bit in the startup scene, but also a corporate world. So to say, I've worked for Zalando, 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, try to transfer my knowledge there and yeah, so really different places. I have been with CIM and started meetups a year ago in Berlin to really share knowledge more across the peers and also started the platform inside CIM because of that.

Tom Burrell 1:25

yeah, you've got a great. You've got a great newsletter, haven't you? It's got a lot of interest, a lot of traction. It's got great content in there every week as well. And I've seen lots of good feedback about the meetups in Berlin. Next time I'm over I'd love to come and join one. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Awesome.

Jessica 1:43

How about you? I also read your newsletter because it's great.

Tom Burrell 1:47

Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yes, I've got a newsletter as well. The retention blueprint. I spent a long time in retention to just two and a half decades and and eight years client DAZN recently. And then and then prior to that, I spent a long time in agencies and particularly as Global CRM Director at a big big digitized agency. Telcos as an analyst before that, customer CRM analyst. So a long time in CRM and retention and marketing and you know, CRM has always been kind of my focus area really. But but yes, 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.

Jessica 2:18

And I think for me, it's also amazing. You have been at Manchester United in the zone. That must have been like really different worlds. In

Tom Burrell 2:27

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Jessica 2:28

concept.

Tom Burrell 2:29

Yeah, definitely. Definitely like the zones. 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, a lot of sports brands are not particularly So yeah, but it's quite quite interesting, you know, both both places. Yeah

Jessica 2:49

All right. So let's get into the topic. As that we want to look at the Point why CRM and managers actually feel undervalued and how they can solve it so what do you think? Why are they actually feeling that way?

Tom Burrell 3:05

I think this is a great question. I think of this research, I think is Plink did some research. I can send to anyone who's listening, if they're interested. That showed that 75 percent of teams in the UK, customer marketing and CRM teams in the UK feel undervalued. 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 that often go and get the data and analytics support that you need to drive, you know, high value CRM interactions. And then. And then it's sort of a self fulfilling cycle because if 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. And then, and then you become, you, you, you're undervalued. So it becomes kind of quite a negative cycle. So I think it's, you know, it's quite important. In for organizations to realize that serum marketing is not a it's not just, it's not a nice to have, right? It's so fundamental to driving, driving revenue, particularly in the subscription space and, and recurring revenue businesses. But beyond that, that if you don't value that serum marketing function, then it actually. Part of it is those people and maybe not be particularly happy. And that is important because we care about people. But the key is like, if you don't value your CRM marketing function, then you're going to be damaging your business, right? Because the opportunity from CRM marketing when done well is huge. And you can really see it in the P& L. So yeah, I mean, I think 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. I mean, I guess partly it's all, it's to do with Misconceptions, right? About what CRM is. What's your take on that?

Jessica 4:58

Yeah, I think the struggle is, and probably you've been there as well, that often we are seen as those people who are sending emails, and that can be that hard, right? Everyone is doing it. Is the science around it? It cannot be that difficult. 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 misconceptions and what kind of misconceptions were there. And 72 percent 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, and some even say that was around 21% that others believe there's no real, he needed to do this. This is not

Tom Burrell 5:51

That's crazy.

Jessica 5:52

Yeah, and I think. When you think about what we do on a daily basis and how diverse our skill set is, right? So we need to be analytical. We need to look at reporting and analyze what we do and optimize it. We need to be creative in finding solutions, how we tackle customer pain points. We need to do a lot of communication and stakeholder management, right? To get the setups right with. Different teams to understand how we can really manage the customer experience along the journey and improve it. And also throughout the years as I experienced it, it got also more and more technical, right? It really understanding how you can get more data in to personalize it. Also thinking about AI, how to leverage different models there for our case. And Yeah, bit of infrastructures, right? I also had to do quite a few tour migrations. I enjoy 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. So I feel it's often not seen how much is going on there in the background. And I,

Tom Burrell 7:11

Totally.

Jessica 7:11

you have a similar experience on that.

Tom Burrell 7:14

I totally agree a hundred percent right like so I actually did linkedin post no not a survey, but I did one About a year ago with the kind of two par 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 but like you just said like the reality is it's 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, I think that's kind of what makes it so exciting in a way, like as a CRM 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 data you're working with technology. 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. So it's, it's, that's why it's great, right? But it's 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 on their inbox. And then maybe the 10, 000 other versions of that same thing that were sent to, you know, 150, 000 of the 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 generate off the back of doing something like that. 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.

Jessica 8:32

Yeah, they are juggling so many topics. We are juggling so many topics and then it feels like it's not really seen. Why do you think that actually, leadership then struggles to understand this value that we are bringing to the table?

Tom Burrell 8:48

I think you kind of said it like a little bit before like because we send emails every day because we're all sending emails every day right 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? It can't be that hard to send like a HTML email with you know. Imagery and copy. It's not that hard, right? And then I think the other side of it is often serial marketing doesn't have like a seat at the top tables and he's reporting into CMO and probably rightly most CMOs come from a performance background like 50%, I think, Forrester said 50 percent 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. 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. And but the, the kind of the impact for for serial marketers is you end up with. leadership that also don't understand the discipline in really any great deal of detail. And and therefore not very good at kind of representing the function at the very highest levels within the organization. And I think the last point I'd say is, is a bit nuanced. Actually, I think in my experience, serial marketing as a kind of driver of revenue or value off the back of delivering great customer experience is. 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 And As a result of that you get very very hard higher wise you don't have to be spending, you know dollars and dollars on meta or Any other kind of marketing, you know versus versus acquisition and because it's so high ROI. I Feel like sometimes as well you can see Even CRM quite tenured getting a pretty good result. And then the business being pretty happy with that result, but it's not necessarily as good as it could be. And then when it's not going necessarily as good as it could be. Then sometimes you have senior folk going why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? And you see CRM folk being like oh yeah. Right? And then it can be And then, and then that becomes part of this kind of attitude of like self fulfillment. I know how to send an email. 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 as it could be. And I think that the, The key really is like brilliant CRM marketing is actually not easy. Like you can drive a good ROI. Like I had a client recently, I don't work with them anymore, but they had a, they didn't have an onboarding program or they were sending like two emails in the first month. And then they started sending like 15 emails in the first month to help their subscribers to get a better use of their service. And of course they had great ROI, right? But the big, you know, drove a big uplift. But the program was poor, right? It was just all about proximity. It was just about sending more, meant that the customer was more likely to use the service as a result of sending more. 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, 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. And yeah. 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, you know, a few hundred thousand increments or they've got, you know, two to one ROI, they don't push it to where it could be, right? 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, can mean that people could don't try as hard as they possibly could do, right? This is not to be negative on serial marketing folk, but it's just to think about always learning, right? Always try and grow, always try and think about how you how you you can improve what you're doing every day. That would be my suggestion, at least.

Jessica 13:05

Yeah, but what is your experience? I went to a couple 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, CIM. And then they say, you can do the newsletter. And of course they don't have any experience before on how to do this. And then that of left with it on their own and they have to try to figure it out on their own. And,

Tom Burrell 13:47

exactly.

Jessica 13:48

I think that's also one part of the issue then what you said, right? It's a channel where you can easily get a positive error, right? But then also, if you don't get the experience in, it's also hard to really leverage it to the peak, basically.

Tom Burrell 14:04

Exactly. And you don't know what you don't know, do you? 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 access to you and you can coach and mentor them. 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, maybe you've got loads of other responsibilities but I think even like seasoned tenured folk as well, like I think I think you should, I put my advice is just never stop learning and just, you know, try and make it the best it possibly can be. You know, I've, as I said, I was working with quite a tenured head of CRM recently and their program could have been, could have been far better than it was, you know.

Jessica 14:48

Totally with you. It totally makes sense. I think. As I'm doing it 12 years, and you're also doing it for such a long time I think then you really need to search for resources that give you impulses and new ideas how to look at this, and that's why I also enjoy your newsletter to get your perspective on things and really have these kind of formats also meetups exchange to get new input in and try and really try new perspectives on this.

Tom Burrell 15:18

Yeah, definitely. I agree. That's why I love yours as well. I learned a hell of a lot from your deliverability guide, I have to say so I recommend it to anybody. But yeah, and also I'd suggest like to folks as well that do want to kind of who are working in CRM, maybe they're, you know, new to the discipline or want to just improve. They've been, they've been doing it for a while. It's just, it's not just kind of like the CRM resources as well as like, look beyond that. Like, you know, that customer experience strategy and a creative strategy. Rory Southern's great on things like behavioral science. Even organizational stuff like, you know, Simon Sinek and start with why. And there's a lot of product people as well. They do like great stuff around like product onboarding journeys. And there's a guy, Ramli John, who I know who does a great job on that. And then there's like a lot of material on personalization as well. Like Rasmun Hoyland's got a great book on that. And there's, so yeah, I I encourage everyone to sort of read your newsletter, but also kind of be beyond, go beyond it as well. Right? Like think about what about about resources that can impact their day to day that may not be immediately obviously CRM. Yeah,

Jessica 16:17

so when the person has done the job as well in four, but still 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. Okay.

Tom Burrell 16:55

serial marketing activity. And then that's obviously the clear way to look at the relationship between the two. 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 even the results of the super control group because they don't see the value that's played into the P and L. And I've had this challenge myself actually when I was in. In client side where I had a super control group, you know, these guys aren't getting anything else. All they're exposed to is the, the above the line activity and through the line activity. But there still was a lack of trust in the app. But I think sometimes it's also part to do with this kind of definition value. But if you start claiming in 100 million of incremental revenue and then the P and L hasn't jumped year to year, then people are like, are you sure? And so it could be quite, it could be quite a Quite an interesting conversation. When we had this problem, we had an eight figure incremental on the, on an annualized basis versus a super control group. And Basically, what we did is we worked with the finance team, 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 and then I think the, honestly, the maths behind it was like. It's almost secondary, really, right? The math behind it was kind of important, but it kind of sounded good. And we did do it, you know, very robustly using the Customer Lifetime Value Calculations. But the I think the real, real reason that got the CEOs buy in to the outcome was or to the, to the analysis was involving finance. If you involve finance, and finance are nodding, and their senior, you know, commercial finance agree that this is the right way of doing things, then, you know, and they're showing the CEO as well, it's not just you, right, then I think that's where you get the value, because So that is, I always really just encourage my teams to like work closely with finance teams, and and um, and try and try as much as possible to relate what we're doing in CRM back to the P& L because that's where that's where you start to be valued. And if there's trust in the impact on the P& L, then 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.

Jessica 19:14

Should we quickly say what's in P& L for people that don't know?

Tom Burrell 19:18

Yeah, this is basically just like how much money the company's making. That's what we mean by P& L, so like the profit, basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jessica 19:28

Straight to

Tom Burrell 19:29

So, no, no, that's cool, cool. Yeah, so obviously, yeah, there's people from different countries in this listening in, isn't there? So I'm very UK centric in my terms. Well, 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? Silence.

Jessica 19:51

difficult because we do a lot behind the scenes and we were talking about that before. Necessarily, CRM people are not the ones that really showcase all they've done, the impact. Feel like and I had this conversation on one of my podcast episodes with Moritz Koellinger. And we were talking about that fact that like other people in the marketing team especially if you have ads or social campaigns, these are often like tiny products that they present and say here, see what I've done and I spent this budget and this is what I got out what I've noticed in the past is that Yeah, we are. CIM people tend to not be that proactive and communicating what we've done. And I think that's something that we need to work on, that we are also visible in meetings, communicating what's the impact, what we're driving there. And I 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 people with performance background, because they spend the whole lot of the budget, right? And Of course, as you said some situations, it makes sense then to say this person should be on that seat. But also when you look stronger into profit, it might be better to actually lean towards with a CIM background, because we are the ones that are really looking into optimization. Yeah,

Tom Burrell 21:31

Exactly, exactly.

Jessica 21:32

you said.

Tom Burrell 21:33

I think I totally agree with that. And I guess the, the, the thing about acquisition as well, which is like versus CRM, particularly if you're thinking about like measuring against the super control and lifecycle marketing for active customers and so on. acquisition it provides immediate hit. You spend a hundred thousand pounds one weekend and then monday you can see how much you've got right and and that can even drive dopamine right like yeah cmo's happy cmo ceo's happy where it's like you may spend a hundred thousand pounds on some tech for crm you gotta figure it plug it in you gotta configure it all you gotta build the programs and then and then you know after six months or so you're showing incrementality versus a super control group there's not that same like hit in terms of like The, you know, how I think necessarily feels for senior leadership and but yeah, I mean, there's a guy actually call it crackquisition, like people get addicted to this acquisition cycle, you know, they just kind of love the acquisition cycle. But but yeah, there's a house of case and I think he's the guy from hazard case and mention that. Yeah. But but yeah, cool. Like, I mean, like this, this kind of lack of a value and appreciation, what do you, what sort of kind of. What impact does it have, do you think, like, on a psychological level on CRM folk?

Jessica 22:46

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 meetups, I'm trying to convince people then to go on stage and it's under the MPR. So it's not even yeah, exactly. It's like a safe social space. But then people say I'm not sure if I have any, anything interesting to share. So there's the, hesitation going on. And I think that also limits the ambition to, to show off their cases, what they've done, what impact they had, and also the idea to go more for leadership positions And I think I can also talk there from my personal experience that, in the beginning of my career, I got promoted into leadership positions, was not something that I personally pushed for, just done my job, and then it happened. And also back in the days, I was really struggling with getting in front of people and talking about what I've done. 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 it's For you doing so much. And I was like as long as the product is working, who cares? That

Tom Burrell 24:17

Yeah.

Jessica 24:18

my, my mindset back in the days. And what I've learned over time that it's important to make it visible what you've done to also, showcase yourself and show what you're worth. Understand that's a journey, like a personal journey to everyone. But you can really see the benefits. I see it now with the meetups as well. We have sent people that are talking for the first time in front of people and get like really great feedback for that. And then feel super good about it. And I think that

Tom Burrell 24:50

Yes.

Jessica 24:51

we should have instead of this cycle that you were mentioning also. Before right that you feel on the value and therefore you're not mentioning

Tom Burrell 24:58

Exactly becomes a vicious cycle 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 because you're not getting support. It's just, it's an endless cycle where you can break that cycle. Like you said, by raising your profile, showing the impact you've made. If it gets questioned, proving it right, work with finance to do that and then just go take the cycle up rather than, you know, on the cycle down. I think you're right. I know you sort of alluded to it as well. I think you're right about. A lot of CRM folk are kind of introverted as well, just by nature, aren't they? 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. 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?

Jessica 25:51

Yeah, yeah, I think being concrete about how to be visible, I think try really to make your case and every marketing meeting or whatever you have, like on a weekly basis, think about what you can share. It doesn't always need to be this big boom 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

Tom Burrell 26:22

Yep.

Jessica 26:24

And I think as you said CRM often takes time to, to show really the impact compared to acquisition. I think what I've learned a lot and consulting was the to map out what is the impact over the last, over the next 12 months to show like a wider range of when I do this over 12 months, it will generate this. impact instead of just focusing on a small amount of time. This can really emphasize what is happening there. What you said around, you need to start speaking the language of the sea 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 I make this happen, you will look good because I can make an impact for you.

Tom Burrell 27:22

Exactly.

Jessica 27:23

yeah, in the end of the game, we all want to look better. So

Tom Burrell 27:28

Yeah, and also business is just about making money really at the end of the day and you can do that. It's not, that doesn't mean it's always about sales. It's also about great customer experiences and CRO can play a role in that as well. But yeah, so if you can show your impact, that's where, you know, and it map it to the language that leadership understand. I totally agree with what you said there. I think that's what, that's where, that's where sometimes CRO and folk fail, I think. And that's where there's an opportunity.

Jessica 27:52

yeah.

Tom Burrell 27:53

Yeah.

Jessica 27:53

also what I've seen actually, like in standard reporting, it's not showing up correctly, right? That then, it's not so much in focus, like you think, okay, I've got my CRM reports and the standards reports not really showing up. Who cares? But it's so important that you are on the map. If

Tom Burrell 28:13

100 percent

Jessica 28:14

looks on a specific report every day, CRM should be on there. And also make sure that the tracking is correct and that you play a part in the attribution Because I've also seen with clients that. and was not attributed at all in the model. I was like, that

Tom Burrell 28:33

What?

Jessica 28:34

happen. And they had tracking issues and therefore the numbers were not reliable. And then people said yeah, if it stands in there or not, it doesn't matter because the numbers are wrong. So we don't really know what impact the M is having.

Tom Burrell 28:50

Yes.

Jessica 28:50

important to, to fix that and have reliable data.

Tom Burrell 28:54

You have to have reliable data, yeah. And that takes time, doesn't it? And I think what you said about attribution models is right as well. Like I've seen what you've seen as well before. But also, like, even without an attribution model, like, this is not like a Criticism of performance folk, but they quite often want to take like last click and they want to take Attribution for every single sale or conversion because they need to write to justify the media investment but one of the simple ways to do it which we did at the zone as well, which Really helped a lot with the profile of the CRM team and the boxing markets was just have CRM influence conversions because quite often people would like Get an email from us because they've they purchased a fight from us before or been this customer for a little while before and cancel They'll get an email from us when there's a fight on and then they'll look at it and read anything. That's great and then A few hours before the fight, they'll go to Google and click on a paid ad, right? And then the reporting was just attributing all of those sales to that paid ad. But when we looked at that CRM influenced conversions, we saw there was like multi million. impacts in like big fight night, right? In terms of revenue, like on a pay per view event. So just things like that, right? Just look at very simply attribution models, obviously the best way to go, but very simply, 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 still measuring on last click. To just just understand like of those that converted just how many did you send the email to because even just a subject line and not open could drive a conversion and also like fight tonight, for example, or also looking at the cut the volume that open the volume that clicks and then the revenue attributes of those as well. And you can share share the performance with the performance guys rather than taking 100 percent of the credit, right?

Jessica 30:42

yeah. And I

Tom Burrell 30:43

Yeah.

Jessica 30:43

then sit at the table who are discussing attribution because

Tom Burrell 30:50

Yes,

Jessica 30:50

I often see like CRM is not involved when it's about this but we should be

Tom Burrell 30:57

without a doubt we should be. They need to be in those conversations, those performance conversations, particularly if the

Jessica 31:03

on

Tom Burrell 31:03

is a channel that's used to drive conversion. I think it's absolutely critical, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, technology wise, I think, yeah, attribution. Yeah, it's a big problem, but also like loads of loads of teams that goes back to the valid point, but also it's kind of complex as well. And then there's obviously often other organizational priorities in brands that, you know, have like a big product organization, for example. And I think quite often there's like Gaps in in data availability can be scattered across different silos. I work with one client many years ago and had 250 customer databases, all with different elements. They're all sitting on different systems like a massive, ginormous mess. And and you know, in those days there wasn't such a thing as a CDP. So it's kind of quite hard to kind of integrate all of that at the time. But nowadays, the CDPs are like yeah.

Jessica 31:57

Okay.

Tom Burrell 31:59

the CRM marketers toolkit because it allows you to pull in the data that you need from different silos. So I would, you know, massively champion that. And and if you are looking at your tech stack, look at brands that have like inbuilt CD piece for CRM marketers as part of the overall marketing automation toolkit. But then when you do that, you'll, you've got a lot of experience in this when you do that. He's really really careful about your project plan because 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? We only implemented it last week, guys. Give it, you know, give us a little while, we'll be IP first. So just really setting expectations and real clarity on that and having like a rock solid project plan of how you're going to execute it because Because it can take a while, you know, I have a client recently, it's took them a year to implement their CDP and Martek platform. They're quite a complicated business, but you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not as fast as As C suite would like it to be, I think, versus, you know, What's your experience of that? How have you seen, like, tech implementations? I know I said, you know, you've done quite a few, haven't you?

Jessica 33:02

General, it's set three to six months, but as you said, it really depends on the company and how complex their setup is because, 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 make that happen.

Tom Burrell 33:21

Yes. That's key. The resources. Support you're going to get from like data engineering is critical, right? You don't

Jessica 33:27

yeah,

Tom Burrell 33:28

turn it on. It's not like when you open Microsoft Word. You know.

Jessica 33:31

no. 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 going to fail and really be clear about it. I've done implementations that took like around 3 months. But I've also done some that took more than half a year.

Tom Burrell 33:55

Yeah.

Jessica 33:56

so it, it depends how complex is your setup. 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.

Tom Burrell 34:06

Yeah, yeah, three months seems seems pretty good. I think if you can do it in three months, that's that's that's excellent, isn't it? Even in frame of a smaller business, you know, with all the IP warm up getting the data in place Templates, etc, etc. I think that's a great. Yeah to do that. Let's set so switching tracks lightly What what sort of advice would you give to to leadership to if you were, you know, if you're talking to some of your clients that? project a like What advice would you give to the leadership at your clients around supporting CRM teams?

Jessica 34:37

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

Tom Burrell 34:48

Usually.

Jessica 34:49

need to shift.

Tom Burrell 34:51

Yes.

Jessica 34:53

And I think they also is 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. And I think. It's maybe also connected to the time when I joined CRM and the years I learned it because that was a huge scaling phase, right? I was at Zalando, had hyper growth phase, right? They were

Tom Burrell 35:22

Yeah.

Jessica 35:23

investing in everything into the company and we were going into different country,

Tom Burrell 35:29

Absolutely.

Jessica 35:33

but now companies are facing this challenge that they don't get investments that easily anymore, right? We are in a different phase now, economically and I looked at some stats, apparently, 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 and the deals were going down by 37 percent according to VentureBeat. So need to change, if you see this numbers right, you cannot expect that you get investments and can grow via that. so I think that's a natural shift and therefore, like really looking into. Talent and invest in it as well as like a good setup, which is also connected to technology. I think that's really important to support that set up and, at value to see I am in that case.

Tom Burrell 36:42

Totally. Totally agree. And like the acquisition, I think people are starting to place more emphasis on CRM more recently, isn't they? Because of the the, the huge increase in costs on platforms like Meta. And but I, I think it's, you know, like, Red tension is key to growth, but often people just think when they think growth, they just think acquisition. But actually, 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, 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? 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 10 percent of the customers that you expect to lose, you had 100 percent of customers, you expect to lose 10 percent in the year, but you lose 20 percent of those customers, or 20 percent of those customers, then suddenly you need way more acquisition budget to hit the same number, right, to hit the same end of your target. So actually, and then it works the other way around as well, 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. And there was some research that was done by Bain and Harvard Business Institute. So like a 5 10 percent improvement in customer retention drives between a 25 100 percent increase in profits. And they, in their paper, They didn't actually break down the numbers, but so I actually wanted to put it to the test. I did a lot of maths around it, and I broke it down. Actually, one of my newsletters, and I think what you what you see is like companies like Amazon, where Jeff Bezos said in 2005, like he was why implemented primers because he wants to put a a moat around his best customers. Because actually, when you think about it logically, you would only use Amazon Prime. Like the people who use Amazon Prime are the people who are already getting lots of deliveries. Why would you pay 90 a year to have faster deliveries if only the people who are already getting lots of deliveries would pay that? So the logic at the board at Amazon at the time was, what's the point in doing this Jeff? This doesn't work, right? And now we see Amazon was worth 30 billion in 2005, now it's worth 300 billion. eBay was worth 30 billion in 2005, it's still worth 30 billion. 30 billion, right? So it's kind of like you can see why it's been so effective and brands like Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, they understand intuitively that that their business growth hinges on great retention and serial marketing plays a massive part of that. And it's not just a serial 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. But But CRM plays a massive role in, like, what I call, like, moments of truth. Like those first, those first experiences of the app, like, through in app pop ups and other content that you can deliver to help customers have a great first experience. Or onboarding the customer into, into the brand. Or when, like, usage declines. When you see, kind of, like, behaviors trickle off. Like, or, or transactions trickle off in a, in a non recurring revenue business. Like, how do you CRM plays a vital role in kind of reengaging the customer or in service issues or you know, likely problems there's loads and loads of ways that CRM could contribute to You know driving better customer experience that then translates into customers being more likely to stay with the brand and which then translates into reduced churn which then translates into growth and And I think it's like we said right at the start of the call. I think that's like it's So, the, so the, the, because teams are undervalued, they don't get the focus, they don't get the support and actually, you know, actually some leaders actually shooting themselves in the foot with that. That actually, if they, if they really understood the nuance around it and put the right investment and focus within, within, within CRM and around, you know, sales and commercial driving initiatives, but also customer experience type initiatives as well they would without a doubt see the benefit of it.

Jessica 40:20

So we need to break through the cycle of

Tom Burrell 40:23

We, we do, absolutely. We want a crusade. You and Jessica

Jessica 40:31

Yeah.

Tom Burrell 40:32

Yeah. Lovely, lovely speaking with you. I really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for having me on your show and I'll, I, and I'm delighted to have your mind. So it's it's been a great, it's a really great chat.

Jessica 40:43

Yeah. Thank you so much. It was amazing. I enjoy talking to you. We've done that before. It's always great to talk to you.

Tom Burrell 40:51

Yeah, likewise, and I have It

Jessica 40:54

have your point on this as well.

Tom Burrell 40:56

was great to have your point of view. I love talking to Jessica always whenever we connect and then I Love to come to one of your meetups in Berlin sometime soon

Jessica 41:05

Yeah, I hope it's going to happen. Maybe you do another one in London.

Tom Burrell 41:08

Yeah, that'd be good we could do one in London we could do inside CRM in London couldn't we that'd be good Cool

Jessica 41:17

Thank

Tom Burrell 41:18

See thanks a lot Jessica. I'll see you next time