#7 Moritz Köllinger | Revenue-First Marketing | CRM Implementation Strategy | Startup Efficiency Framework

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I have the pleasure to say that Moritz is here today. Why I wanted to bridge to the stage is actually the fact that we worked together last year for a couple of months and I got to know him quite well over that time. And for me, he has a particular interesting background because he is now managing marketing as a whole. But he has not only a paid background, but also a CIM background. And I noticed also, I could say a little passion for cm. I would say, yeah, yes, it's.

Yeah, it's true.

Yeah. And that's why I thought he can bring in like a different perspective to the topic. At least I experienced that in our talks and found that quite interesting. Before we go into questions, I think it would be good if you give a little introduction to yourself. What have you done so far?

Okay, so my standard introduction is, hey, I'm Mo, I'm doing marketing. I'm doing this for 12 years now. And yes, I have a background in CRM, which is 10 years ago, to be honest. I built this for two years in the trenches with Mailchimp. Not kidding. So Mailchimp and then Optivo, I think it was. And so yeah, really Back in the day, right? Yeah. Nowadays I am VP Marketing at Timeless. It's an investment app. Right. You can basically invest in fancy stuff, right? Shoes and cars and art and stuff like that. I do have a background in more or less software as a service companies, mostly fintech related. So yes, that's me.

When we also talked about like your career, you have often the situation that you go into startups and try to build up marketing there as a whole. And when you go in there, what are your first priorities? How do you approach it?

Yeah, I would even be more specific meaning. So I don't know how I ended up in that place, but I'm a firefighter, so to say. So if marketing does not work, people tend to come to me, right, and say, hey, that's the efficient guy, maybe he can change stuff. So usually I end up with companies that are either one trick pony or super unorganized or super immature, whatever. So I have to go for efficiency. And if you go for efficiency, usually you look at revenue first because, I mean, look at it. If you talk about marketing in the startup space, most people tell you anything about, I don't know, paid media, budgets, creatives, anything that is awareness driven, TikTok and the like. But actually what's the key thing that marketing should do? It's increasing revenue. And most people also in the startup space do not really see it as such, which is weird in my opinion because they do all kinds of things with being on TikTok, being on socials, being live on stage anywhere, but they do not have really revenue as their number one priority. And this is what I tend to do to have that as my number one priority. Which leads me to actually talking to the CRM people first when I come, whenever I come into any company because that's just what they do, they bring in the revenue. And this is also, I mean your going after the topic now more and more that I think CRM is underappreciated, so to say and that functionality of sorts. And I couldn't agree more because CRM is not the topic for people that are the, let's say loudest one in the meetings, the ones that really represent anything. It's usually the ones with the nice creatives, the videos to show so the budget they spend. But it's actually not really what drives success in my opinion.

And how do you convince then the management to yeah, invest in CRM and also in such an early stage one.

Would say yeah, as I said. So usually I come in when things are not really great, right. So I have to change something and usually they're quite open to anything. But if you come from a numbers perspective, CRM always makes sense because if you would want to change things from the start you would have to increase budget because you would need to in order to increase efficiency and acquisition you need to test. Testing needs budget, right? And then you need the whole creative machinery behind that. If it's video, if it's ucd, if it's whatever creative, it will cost you money. CRM does also cost some money, but it's not nearly there in terms of the amount of what you would need. So actually making more out of your like user base to actually get more money out of them, more revenue, create more retention of sorts is always a good idea and something that is not hitting like the bank so to say. So in the end you always do yourself a favor of doing that first because if you would then start changing things in acquisition, you basically get paid double because you can only make acquisition much more profitable if you increase your retention first. Yeah, that's Just it.

And just to share with you also the situation we had. So when we came up, came in to the startup, Moritz was leading the marketing team and I was coming in to build up CRM. So it was done before, like with in house tools and like some stuff.

Building up CRM is literally right. So we implemented the tool first because we had none.

Yeah. And I think what was a challenge there was, I came in but you needed to give me first the time to implement a setup. Right. There was not the right setup to.

Scale and even to send an email.

Right. Yeah. So how did you manage the situation to, I wouldn't say calm them down, but to manage expectations and say like we need some time to establish the groundwork first.

Yeah. That was a tricky one to be honest because like where we were at expressdoi, I can say it, what we had was a management that was really convinced they had the super good CRM setup and they just didn't. So it's. They had a self built CRM system that was able to send some bulk emails and that's it. And they didn't have a look at any tool. They had no idea about the whole industry of CRM and the tool space and everything. So actually it took me quite some time to convince them to look into this, to actually see what would be possible if we could do specific campaigns, if we could look, have a look at the data, we would just leverage what we have. And then obviously we looked at race, they looked at the cost, they said no. So the standard procedure. But in the end I managed with actually just from the cost perspective because they were spending quite a lot of money on acquisition and obviously the CAC was just too high. And I said we are only going to manage to reduce that if we would make more out of that customer. Right. And, and then reduce the cac. And this is basically what convinced them. And on top I could say, hey, this is a tool. You can automate stuff. You don't need a huge team. Because they were all, I don't know, like old school in terms of cm. They said, yeah, that's like super expensive tools. And then you need like a huge team in order to manage it and so on. And obviously braze helps a lot with that and also to argue against it. So this was basically the job that I had to do. And it sounds easy because hey, look at the numbers, it's easy peasy. But it took me three months actually and several talks.

Yeah. And there's actually the, the first question from the audience. It Says as a startup, what strategies can be employed to effectively introduce new product to established companies with well established processes that resist change. That's a long one.

That's a long one. Very sophisticated. In the end, always look at the cost perspective. So what is it you can actually improve? Because if you say, hey, we can make lots of more money, we can increase revenue, it's always a bet, right? Everyone can tell you, hey, we could increase revenue. This is what everyone in marketing will always tell you. You could increase, maybe. But if you can really say, hey, we will reduce costs or we will not create new costs in future, it's always much more valuable. And if you come in a tool system or a setup, we see, okay, it cannot scale. But we have to scale. And if we would scale, it would cost us a lot of money because we need team or we need to have more of that tool space or whatever. We just waste time. Then this is basically a leverage that you can really do that. You can say, hey, we need a new tool set up in order to be able to not increase costs while we increase revenue. So always come from the cost perspective. And every management loves to hear that you don't need more people. Yeah, it's in whatever setup which is obviously possible with the new tool system. And it's not just braze, it's as we know, all of the automation tools out there can do this for you to some extent.

Yeah. And the next question, with focusing on revenue as the main KPI and CIM as one of the main tools to achieve that, how do you balance between short and long term effort?

It's a tricky one. I'm doing this for 10 years now and this is super individual, depending on the company, depending on the people you talk to. So there's no clear answer to that question. First of all, it's about expectation management. You have to be transparent on what is possible and what's not possible at that moment. If you see that there's a, I don't know, 12 or 24 month cohort that should increase because investors need to see that, then you should be transparent and say, hey, we're not going to change this tomorrow, it's just not possible. We need to do some changes. Cohort would be rather small. Testing will be coming in, but it will take some time and so on and so forth. So this is what you have to understand and make people understand. Right. So then you can. Yeah, that's the hard part. It's also, at least I made the experience. Some people just don't like to talk about numbers, right? Everyone says, hey, let's be number driven. But if you start arguing with numbers, they're just like eh, don't tell me the numbers, I don't want to know. Just make it go up, right? And if you started with the expectation management, you will find the balance automatically because you see also from the other side, what's the expectation on you to your team, let's say. And you will always have to face the short term revenue expectation, right? So hey, we need to push something now, better yesterday. But in the end this is something that you also like. If both sides are transparent, it will work out over time and then you find that balance, that there's no balance. You can just establish right from your position alone. It's just not possible. Sorry.

And what I also want to hear your opinion on because you have this paid and CRM perspective in mind. Where do you think do paid and CRM have potential to collaborate.

Like basically everywhere from the start. So yeah, I know usually in companies this is seen as separate entities. They do acquisition, they do retention, but in the end obviously they go hand in hand, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. You cannot do have an efficient acquisition strategy without having the retention. So it starts with having the KPI. What's your customer acquisition cost? And you will always be dependent on the revenue per customer. So this is where CRM comes into play right from the start. And I think if the CRM team is in the loop of how you do advertisement, it's already a good start. So that they know what is communicated to the user. How do these ads look like? Is it a video? Is it a static, Is it ugc? Are there different creators? What's the USP they're using? And just being aware of that oftentimes helps. Just because they know how we communicate to the outside, how can we really play that in the inside? Let's say. So that's the start. But then again obviously you need to connect this. If you start using with let's say welcome bonuses or anything, you get €10, 20% off, whatever, these usual things that you would use and test, this is where you really have to have the team sit together and see like how do we do this technically? How does it make sense? How do we not blast the budget out? Because also a bonus or 20% is some money that you would spend indirectly. This is budget. And yeah, this is basically what you should do. But then the really high level, what you need is a low customer acquisition cost. So you really have to in My opinion, you have to think CRM first. Even if you think about acquisition, if your CRM does not work, cannot just go start like pushing money into the acquisition challenge. It's just not, it's not efficient. Unfortunately some companies don't want to be efficient or have no clue about efficiency. But this is how it would work, let's say.

And who do you think can support this view or establish this view? Like collaborating between the overall marketing team on those topics?

Yeah, in Germany we say the fish stinks from the head, right? Usually it's not the CRM team, unfortunately. I mean they can show what they do. They have to be present, they have to be, I think louder than they do as as of yet as I experienced and the teams that I came in, they have to be like as vocal as anyone else. Because if acquisition shows that shiny new video, that cool UGC that whatever they should show their email templates say, hey, this is what goes out to millions of users. This is what basically our landing page. This is how we make people convert. And I think this trying to share this attention is going a long way. This is what really can help also to bring the attention to this is marketing as well, so to say. Because also for founders and for people that put money into the company, like basically everyone that is looking at marketing, they only look at the awareness stuff. That's just it. They look at the social channels, they look at the performance marketing, they look at videos, tv, whatever. They don't look at the emails, not in the first thought so to say. But this is what you would have to change in order to really bring that awareness to the revenue part as well. But unfortunately I really think that only goes if your managers think thinking the same like in that position to actually also have that influence.

So what can we do to push our managers?

No, actually you would have to be some managers.

Hey, that's our goal there.

I think like people with CRM background are under utilized of sorts like in leading teams, also marketing organizations.

Why do you think that we need to elaborate on this?

No, because Steve, wait a second. Because usually who gets the promotion, right? The people that handle people or money, meaning they spend the budget and if you don't waste the budget, then you get the position. But in CRM it's hard to really waste budget. You might not bring in more budget, but this is people do not really notice.

Yeah, that's true.

In terms of quality and what you can do for the company. I think you should look into the CRM direction. If you promote people into higher positions in marketing.

As a question, that is a very great like an amazing point because the other day I had this head of marketing told me when I was talking about a friend in CRM who applied for a job in growth for a brand, this head of marketing said they won't get it. And I'm like, how they won't get it? To me CRM is the closest thing to growth marketing and or how to scale like a brand, a company, it's the number one thing. But a head of marketing doesn't see it that way. I'm guessing. I didn't ask them directly but in my mind they probably favor a performance marketing person over. Sorry, I was going to ask like how do you think we can get rid of this, this branding on the CRM managers? And maybe also because I feel like CRM people have an imposter syndrome in general because that's what companies tell us, you're not important, blah blah blah like how can we get rid of that mindset?

Basically it comes back to what I said before. It's depending on the definition of growth and for most people growth is new users, it's not revenue. If growth would be revenue, then obviously you'd be right. It's CRM like being on a top position somewhere. But most people just see growth as new users, new people in the system that this is highly inefficient most of the times, especially in startups. And this is what I think is just not right. And most people, like most companies just don't do right at the start because this is the mindset of a founder. I need to grow, I need more people no matter what they do, if they buy or not. It's just like this growth part, like bringing more attention. This is what they are trained for.

Right. You know what to do people. So we need to get into this room. You have another question?

Pricing advice, versa like you said. And I'm fully agreed, like I'm fully on board like with, with everything that you said. But I'm just saying like getting more people is. Wouldn't then it also be like a potential way to go forward to make brand marketing or all these things more measurable? I'm just asking rather than saying making performance marketing or CRM, which is very much numbers driven and you can attach it to, to numbers directly.

Yeah.

And focus more on that. Rather than saying if I already focus on branding in social media or whatever else or any type of brand marketing, wouldn't it then also be a strategic direction to say isn't that the way to say, like, how can I make that more measurable?

Basically? And the funny thing is that the learning curve for like most people thinking in that direction is they start with brand and end up in performance marketing. Right? Because it's a. You can still see stuff, but it's measurable. But this is basically how they think. This is where it stops. And performance marketing is obviously highly measurable. But in the end, even if you bring down your app install cost from, I don't know, €2 to €1.50 if people don't buy it doesn't mean anything. And this is the only thing that you can actually do via creative if CRM doesn't make people buy it doesn't bring you anything. Bottom line, people are stupid.

I'd like to end it with that. Thank you so much Mukitz for your time sitting here and answering the questions. Yeah, always a pleasure. Yeah, I just like like it when Morocc has his perspective on things. Thank you so much.

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