#3 Alexander Seiler | Ideal Organisation | Berlin Bubble | Tooling

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Hey there and welcome to Inside CRM. I'm your host Jessica Jensen and I'm so excited to have you join us. Today on this podcast we dive into the world of CRM with experts from all kinds of companies. From fresh face startups to billion dollar unicorns and solid established corporations. Our goal, to share practical insights and strategies that you can actually use. Each episode is a quick 20 minute chat packed with tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your CRM. So grab a cup of coffee, get comfy and let's get started.

I have the pleasure to say that Alex is here. Thanks for the invitation was open to Joyce.

After seven, eight beers at a bar you convinced me.

Yeah, that's the trick. I remember there was pretty impressed by your career steps in terms of that you managed to became director of CM and I think back in the days that was pretty rare. At least in my bubble, not in the startup. Okay, you have a lot of hats there, but I think it would be great if you could start to share. Yeah. Who you are, what was your. What were your major steps in your career.

Sure. Happy to. So Alex, my name. I am also the founder of a company named Sparkplant. Sparkplant is a full service agency with the focus on implementation and managing on brace software. So basically the first German speaking bracelet in Germany. Basically. And yeah, prior to that I had, as Jessica said, several roles in the Berlin bubble. I was VPCRM at Gorillaz and Autodoc. I worked several years as CRM lead at HelloFresh at Rocket Internet at a venture to name it. Sparkplant was also the name a bit influenced by the company at that time which was Spark Network where I led the CRM pricing department. And before I came to Berlin, which was 2012, I spent a few years in the corporate industry at a telco provider named One One. Nowadays it's One One and Jonas. So back in the days it was both combined and that's how I ended up in Berlin basically because Jonas back in the days acquired Strato and then I moved from Carlsruhe to Berlin for a PMI project. So sometimes things are not working out like planned. I stayed and I was supposed to stay for half a year. Now it's 10 years. Now you're a year. Yes, now I'm here and I know.

You are pretty passionate about the topic organization within CRM. So what is your experience there? What have you seen? What do you also think makes sense for the CRM topic?

Yeah. And that's a topic Indeed, after a few beers we always end up in a fight. Because in theory, what is CRM? And in the Berlin Bub, I have the feeling CRM is always linked with a communication approach, a channel sending out communications, but that's it. In the beginning of my career CRM was more a domain looking on the customer base and then channel is one part of it. You had to interact with a lot of different stakeholders across different teams. And for example, what you described would always be in my mind part of CRM. So in an ideal CRM setup I would have onboarding team, I would have basically a lifecycle team, a retention team, a win back team, but also then a level for executing campaigns, campaign management for example. And that together is hard to explain and convince to see levels. I have the feeling nowadays more and more companies are getting to that point point. But in the early days, especially Berlin bubble CRMs, we sent emails or communication and they even had a friend who always introduced himself, yeah, I'm the mobile guy, but he was doing much more. But that was his explanation to someone because it was the easiest way to tell what he's basically doing. And sending push through communication was one of his parts, but only one.

So if you can create this ideal organization, that would be what you described then like having the different lifecycle steps and then a campaign layer.

Yes.

Anything else?

Yeah, for sure. So basically I would always, let's say on a green field, I would always combine product people, tech people, engineer people, then data engineers and analysts, plus campaign manager, plus strategic domain leads for one topic and then they together form a CRM team.

Why does it make sense to combine them?

Because CRM is not a channel, it's a topic. And to do that you need to have those resources. I'm not talking about reporting lines, I'm more talking about they need to work together and for example, let's make a CLV uplift test or let's make a prediction on the clv. Someone sending email campaigns can't do that. But it's relevant for the, for the topic CRM so you need to have the resources to use it and enable it within the team.

When we now talked about organization and we know that also tooling is really a core topic in CRM. So what is your experience of landscapes? What does make sense in CRM?

Yeah, I'm a bit older, so when I started working in the CRM domain It was 2008, shortly after the Lehman Brothers crisis and it was a different world landscape wise than it's nowadays for sure. Back in the days there was no tooling, I had a team called Tag Group Marketing and the only job was in the morning selecting or querying the database and putting out files for a user that then were pushed to channels and executed a bit later than. So the early 2010 years, the company I worked for, we went into the approach of having a data warehouse on premeditate time, a data mart and then the data mart was connected to campaign tool Unica and later on SaaS and then the channel were connected. So that was the landscape tooling setup in that period when I came to Berlin, it was interesting because here it was more the one platform fits all approach in the 2013, 14 years. So Salesforce, Braze, App boy that time and so on. Then there was a net iteration of CDPs are there a funny buzzword in a way, but still a lot of clients we working with are having our CDP and then the CDP connected to our engagement software. And I think at the moment the tooling landscape goes a bit more in a way that you have a data warehousing solution. I don't want to do advertising, but for example Snowflake and then you have from Snowflake a direct connection to an engagement platform and then you can also get the data back and use them then again in the setup. So that's more the future ahead I would say to save also some costs. But yeah, in a nutshell, I think tooling itself is only a helper. It's never the solution. You need the tools to do stuff, but it's not. And that's also what I see at a lot of clients at the moment. They buy a software and then the management thinks, oh, we spent money, now everything is better. No, if I give you a car to go to work every day, you also need then to find out when do you have to leave, what's the best route, when is a traffic jam, la di lah. So all those things is also with the tooling. So you need to get used to it and think about what basically do I want to do. And then another topic is you need to look on the infrastructure. So if you have, I don't know, a monolith system in place, you might pick different tools. Then you have already a microservice oriented architecture. So yeah, it's not that solution for everyone. It needs to be scoped, but tools are developing. That's basically for me the crazy part. And it's developing so fast. If I look back in time 2010 and now that's just for me Unbelievable how things developed.

Yeah. It's crazy how the landscape is really exploding in so many directions and I was wondering what is your experience? Because I have a quite a lot that ventures approach me with a typical like specific tool in their mind and they say can we use for example HubSpot? And I'm like oh, that's the wrong question. Right. You need to start somewhere else. Like looking at your infrastructure and your requirements.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's what. What is a common approach that you normally. If you do a RFP then you look into what is my setup and what does make sense to have in my setup. And maybe for some customers, hotspot would work for another one doesn't make sense at all because they are fully. I don't know on a. A different approach already. Yeah, it's only fine after proper scoping and rfp.

Yeah. How do you convince them to do that?

Business case? No, it's interesting because you have so many companies also in Berlin that believe building internally sometimes is easier and faster and cheaper than buying. So that's the first level of defense. Build in house or buy. Now I'm a bit biased because I'm a brace partner. But even before why should I build internally if I can buy something where the expertise is only that one topic. So that's one thing and then the other one is nowadays. And that's also a sentence you said before. CRM gets more and more relevant. So the business case for tooling around CRM should be quite easy because most companies are not at the state of art setup. I'll do a test. You all might work somewhere. Do you have a CLV prediction in place? For example, hands up who has it? I don't see any hand up, but that's my point. There is so much to improve and it's only one topic and based on that it should be easy to convince the management with a proper business case in place. The same with your WhatsApp topic. Before there's value MVP approach testing, rolling it out afterwards.

Yeah. What is the biggest challenge you currently.

See personally or in the industry?

In the industry of course. Personally don't know if you want to.

Share that habit is fair because I can also do advertising. And personally we need more employees. If anyone is looking for a job, reach out because they're quite busy at the moment. Which means I spend too much time in the office and I also have two twins at home. So I need to balance it out a bit. No, but in the industry it's the speed of development. So as an employee. I had always a challenge that you had to manage the team, you had to manage the business, you had to manage also your KPIs. But then on the same side things are developing in a speed approach that it's hard to follow. As I said before 2008, 9, 10, there was the tool for me and now I have the possibility to connect an AI system and the email is generated with one click. And those things you need to follow, the time invest for following that development is also something you need to plan in in your calendar.

Basically you just mentioned that you need to plan the development of yourself and keep up with the trends. Is there any particular that you use that you would suggest? Because there are no specific CRM conferences by themselves, there are limited groups that are CRM focused in this area.

So the first approach I would always do, I would look at the roadmap of your provider. So I don't know what tool you use, maybe trace. Then you have an IA and IA tells you this is developing and this features get live in quarter one and so on. So then normally half a year upfront, what comes on the roadmap of your provider and when and then you can think about does it make sense for me in the business? Yes, no and how do I use it? That's one topic and the other one is events like today for example, talking to other companies, what they are doing, get information there. So for example your WhatsApp part, I assume not everyone use that and maybe have not heard about it, so those things are relevant. And then last but not least, I personally follow some podcasts on CRM mainly from the US but also then different platforms that are sharing information, LinkedIn groups and so on.

I have a question regarding your preferred setup of having audience specific team members like acquisition, activation in life retention and win back. Yeah, the. The thing that I always struggle with is how do you make sure all of them are aligned towards the same goal. Just one example, like if you're in the activation group and this is your audience, you basically have tools at hand that you can use to activate people and you basically throw in as many coupons as possible. Yeah, but you probably not getting. You're making like you're optimizing the activation part but not the overall part. So how do you make sure? Probably if you throw in a lot of coupon codes, you probably won't get the maximum cli.

I totally get the question. And the best example is I had once a director Lifecycle management who basically was doing a great job. So he worked a lot on term prevention which means the audience for the for the Winback team went smaller but the solution is KPIs. In this case, the KPI for the winback team was the reactivation rate, not the amount of reactivations which means the person could still optimize the reactivation rate even if the audience is smaller, but the rate went up by their experience basically in the end you can only do it if you manage the team along KPI tree that funnels up in a Northstar KPI and then you have to make sure that you also have a team that works together and not against each other. So that's also key because as I said before, the guy doing a great job on Churn prevention he would have messed up then and the wrong KPIs are in place. The Winbeck team would have gotten good results without any credit for it.

That's exactly the point. My life is getting easier, probably someone else's life is getting harder and you have to make sure that yeah, it's.

The KPI tree and how you then measure them on their success basically. And also the lift test for example is relevant. So you need to find the right way how to measure the success and then steer towards that you mentioned piece.

As a buzzword there were hip a couple of years ago nowadays at least in the data bubble it faded out a little bit. But here and there I get a question like when do we need one? I have an opinion but I would like to hear yours. For me the features are quite overlapping. A lot of things like this 360 view of a customer you can also do in a data warehouse and then loop it back. So when what are the criteria where you think CDP makes sense?

So it really depends on the state of the company and the setup behind. So if you have a huge for example data engineering team then you don't need to implement the cdp at least for my view if you have the resources to manage a proper infrastructure on a cloud solution on a data warehouse for example. But if you now are a small startup that don't have the resources then I would highly recommend to go with a CDP because then you need a source of truth so you need those golden record of the customer data and what was a data mart 10 years ago is nowadays a minor CDP. What I wanted to say was that it's fading out. I'm not saying it's fading out. I just saw for example in the Twilio who bought segment report that they are scaling down fully investments on segment which also tells me something is happening there. And more and more customers, at least we are working with are having this snowflake setup and then directly connected to the price for itself. And you save the money for the CDP in between.

Exactly. That's the question with more and more features overlapping and then another basically invoice.

To pay every price but it depends on the setup of the company and also basically who is there to to manage it. Basically.

Then finishing up with the last question. Do you have a recommendation to the group, anything that inspired your C A M work in any way that you think it's worth sharing?

Yes, indeed. And I have to smile because I remind myself on the topic as well at the moment every day because as I said, I have two kids, twin zilla, two boys, six months old and they are now learning every day something new. It's crazy to see that how they are developing. And my recommendation is indeed. And I have to admit I also did that for some time. Not anymore. But don't stop to be curious and to learn. At some point you're getting into this comfort zone where you maintain and you do your job. But my only recommendation that I would always give to everyone, learning never stops. So basically spend some time a week, even if it's only 1, 2 hours for a topic that you always wanted to look into. Talk to your colleagues. I don't know if I would now work here. I would think to at least spend one hour with you every week and to get something out of you and those things you need to, you need to encourage. And a lot of companies are, at least from my perspective, offering that. But then you have also teams where you are just stuck in your daily business and I don't want to say it's an excuse, it's the way the business developed, but then you're also stuck in your job at some point and then you are silently quitting and you're gone. So yeah, make sure that you always develop and learn.

I think that's a great way to end this conversation and thank you so much for being here for your time for your sharing.

Welcome.

All right, that brings us to the end of today's episode of Inside CRM. I hope you enjoyed our chat we and picked up some useful gems to take back to your own CRM toolbox. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you liked what you heard, do me a favor and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And hey, if you've got a quick sec, check out our website for more great content and updates. Until next time, I'm Jessica Jansen, and you've been listening to Inside CRM.

Take care.