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Unlocking Business Growth with CRM
In today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, customer relationships are more important than ever. The effective management of these relationships through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can drive growth and profitability for businesses of all sizes.
Kai Glinin (Kai), head of CRM at JUCR (an electric vehicle charging solution business) strongly believes in understanding what the business is doing and asking the basic questions – WHY & HOW– before taking up any CRM initiative to understand how it is going to impact/support business growth. In this article, they discuss the structured approach to CRM to create business value and drive growth, and also list the core elements/steps for setting up CRM systems.
A Structured Approach to CRM
One of Kai’s big learnings from their extensive experience is that CRM can have a continuous and deep impact on business growth. They emphasised that it is necessary to understand what growth means for every business. It is the key to what a CRM person should be doing.
Hence, CRM departments and CRM Managers should be constantly updated on the business needs and business strategy and align CRM strategies accordingly. However, to be able to see the value of CRM in driving business growth, there has to be a structured approach to CRM, as detailed below:
1. Understanding the Business Requirement
It is crucial to deeply understand the unique requirements of your business. With a comprehensive understanding of your organisation’s operations, goals, and challenges, you can determine how CRM can best support your specific needs. This knowledge forms the bedrock for defining and implementing a CRM stack that aligns with your business objectives, ultimately leading to improved efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall success.
2. Formulating the Right Questions
Formulating the right questions is a crucial initial step in CRM as it allows businesses to gain valuable insights into their customers’ behaviours, preferences, and needs. By posing well-crafted queries, companies can gather accurate and relevant data, providing a solid foundation for decision-making and strategy development. From the information gathered, formulating a hypothesis becomes the next critical stage.
3. Hypothesis and Testing
You must have a hypothesis and a testing strategy to know what you’re doing, when, how and why – why being the most important question. Hypotheses can be formed based on different factors. For example, if your hypothesis is about the data, then, analyse the data and determine which cohort of users converts better and test specific cohorts rather than all at once with various copy and other variants. Upon testing, the results will either validate or negate your hypothesis. However, with a hypothesis and its test results, you can reiterate or adjust your hypothesis and drive some experiments.
4. Experimenting to Generate Learnings
When it comes to experimentation in CRM, the possibilities are vast, ranging from significant elements like channels and segments to smaller components like copy variations. It is crucial to anchor these experiments in data-driven insights derived from past campaigns and ongoing user iterations. By leveraging the power of data, organisations can uncover valuable learnings and insights that inform the next steps and serve as drivers of growth.
Setting up a CRM System
Against the backdrop of the CRM project at JUCR, Kai spoke about the core elements/steps required for setting up a CRM system.
1. Selecting a Platform/System
To select a platform, have a strong understanding of the business strategy, mission, and vision, and formulate strategic questions to answer. Certain platforms cannot operate alone and you always have to fuel them with data.
Having a database with a unique identifier for every user is essential for effective communication. Thus, before selecting a CRM tool, understand the business and user needs to choose the right tool and have reliable data.
Here is how you should go about selecting a platform/system while setting up a CRM system (Massive Rocket Insights):
- Assess Your Business Requirements: Begin by thoroughly understanding your organisation’s unique needs and objectives for implementing a CRM system. Identify key processes, such as sales, marketing, customer support, and data management, that the CRM will impact. This assessment will help you prioritise features and functionalities required to meet your specific goals.
- Consider User-Friendliness: User adoption is crucial for the success of a CRM system. Evaluate the platform’s user interface and ease of use. Choose a system that your team can quickly learn and effectively use without extensive training.
- Scalability and Integration Capabilities: Ensure that the CRM platform can accommodate your organisation’s growth. Select a system that can scale with your business needs over time. Additionally, assess its compatibility and integration capabilities with other tools and software you currently use or plan to implement in the future.
2. Data and Performance
Before implementing a CRM system, analyse the historical data to understand how the business and users behave and to evaluate the current performance levels, conversion rates, and retention rates to see how much boost the CRM system can generate.
Here are the ways in which you can analyse historical data and evaluate the current performance levels while setting up a CRM system (Massive Rocket Insights):
- Data Cleansing and Validation: Begin by cleaning and validating your historical data. Ensure that the data is accurate, complete, and consistent. Identify and rectify any duplicate or outdated records to prevent errors and inaccuracies in your CRM system. Verify the quality of historical data by cross-referencing it with reliable external sources or industry benchmarks.
- Performance Metrics and KPIs: Define clear performance metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your CRM objectives. These could include customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, conversion rate, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), among others. Compare historical performance against these metrics to assess past trends and identify areas of improvement.
3. Formulating Use Cases
To implement CRM, formulate and prioritise different use cases based on their impact and effort to implement. The limitations and blockers in the implementation of certain use cases should also be considered, and an audit of available data should be conducted to understand how much data is available to work with.
Here are the action points to guide you in this process (Massive Rocket Insights):
- Identify Key Objectives and Stakeholders: Begin by clearly defining the primary objectives of implementing the CRM system. Common objectives include improving customer retention, increasing sales, enhancing customer service, and streamlining marketing efforts. Identify all relevant stakeholders, including sales teams, marketing departments, customer support, and management. Understanding their unique needs and expectations will help you tailor use cases to address different user requirements.
- Map Customer Interactions and Processes: Map out the various customer interactions and processes within your organisation. This includes lead generation, sales funnel stages, customer support workflows, and marketing campaigns. Analyse how the CRM system can optimise and streamline these interactions and processes. Create use cases that align with these processes and interactions.
- Prioritise Use Cases and Define Success Metrics: Prioritise your formulated use cases based on their potential impact on your business objectives and the feasibility of implementation. For each use case, define clear success metrics and KPIs that will help you measure the effectiveness of the CRM system.
About JUCR
JUCR is a deep-tech startup founded in 2020 and based in Berlin, Germany. They started by launching an app that allows EV drivers to find the most convenient charging points among more than 330,000 connected to the platform. Shortly after the launch, JUCR became Germany’s fastest-growing EV charging platform. Driven by the goal of building its own Europe-wide charging network with more than 100,000 charging points by 2025, JUCR is now pushing ahead with the further development of its software and charging hardware.
As the Head of CRM at JUCR, Kai is focused on building the CRM platform from scratch. They said that a strong foundational level is crucial for successful CRM implementation, as everything built on top of it will crumble if the foundation is shaky. It is important to allocate sufficient resources and budget to building a trustworthy platform and ensuring the reliability of data. Another important aspect is that CRM professionals should have hands-on experience with the platform.
Kai’s Career Journey into CRM
Kai worked in corporate communications and user acquisition marketing at the beginning of their career. Soon, they discovered their interest in having a longer-term impact on the user’s lifecycle, shifting their focus to CRM. They joined Sephora, a beauty retailer, where they got exposure to CRM.
After a couple of years, Kai got interested in app-based products. Kai thus moved from e-commerce to app-based businesses and they have stayed there ever since.
Their first experience was with LOVOO, a dating app, where they were doing a lot of experimentation, building and testing. Eventually, technical implementation and maintenance became their main focus area which was their first major step into technical CRM.
Gradually, they further expanded their area of focus from CRM-tech to MarTech, working on performance sites, tooling, ensuring data quality, and generating reports. In their current role at JUCR, Kai’s primary goal is to build a CRM platform from scratch.
Kai believes in understanding the impact of their work on the overall business performance and this has guided their work in various roles throughout their career.
Final Thoughts
Towards the end of our conversation, Kai shared their advice for those who are afraid of failure. They said – you should not be afraid of failure, as it provides opportunities for growth and learning. When you start seeing failure as a necessary step for growth, you can better understand the problem and create new hypotheses to approach it differently in the future.
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