CRM Marketing projects can be complex as they work across many different disciplines and even teams – data, technology, content, creative, insight, comms etc plus agencies, consultants and other client stakeholders (including local market teams if pan European)

Whether you have been made accountable for delivering a project across multiple channels or departments that you do not control. Or engaging an outside expert to create a campaign that will need to be socialised within the business.  Just like CRM, the key to a successful CRM Marketing step change is knowing your audience and tailoring your messages to suit their needs.

Ignore this simple fact, and your project could falter as further down the line, you realise that you have created an unbridgeable gap between stakeholder expectation & deliverables.

Having recently been involved in a global program for a blue chip provider, it reminded us of how important ‘tailoring your message’ is for a successful project delivery.  So to help you keep on track, here are our 3 simple steps to ensuring your next project is a success:

1.  Mind the Gap

2.  Ensure deliverability

3.  Determine KPIs

Make sure that you group the audiences into ‘outcome groups’ – so your presentations address their particular role within the program delivery. Detailed strategy & top line deliverables for your Scoping Team and top line strategy and detailed deliverables for your infrastructure teams.

1) Mind the Gap

• Have the key stakeholders fully bought into your solution?
• Do they all have the SAME understanding of what is being proposed?
• And more importantly, have the right people have been consulted as part of the project scope?
• So start with a series of sessions with key stakeholders across the business, to explore the proposal from objectives to strategy and deliverables:
• Your stakeholder team needs to include senior people from your infrastructure and delivery departments that will be impacted by the change – from Marketing, IT, Web, Channel Specialists, Local Market specialists
• Walk through what is being proposed and highlight how this differs from your existing strategy/solutions/programs.   
• Does it introduce new channels, more complex integrations, new data fields, new measurements, or campaign delivery?
• Work through the implications as a team at a channel/market level, to identify any gaps in infrastructure or capability.
• Ensure that all stakeholders are onboard with the step change and fully conversant with what this means to their areas.

2) Ensure deliverability

• Once you have established the scope of the program, you are one step closer to understanding how deliverable it is.
• Develop a simple presentation to the delivery team, to re-cap what is being proposed and highlight the perceived change in operational structure or channel integration necessitated by the project as scoped.
• Use these sessions to Identify any documentation and timescales for briefing changes that you will need to drive new process or deliverables
• Break down the deliverables into ‘use cases’ so you can explore the art of the possible
• Work through the ‘gaps’ and scope out changes needed together with estimated timescales.
• For global businesses, you will have to do this phase for each new market, so you can build your gap analysis around their current process & skills gap.   

3) Determine KPI's

• As marketeers we seem to be obsessed with dashboards – the visual representation of our results in an easily digestible form. To the point that we are letting the format limit our ability to learn and interrogate the results.
• So, before you start jumping into the detail. Take a step back and ask yourself 2 questions:

1. At a global level, what does success look like, to whom?
2. How will these reports help me to optimise and control my campaign deliverables?

• Let these questions determine your key measures and how you partition your reporting for your different audiences and purposes.
• You may need to setup a smaller project group to develop your measures, to ensure that all the data is available in the right format, from all the necessary channels and consolidated into a single source of truth which makes reporting seamless.
• Once you have established what you need to measure and how you will do this. You will be ready to develop the dashboards.
• Be careful that you partition them for your audiences. Your senior stakeholders will just want the headline figures, but your marketing teams will need these to be expanded with more detail to explore and optimise your programs.

Further Guidance

Once you have established a timeline for technical implementation, you will want to get your marketing team ready to start developing the programs you will need to fix your CRM problems.  You will find guidance on how to resolve strategic CRM problems in just 5 steps here.  If you are looking for specific strategies that will help you generate more income from the customer data you already have and address particular problems such as conversion, retention or engagement - then look here.