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

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 because we want to discuss why CRM managers actually feel undervalued and how we can solve that.

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

Yeah, of course, yeah. My expertise is within CRM for 12 years. I'm based in Berlin and have been there around a bit in the startup theme, but also corporate world, so to say. I've worked for Zalando, for example, which is a bit more known in Europe for seven years and basically learned there like the operational but also the strategic work, and then went into consulting. Different industries tried to transfer my knowledge there 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 CRM because of that. That's my background.

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

Hope soon.

Yeah. Awesome, awesome.

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

Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a newsletter as well, the retention blueprint. I spent a long time in retention, so just two and a half decades and eight years. Client side Man United Design recently and then. And then prior to that, I spent a lot of time in agencies and particularly as global scrim director at a big, big digitas agency and then a bit in telcos as an analyst. Before that, customer CRM analyst. So a long time in CRM and retention and marketing and you know, CRM's 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 and I.

Think for me it's also amazing. You have been at Manchester United and the Zone. That must have been like really different worlds in Comparison at the concept.

Yeah, definitely, definitely like Daz. Yeah. 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 it's quite, quite interesting. You know both, both bases. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

I think this is a great question. I think I've. This recent thing is Plink did some research I can send to anyone who's listening if they're interested that showed that 75% of teams in the UK customer marketing and CRM teams in the UK feel undervalued. And it's kind of a problem, right, because it's not just that they feel undervalued, it's just. And because they feel undervalued they don't get the support and the investment. They often go and get the data and analytics support they need to drive, you know, high value CRM interactions and then, and then it's sort of a self fulfilling cycle because you don't get the support and the data and the tech and even the tech investment that you need in order to drive great quality work then the work's not as good as it could be and then, and then you be you, you, you 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 CRM 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 the recurring revenue businesses. But beyond that, that if you don't value that CRM 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 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 sort of is to do with misconceptions. Right. About what CRM is. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I think the struggle is, and probably you've been there as well, that often we are seen as those people who are sending emails. And that can be that hard. Right. Everyone is doing it if the science around 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 experienced misconceptions. And what kind of misconceptions were there. And 72% actually responded that the most or the biggest misconception is that it's just about sending emails, which is really not the case. We know that and some even say that was around 21 that others believe there's no real team needed to do this. This is not really work. 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. 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 kids and yeah. Bit of infrastructures. Right. I also had to do quite a few tool migrations. I enjoy that part. But it's also something that became more and more heavily part of the job throughout the year. 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 assume you have a similar experience. Experience.

Totally agree. 100 right. Like so I actually did LinkedIn posts and not a survey, but I did one about a year ago with the kind of two PAR charts which was 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 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 practice practitioner and someone that is interesting in that space, you know, it's, you're working, you're working with creative, you're working with data, you work 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, 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 that's why it can be quite frustrating, I think, for CRM folk, like where they feel that kind of. They don't feel appreciated for the work that they're doing and they don't feel that value.

Yeah, 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 let actually especially leadership then struggles to understand this value that we are bringing to the table?

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 CRM marketing doesn't have like a seat at the top tables and is reporting into a CMO. And probably rightly, most CMOs come from a performance background, like 50%. I think Forrester said 50% of CMOs come from performance and the most of the rest are coming from brand. And then you have a few that come from like the 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. But the kind of the impact for CRM is you end up with leadership that also don't understand the discipline in really any great deal of detail and therefore are 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 it's 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 high ROIs because 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 marketers that are 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 to necessarily as good as it could be, then sometimes you have senior folk going, well, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? And you see CRM folk being like, oh yeah, right. And then, and 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 RI 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. 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 their service. And of course they're great roi, right? But the big 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 So 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 talk to and I know you've been through quite a big 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, 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, 2 to 1 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 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.

Yeah, but what is your experience? When I went to a couple of companies, I can also see that they don't invest heavily in CIM 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 I noticed that they kind of left with it on their own and they have to try to figure it out on their own. And 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 roi, but then also if you don't get the experience in, it's also hard to really leverage it to the peak degree.

Exactly. And you don't know what you don't know, do you? And I know, you know, at project you work with a lot of like small businesses that probably have that kind of profile of CRM person that's doing content and doing digital marketing and actually doing CRM as well. Which is why, you know, it's really good that they get to access to you and and you can coach and mentor them. 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 put. My advice is just never stop learning and just, you know, try and make it the best it possibly can be. You know, as I said, I was working with quite a tenured head of CRM recently and their program could have been far better than it was, you know.

Yeah, 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 through these kind of formats or also meetup exchange to get new input in and try in really trying new perspectives on this.

Yeah, definitely. I agree and that's why I love yours as well. I learned a hell of a lot from your deliverability guide, I have to say. So recommend it to anybody. But yeah, look, and also I'd suggest like to folk 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. It's like look beyond that like you know, like customer experience strategy, you know, creative strategy. Rory Southern's great on like things like behavioral science, even organizational stuff like you know, Simon Sinek and that start with why. And there's a lot of product people as well that do like great stuff around like product onboarding journeys. And there's a guy, Ramley John, who I know who does a great job on that. And then that's like a lot of material on personalization as well. Like Rasmund Hoyland's got a great book on that and this. So yeah, 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 that may not be immediately obviously CRM.

Yeah. So when the person has done the job as well informed but still struggling with the leadership is seeing the value. What kind of approach have you done in the part to really show them this is the impact CRM is having?

Yeah. I think what I'll say is probably there's, there's different level of folk that are listening to this call. Right. So also this podcast so there'll be, you know, more junior folks. So if you don't have a super control group and you don't know what that is then or universal control group or fallow Sal or whatever you want to call it, like Google it and definitely get that in place. Right. It's effectively a part portion of your bet, your base that don't get any of your, your 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 pl. And I've had this challenge myself actually when I was in client side where I had a super control group. These guys aren't getting anything else. All they're exposed to is the above the line activity and through the line activity. But there still was a lack of trust in the output. I think sometimes it's also part to do with this kind of definition of value. But if you start claiming 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 can quite be quite a, quite an interesting conversation. And I happened that when we had this problem at an eight figure incremental on the, on an annualized basis versus a super control group. And basically what we did is we work 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 allowed us to understand the incrementality versus of the two cohorts and we saw a difference. And then we can map that back into the P and L. And then I think 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 CEO's buyer into the outcome was or to the, to the analysis was involving finance. If you involve finance and finance are nodding and, and they're senior, you know, commercial finance agree that this is the right way of doing things, then, you know, and they're, they're showing the CEOs well, it's not just you. Right. 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 try and try as much as possible to relate what we're doing in CRM back to the P and L, because that's where, that's where you start to be valued. And if there's trust in the impact on the P and 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.

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

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

Yeah, the best definition ever.

Yeah, exactly.

Straight to the point.

No, no, that's cool. Cool, yeah, that's 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, you. Well, what's, what's your take on the, on the visibility problem for CRM teams? What's your, what's your experience and what have you seen?

Yeah, I think it's a bit difficult because we do a lot behind the scenes and we were talking about that before and necessarily CIA and people are not the ones that really showcase all they've done, their impact feel like. And I had this conversation on one of my PAT episodes with Moritz Koehlinger and we were talking about that fact that like other people in the marketing team, especially if you have ad 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 as CIN people tend to not be that proactive in communicating what we've done. And I think that's the something that we need to work on that we are also visible in meeting, communicating what's the impact, what we're driving there? And I think what you also mentioned before, when we look at B 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 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 someone with a CIM background because we are the ones that are really into optimization. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

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 life cycle marketing for active customers and so on acquisition, it like 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, CMOs, CEOs happy. Whereas like you may spend a hundred thousand pounds on some tech for CRM. You got to figure it, plug it in, you got to configure it all, you got to 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 called it crack position. Like people get addicted to this acquisition cycle. You know, they just kind of love the acquisition cycle and, but, but yeah, there's a House of Kayson, I think he's the guy from House of Kazen mentioned that. Yeah, but yeah, cool. Like, I mean like this, this kind of lack of 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?

I think there is a bit of tendency that people get imposter syndrome over time that they feel like what they are doing, it's not so much worth mentioning compared to others. I even see that with the meetup and trying to convince people then to go on stage and it's under vir, 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 this hesitation going on and I think that also limits the ambition 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 he was like, you need to be more present and out there of what you're doing, you're making so much and why you're doing so much. And I was like, as long as the product is working, who cares? That was my. 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. I 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 been 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 feeling we should have. Instead of the cycle that you were mentioning also before, right, that you feel undervalued and therefore you're not mentioning what you've done.

And then, like, repetition 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. And 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 made. If it gets creation, proving it right. Work with firearms to do that and then just then 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 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, 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?

Yeah, yeah. I think being concrete about how to be visible, I think try really to make your case in 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 bone 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 that is mentioned. And I think as you said, VRM often takes time to show really the impact compared to acquisitions. I think what I've learned a lot and in consulting was the okay 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 automation 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 C level. I think your example was perfect for that. That you really think about how can I map this to the P and L statement that also they understand if I make this happen, you will look good because I can make an impact for you.

Exactly.

Yeah. In the end of the game, we all want to look better.

And also business is just about making money really at the end of the day. And you can do that. That doesn't mean it's always about sales. It's also about great customer experiences. And CRM can play a role in that as well. But yeah, so if you can show your impact, that's where you know any 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 CRM folk fail, I think. And that's where there's an opportunity.

Yeah. And also what I've seen that actually like in standard reporting, it's not showing up correctly. Right. That then it's not so much in a focus like you think, okay, I've got my CIM reports and the standards report not really showing up who care. But it's so important that you are on the map. If your CMO 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 model. Because I've also seen with clients that it was not attributed at all in the model. I was like, that shouldn't 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 doesn't matter because the numbers are wrong. So we don't really know what impact the IM is having. So I think it's important to fix that. And have reliable data.

We 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 to justify the media investment. But one of the simple ways to do it, which we did at Design 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 like get an email from us because they've they purchased the fight from us before or been this customer for a little while before and canceled. They'll get an email from us when there's a fight on and then they'll look at it and read it and think that's great. And then a few hours before the fight they'll go to Google and click on a paid ad. Right. 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, 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, or also looking at the, the volume that open, the volume that clicked and then the revenue attributes of those as well. And you can share the performance with the performance guys rather than taking 100% of the credit. Right?

Yeah. And I think also then sit at the table who are discussing attribution because yes, I often see like CRM is not evolved when it's about this. We should be involved.

Without a doubt, we should be. They need to be in those conversations, those performance conversations, particularly if the CRM is a channel that's used to drive conversion. I think it's absolutely critical here.

Are there any other technical challenges you see on that area apart from attribution yeah, attribution.

Yeah, attribution, big problem. But also like loads of teams, it goes back to the undervalued 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 worked with one client many years ago and they had 250 customer databases, all with different elements of data, all sitting on different systems like a massive ginormous mess, like, 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, they're the marketers toolkit and particularly 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 if you are looking at your tech stack, look at brands that have like inbuilt CDPs for serial marketers as part of the overall marketing automation toolkit. But then when you do that, you've got a lot of experience in this. When you do that, it'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 implemented it last week, guys.

Give.

Us a bit while we go. 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 took them a year to implement their CVP and Martech platform. They're quite complicated business. But you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not as fast 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?

General, it said 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, to make that happen.

So that's key. Resources. The resources, the support you're going to get from like data engineering is critical, right? It doesn't, you don't just turn it on. It's not like when you open Microsoft Word.

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 three months, but I've also done some that took more than half a year. So 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.

Yeah, yeah, three months seems, seems pretty good. I think if you can do that in three months, that's, that's, that's excellent, isn't it? Even in frame for a smaller business, you know, with all the IP warm up, getting the data in place, templates, et cetera, et cetera, I think that's a great way to do that. So, so switching tracks slightly. What, what sort of advice would you give to, to leadership to. If you, you know, if you're talking to some of your clients at Project A, like what would you, what, what advice would you give to. To the, to the leadership at your clients around supporting CRM teams.

The leadership teams need to shift their perspective anyway because they see that acquisition costs are rising and they still are for a couple of years. So they need to shift.

Yes.

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 office. And I think it's maybe also connected to the time when I joined sia in the years I learned it because that was a huge scaling phase. Right. I was at Salando, we had hyper growth phase. Right. They were just investing in everything into the company and we were going into different countries. There was a lot of budget going into acquisition. 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 20, 21, we had the peak and then until last year it went down by 50%. Like the amount of value that went in or amount of money that went into investments in the years was going down by 37% according to VentureBeat. So you need to change if you see this numbers, right. You cannot expect that you get investments and grow via that. So I think that's a natural shift and therefore like really looking into CIM talent and invest in it as well as like a good setup, which often is also connected to technology. I think that's really important to support that setup and add value to CRM in that case.

Totally, yeah, totally agree. And like the acquisition, I think people are starting to place more emphasis on CRM more recent years, haven't they, because of the huge increase in costs on platforms like Meta and, but I think it's, you know, like retention is key to growth, but often people just think, when they think growth, they just think acquisition. Actually if you're in a recurring revenue business, or even if you're not, but if you're in a subscription or recurring revenue business, you start with like 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 if you lose more than you plan for, then your acquisition needs to increase more. So you could lose, if you lose like 10% of the customers that use temps, you expect to lose. You had 100% of customers, you expect to lose 10 in the year, but you lose 20 of those customers or 20% 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 the Harvard Business Review. So like a 5 to 10% improvement in customer retention drives between a 25 to 100% 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 load of maths around it and I broke it down actually in one of my newsletters. And I think what, what you, what you see is like companies like Amazon, where Jeff Bezos said in 2005, like the way he implemented prime was because he wanted to put a emote 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 already getting lots of deliveries. Why would you pay 90 pound a year to have faster deliveries? Only the people who are already getting lots of deliveries would pay that. So a lot of the logic and the board Amazon at the time was what's the point in doing this, Jeff? This, 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. 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 their business growth hinges on great retention. And CRM marketing plays a massive part of that. And it's not just a CRM marketing of course, it's your product, it's your how you handle customer service. It's all, you know, different components of the relationship. 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 non recurring revenue business, like how do you. CRM plays a vital role in kind of re engaging the customer or in service issues or you know, likely problems. 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 it's like it's the. So the, so the, the because teams are undervalued, they don't get the focus, they don't get the support. And actually some leaders actually shooting themselves in the foot with that if they really understood the nuance around it and put the right investment of focus with CRM and around sales and commercial driving initiatives, also customer experience type initiatives as well, they would without a doubt see the benefit of it.

So we need to break through the cycle.

We do, absolutely. We were on a crusade. You were digesting her.

Yeah, yeah.

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

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. So I think was good to have your point on this as well.

It was great to have your point of view. I love talking to Jessica always. Whenever we connect and I'd love to come to one of your meetups in Berlin sometime soon.

Yeah, I hope gonna happen. And maybe you do another one in London.

Yeah, that'd be great. We could do one in London. We could do inside CRM in London, couldn't we? That'd be good.

Yeah. Be amazing.

All right, cool.

Thank you.

See? Thanks a lot, Jessica. I'll see you next time.