#4 Krzysztof Szymanski | CRM Tools | Customisation Strategies | People Process Platform

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Hey there and welcome to Inside CRM. I'm your host Jessica Jansen 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.

It's great to have you here. I hope you are up for this one because I think you are really well seasoned when it comes to C. I am. So maybe give a bit of background to yourself, where you have been, what you've done in the CM space.

Sure. So I'm Christoph. I've actually spent six years in this building. I'm in the CRM bubble for actually a bit over 10 years already and my proper journey started here. So that's why I'm actually super happy to be back and catch up with people from Project A, but also from the ventures that I see. I spent six years here working with multiple companies, I think 20 plus companies I've operationally supported. You can imagine how many tools set up, team setups, challenges, solutions and so on. I've seen and I loved it. But. But at some point I was missing a bit of ownership. I was always the one advising, always the one recommending training. But I, I couldn't really make my own decisions since it was my first proper job, I was missing that. And in 2019, the very interesting opportunity came from get your guide who offered me a challenge to build a CRM team from the scratch in this company. Little did I know that three or four months later pandemic will hit and travel will basically stop. But looking back at it, I think it wasn't actually that bad because it put a bit less pressure on a daily business and more time and focus into building a strong foundation because we believe that travel will rebound sooner or later. So I spent three great years there building the team, building the setup, like pushing the retention metrics at getyourguide. Also engagement. And after this time I've started talking to TasksFix. I thought okay, very different industry at that time. We were also thinking a little bit more about internationalization, multiple products and so on. Right now we know in which kind of reality we live. Every company is pushing like crazy for profitability. So some plans had to be Adjusted.

Yeah. Amazing. And with your experience like you've seen quite a lot of different companies and I'm wondering what can you easily transfer when it comes to CIM into different companies industry and what are the parts where you say there you really need to customize it to the situation?

Yeah, I think something that I miss from the project eight times that I actually don't have that much if I focus on one company is like still talking to different businesses and so on. So I try to do that. I try to either have like knowledge exchange sessions or some workshop that I run with smaller companies. And yeah, I've noticed that we call it CRM but it can mean something completely different. Right. And even if we talk about, let's say the ecom or like customer facing, like B2C product, it may still mean something very different because your needs at that moment can be very different. Right. So I think always the most important thing to me is in the beginning whoever I talk to is okay, we need to identify the needs and the needs cannot be anything. The needs cannot be activation, some like direct mail, sending, discounts, everything together. You should actually be clear on what are your priorities and if you can do one thing right, what would be this one thing right? So I would always start with identifying needs and then once you have these needs identified then it becomes a little bit easier because then okay, what can we transfer and what actually we need to discuss or maybe connect like a few different learnings or like backgrounds that, that we have. I think many companies, they have some kind of okrs and they need to grow like reactivation needs to bring X incremental bookings and there are like orders and then activation needs to be improved by relative 5% or so. I think it's. We don't use, we don't understand actually the skillset that we have in the teams and that we don't actually make use of those skill sets like many teams would have. Someone who is a bit more technical. I think it's actually very important to say we don't copy paste what others are doing but we try to actually understand what skill set do we have. Of course it cannot be done independently from the company metrics, but I think we as CRM teams we could do a better job in it. So that's on the people side, on the platform side. Yeah, I think we're going to talk a bit more maybe about the platform because I know people generally are curious about trends and what do we see coming. Who is where, what is, who is leading, who is not leading. What are the advantages, disadvantages. But I, Yeah, so maybe we'll pick up on that a little bit later. But I also think it should be highly like custom. Right. So you should really like my rule number one, if you don't have to change, don't change. Yeah, it's. You always underestimate the effort in changing the CRM tool. So if you absolutely don't have to do it, don't do it. Second thing, like really think about the people that you have and the challenges you have and try to then talk to similar companies with similar challenges, similar learnings, maybe similar team size and so on and then start exchanging this knowledge and then deciding, okay, is there something that we could take and apply or is just an interesting thought.

Yeah. In the meantime, a question came up. So you talked about people process platform. So could you briefly explain that framework approach that you have in mind? Sure.

So something that I love and something that helps me in how I operate is I like to create those structures in my head and whenever I see the structure that actually makes sense and it, it resonates and I understand it, I, I try to apply it because it's then way easier if you explain something to people. It makes it a way easier to talk to senior leadership or C level and so on. If rather than throwing a lot of ideas and thoughts and I'm actually like, the reason why I need to do it is because I have too many thoughts and I want to say too many things at the same time. So I try to apply those, let's say, mental templates that I would use. So people process platform would be no people. So there is a skillset and resources and skills that you have within the team. And this is super important. Right. Because if you do a salesforce marketing cloud integration to a team that has one intern and one mid level manager that also is doing social media and something else, I would not say that's a smart idea. Right. We need to think about what kind of processes would be around how the success is defined, what are our main stakeholders, how do we work in terms of do we have okrs like everything around? Like how do we structure work that it's clear, understandable for us and measurable, but also understandable and measurable for people that will be looking at what we're doing, people that are paying our salaries and then platform is mostly about tooling. Right. So what kind of tooling environment do we have?

Yeah. And talking about tooling, what would you say are key reasons to consider when changing a CIM tool from your experience?

Yes. I've spoken to many companies where the first thing they say is, we want the new CRM tool. And you think like, the new CRM tool will solve your problems. Right. That will immediately add this incremental revenue and that everything is going to be better. It's not true, of course. It could enable more things, but you need to know exactly what it needs to enable. The first question, if you would ask me, hey, I'm working for Trade Republic, we're using Bryce. Do you think we should change the tool? I would say, do you think like you're reaching the ceiling? Do you think you have limitations in what tools offer what the tool offers and that you have not even one or two use cases, but you have like multiple use cases ideas that you would want to do but you're not able to do it? Yeah. So that would be the. Like. I would always start with this question and the opportunity cost and basically the cost of changing a tool is not only what you pay, but also all the resources that need to go into it, all the preparation, all the discussion. It's like heads of CRM time, everyone. So you really need to have a strong case that, okay, it's an investment that will surely pay off because we're going to have action based, we're going to have multichannel, we're going to improve quality, we're going to improve messaging frequency. So you really need to be clear about what it will improve and what impact it will have on your user base.

And can I ask you based on that? Because I think you have a lot of experience in looking into different tools because of your background. I was asking a couple of CM managers, like Race is at the moment at the lead when it comes to CM tools, like if they see anything else on the horizon or also what are the limitations of raise, if you should always go for it, what is your take on that? Is it the best tool at the moment?

Like it's. I don't want to say whether it's the best tool at the moment. I want to say that it's definitely a tool that is in a post like pole position. It has, it has like a very good and strong client base. It has like a good network. Because of that. If I would have problem with Bryce, I could always like reach out to Florian or I could reach out to guys at Delivery Hero or other companies. And actually I found out that reaching out to other CRM teams is better than reaching out to Bryce and because they know best, actually, because they've been through it, they had to go through it. So they actually know best. I don't ask many questions to Bryce, to be honest. I. If I have problem, I know who to ask or I think I know who to ask. Surely Bryce is in a pole position, right? They have a great salespeople. Half of a Brace Berlin is ex salesforce people. They have a product that is intuitive, that is pretty in a way that also helps. And they have a product that is also reliable, like Brace works. I've been using Bryce for the last five years. I did not have ability problems with Bryce. Right. What I think is missing on what I would like to see as a new chapter in a CRM tooling landscape would be something around. So what I say to Bryce when they ask me how I would like to improve the tool, I would say, you guys give me a good car, but I still need to drive it. Like I need to drive it like a hundred percent. What I would like is I would like the tool that like help me drive the car. So I don't want. It doesn't need to be like fully the autonomous, but it should already help me be like a bit smarter when it comes to you know, what, when, how. And I see a lot of buzz around this hai and so on, but I'm not convinced that it really solves the problem. There are a lot of simple things packed in like this crazy big package. Like sentime Optimization has been there for ages. You know, it's ridiculous to me that they put it into like big AI package, but they are also too slow, right? I think whoever figures it out and whoever will actually make a significant difference on increasing like boosting efficiency, saving cost and improving the quality of messaging will be in a position to actually fight Bryce. Because people will not stick to Bryce because they're loyal. They'll pick the tool that they think is the best. The interesting part is that it used to be a bit of a price game. Right now if you look at Bloom Ridge, Iterable, Bryce, more engage and so on, there is not much of a price game anymore, right. Price is similar. So I think it will really need to be. I think right now Brace has this network effect that is super strong, right. You look around, I talk to some companies and they ask me, they ask someone, they say, okay, these three companies are using Brace so I'm going to be safe, right? The market, like the, the market validation is there. Exactly. And the kind of like a head of sales in or Salesforce is now a general manager Dach For Bryce. Yeah, he knew when to switch and like how to keep this.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe let's take the last question that got two votes actually. What's the CIM team's focus on a product you only need once a year, actually.

Yeah, very good.

You have a tax case, right?

Yeah, very good question. But like you, first of all, you need to remember that people file throughout the year, right? Only mandatory people need to file. They have a deadline. Non mandatory people, that is majority, they file throughout the year. Right. We have last year we had more than a million Germans that use tax fix to do their taxes. Right. The uplift potential is crazy. To use word of mouth, refer a friend programs and to optimize that to do seasonal campaigns to understand price sensitivity in terms of do we optimize more for revenue, do we optimize for submission? There is a lot of, I don't want to say data science because it sounds really big, but. But there is a lot of thoughts around. Like, every following submission increases the likelihood of the next one tremendously. So then you also need to know how to segment between early filers, late filers, high intent, low intent. Plus remember that in Germany you could file up to four years back. So it's a very interesting product where if you get a first transaction, you could like quadruple your CLV within a month. So that's another big challenge. We call it a repeat rate. How many submissions from a new submission can we generate within, let's say, first 30, 60, 90 days?

Thank you so much being here and answering all those questions to us.

All right, that brings us to the end of today's episode of Inside CRM. I hope you enjoyed our chat 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.