Alignment and Business Goals: Winning Through Proper CRM UsageAlignment and Business Goals: Winning Through Proper CRM Usage

Alignment and Business Goals: Winning Through Proper CRM Usage Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to the Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. I’m trying to stay focused on keeping the mic off mute, Jeff. We’ve, sometimes with this recording business, we get some false starts and I ended up going on this tangent and then you guys are waving at me, telling me that my mic’s muted, but I think I’m doing good so far. 

Jeff White: Nobody gets to hear the brilliance.

Carman Pirie: Indeed and look we’ve been doing this podcast for a long time and sometimes you get some topics that maybe overlap others or we cover the same ground in slightly different ways. I’m interested in today’s conversation because I think it’s like completely net new for us. I don’t think we’ve really covered this topic of CRM ownership, why it matters to marketing, why they should care, unpacking that a little bit beyond just a territorial debate and into something around it’s a little bit more future-focused and success-oriented around why would we think about it in various ways for various companies. So excited for today’s guest and excited for that topic. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I think it’ll be interesting. And like you say, it’s not something we’ve directly chatted about before. So joining us today is Caleb Rule. Caleb Rule is a fractional CMO with Rule Marketing Group and currently working with Double Track, a Salesforce consulting firm. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Caleb. 

Caleb Rule: Thanks so much for having me excited to be here. Glad that I could maybe inject a new topic into the typical Kula Ring conversation and excited to see where this goes. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, as are we and I think Caleb, did I get it right that you also previously worked with Club Car as well?

Caleb Rule: I have. So I have been an in-house marketer for an OEM manufacturer, put on the safety goggles, go out to the back and watch the golf cars being made so manufacturing is an industry I’ve always been very close to and sometimes in, specifically. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and that’s a nice point of framing, I think, really, for how you think about the notion of customer relationship management and the software that basically powers it. It’s funny how we just assume that because I think one of the things we talked about is that. An awful lot of this type of technology isn’t really about customers at all. And it’s, that kind of starts the maybe the confusion or the debate around who should own it.

So have you looked at the situation and said, I have a firm point of view that it should always be this area of the business that owns the CRM? Or do you feel that it is a bit more of a consultant’s answer and it depends and certain scenarios dictate certain approaches? What have we seen?

Caleb Rule: I work in marketing, so it’s always, it depends hashtag jokes that marketers get. But, it does truly depend on a few factors. And when I think back to my time at Club Car, Club Car was at the time, part of the Ingersoll Rand family. It’s no longer that, Ingersoll Rand sold it a couple of years after I left.

But when we implemented Salesforce, actually, I actually went through that process from a user acceptance testing perspective. And I think about who was leading that it was IT. Who led that process, but it made sense because it was a neutral party. They were, it was very tech center, tech stack-centred implementation. So you had sales, you had marketing, you had finance, you had support. They were all in there. And IT was more of a, more than a connective tissue because they were leading the process. So how IT was structured within Club Car, which at the time, I think was a 500 million ARR company. I’m sure it’s more now. That made sense for them. But if you’re a, if you’re, let’s say you’re a manufacturing startup, or let’s say you’re less than 10 million in ARR, or let’s say you’re 1 billion-plus your org chart is going to be significantly different than other companies. And so who owns, the CRM who’s really leading that development I think can largely depend on. The org structure, yes, but also what resources are available. And sometimes it’s simply a matter of history. For instance, who used it first is sometimes the default answer. And to answer your question directly, I really do think it largely depends. And so there’s no one catch-all statement that says, Hey, X should own the CRM. And sometimes that answer should morph as well as companies grow. 

Jeff White: When IT owns it though, we’ve often seen, of course, coming at this from the perspective of marketers and sales teams, they often butt heads sometimes with the internal IT department and trying to get things deployed or expectations of when you have a 10 million company trying to get Salesforce to change its rules for how it actually goes to market. You’re not going to get very far, even though that may be IT’s policy, but what sort of situations have you seen where IT is the owner of the serum where that’s been a net positive to have them in control of something that seems to touch all of these different parts of the organization. 

Caleb Rule: I think that’s a great question because that can be an antagonistic relationship, right? Where you’re butting heads, you want to make this customer-centric progress and yet you run into red tape. At the same time, I’m going to go to bat for IT here because if something happens, Who’s putting on the cape and rescuing you? It’s going to be IT. IT is always under-resourced, always underappreciated. 

When I was at Club Car, I was thankful to have some really good business partners to actually work with and a couple of years ago I actually wrote a LinkedIn article, just exploring this topic a little further. It was just interesting. So I did some pros and cons. I reached out to my point of contact, he’s now I think, vice president over there in it, Craig Drenthe who, he was awesome and he was great to give me some perspective.

But that does depend right on who you are working with. So IT can be very beneficial for a couple of reasons. Number one is IT, a good IT department is speaking a lot in business cases. You don’t do it to just do stuff. You got to have a win. Why, how, what’s the cost of not doing it? As well, you’ve got to have your dots connected because that’s how IT is thinking and they’re always connecting dots, in many ways and so working with it forces you to be a better marketer in some cases because you have to think in terms of business cases as good marketers should be doing already.

I would also say that from a, “Okay, how does this work with everything else perspective?” You think sometimes, for instance, manufacturing can over-rely on their ERPs. And sometimes they use their ERPs and slap the CRM module onto it. I can think of a couple of major players in the ERP space that have done that and it doesn’t serve sales or marketing or support teams very well. But okay, how is this all going to work together? Also, who’s probably going to be making these connections? It’s often IT. And so if IT is your friend, it makes a lot of difficult conversations easier, but they’re also going to give you a wider lens into solving the challenges that you’re trying to solve, which allows you to then factor those in. Oh, sales are doing this, but operations are doing this, but the plant needs this. Okay. Where are we really going to fall? On the priority list and then wins the time to try to really push a key initiative through. So I think IT owning it can be quite beneficial, especially because they are often positioned as a central kind of hub for all technology, but I do think there are some negatives as well. That can come from IT.

Carman Pirie: think you started down the path of talking about the ERP there, which is kind of what triggered me and see if I can make these dots connect to your earlier point, um, companies that have an over-reliance on the ERP or that seems to be the starting point for the CRM discussion.

It, when I’ve encountered that most often, it’s been companies that maybe don’t have much of a new prospect pipeline. They’re not generating net new customers as often as they are continuing their very large relationships with very established customer accounts. So therefore the ERP. That kind of ongoing customer relationship management really lives within the ERP the order histories and all of those things. And then, of course, on the other side of those organizations that are much more prospect-lead-focused, our marketing teams are very much engaged in generating MQLs. And getting them over to the sales organization or working collaboratively with sales to convert them to SQLs, etcetera. It feels to me like that might point us in the direction a bit more of who owns what because, as things become, as that CRM becomes a bit more of a PRM, a prospect relationship management tool, man, it seems to make a lot more sense for it to be, for marketing to have a piece of that, doesn’t it?

Caleb Rule: I would say that marketing has to be. A strategic, strategically involved department in a lot more discussions than maybe it sometimes is. I phrased that a little cautiously because it obviously depends, but I think there’s an overarching conversation to be had around how marketing is viewed. Within an organization, because of how it’s viewed, if it’s a cost center line item on a P and L versus, Hey, marketing is a strategic revenue driver. That changes the dynamic of how marketing, how involved marketing is going to be in these large investment-type decisions, because the CRM or the ERP are not cheap. For good reason, they’re powerful platforms. They are a large investment. And so where’s the ROI around that? How much say marketing has into it is going to largely depend on how it’s viewed. But I would also say that yes, as the CRM is, how is it used today? If you have one really matters in terms of how much sway marketing might have.

For instance, I have seen in past ops, that I’m much more of a Salesforce guy. But I’ve seen HubSpot be connected to, I think it was NetSuite for one client. This was a couple of years ago and it was a mess. I tell you because the big thing that the big challenge is data flow, right? And ERP, why was it purpose-built? It’s purpose-built for resource planning and management at a large scale. It wasn’t built for prospecting sales processes. It wasn’t necessarily built for invoicing and automated billing. It wasn’t built for customer support and self-help portals, right? And getting that data out of the ERP into the CRM can be a major hassle. It can just be a major hassle. Sometimes that’s where IT helps, but sometimes that’s where you need developers, but marketing is going to be involved sometimes by default in a lot of these conversations. And because marketing influences heavily the go-to-market plan to your point, Carman, it’s okay. Who’s really using this technology? Sometimes I mentioned historically, right? Sometimes the customer supports the first team that brought it in. And so they’re seen as the owner because they were the trailblazer. Sometimes, Salesforce is one of the major players that has sales in the name, right? So often sales owns the CRM because it’s really prospecting, or sometimes customer management. But I think Carman, one of your main points with what you just said, which can’t be overstated is. How is it used, within a given organization, that matters? Is it really just used for prospecting and sales or is it used for a whole customer journey from acquisition to retention to cross-sell, upsell? Because how it’s used also significantly changes maybe who owns it or who’s responsible slash accountable for the return on the investment. 

Jeff White: Man, and that, one of the things you highlighted in there too, I think is also a point that not a lot of folks necessarily understand, especially outside of the more technical arena, like it side is that these are big software platforms and they are built within a silo in order to do a certain thing, but they can be connected to other tools, but it’s not a given, so that’s another consideration you definitely need to have as you’re choosing, who’s going to own this and all of that is how well can it be integrated with any ERP? How well can it be integrated with other platforms that are in use around, trouble ticketing and things like that? Like it would be nice if it was just a matter of HubSpot or Salesforce going in and saying, route this here, but it really isn’t. And it’s going to take some effort to do that. So that’s a huge consideration. 

Caleb Rule: Unrealized potential. I think that is the key here, right? Because with any technology, right? We, anytime we buy a technology, whether it’s for our personal lives or for our professional lives, we see a use case for it. Hey, if I buy this, I want X. For instance, like with Salesforce or with HubSpot, I want better reporting. I want faster sales processes. I want marketing visibility into the entire lead-to-cash process. Or at least a good marketer should be looking for that. Finance, I want to automate some billing, but not realizing all that potential of what you’re trying to get leads to a lot of. Tech debt leads to a lot of, what are you really paying for? And maybe a significantly lower return on the investment from a marketer’s perspective, there is so much that can be leveraged from within the CRM as long as it’s got the access and the respect internally to be able to get it, for instance, if I am only if I only have visibility as a marketing team into leads and okay, leads come in, then they’re passed off to sales. I have no visibility past that. That’s a problem, right? But the CRM can, if used properly, have lots of ifs and buts, right? Gotta love it. It can be so much more because all right, with the right reporting, the sales pipeline is, it’s in the basic for Salesforce and basic Salesforce instance, I should be able to at least have dashboard reporting to say marketing drove these leads, or they came in through these sources and here’s how much went to closed won, here’s how much went to close lost. Here’s how much is stalled in the pipeline. Then I can adjust my go-to-market planning based on XYZ PDQ and Oh, Hey, next year, we should invest more heavily in, some of the brand marketing initiatives because we think, that’s helping or, Hey, we should really stop with these gated eBooks because these downloads are turning into MQLs and, but they’re never turning into SQLs or closed won opportunities, right? If you were talking with the data that’s within the CRM, it makes you a much more powerful marketer. But you have to have the infrastructure in place to realize some of that. And cross functionally there’s, sales, IT, finance, customer support, have all of these other potentials, right? Like the ticketing system that you mentioned Jeff. That could be huge and it could, sales and support alignment could be amazing. Could, could, could, but is it oftentimes it’s not because either the teams are siloed or Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever the CRM of choice is if there is one, is not used in a cross-functional manner?

Carman Pirie: You mentioned Salesforce as being a Salesforce if there’s one platform that epitomizes sometimes the notion of bringing a bazooka to a knife fight, it’s Salesforce and, HubSpot started down that path as well. It’s gotten a lot bigger, a lot more complex, tries to do a lot more things, certainly moved well past its marketing automation routes and now full functioning CRM, et cetera.

There’s a core use case that starts this investment in the first place. And then there’s all of these nice to haves or could be. Would it be fair to say that you think more organizations would be better served to focus on the core use case and not get too distracted by the nice to haves and the what could be, maybe they should simplify their deployments rather than looking back after five years and saying, geez, we have all this unrealized potential.

Caleb Rule: In a word, yes. If only it were that simple though, right? When we think about how the C-suite operates and the ones who are making these 5, 6, 7 figure investments, depending on the size of your company and reach, it’s never just one thing. Now, you might have overarching business goals. But I think where it often falls down, especially when it comes to technology investments and, or the CRM is not all of these investments are aligned to the overarching business goals. I do think that’s where something like a roadmap comes into play. For instance okay, we have our CRM. Why do we have it? To your point, we have it because we want to, okay? Why did we originally bring it in? Maybe it was, Oh, we want to sell better. We want to win more deals. And so sales needs this to be able to sell better. Okay. Have we maximized that potential? If the answer is no, what do we need to do? But what are the external internal influences? Are we being asked to do more with less? What are the internal budgets, right? Where’s the pain point who’s actually using it today, right? There are all these influences around the CRM. That can be sometimes not caught by an internal resource, right? That’s why I do advocate sometimes like this, where you need a neutral third party to come and say, Hey, everybody, we need to get in a room virtually or physically and talk about this and really map this out. But then, okay, are we getting this from sales? Then what supports sales, for instance, marketing, hello, marketing and sales alignment, like more aligned teams equals more revenue for you. 

But I saw some marketing charts data in 2023 that only about 52 percent of surveyed marketers and surveyed salespeople, it’s roughly 50 percent said that they were aligned with each other. That was in late 2023 from a marketing charts article. I don’t think that’s probably changed that much, right? And the CRM is ground zero for that. So if you, Hey, I brought in the CRM for sales. Okay well marketing, this is your time to shine because you feed into sales. You two need to be working together. And if you aren’t, the CRM is a way to be able to do that, especially, what’s your visibility into the sales pipeline marketing, what are you doing that aligns with what sales are doing? And so we’ve talked about a few things, right? How is marketing viewed internally? That impacts sales-marketing alignment. That impacts the effectiveness of your go-to-market overall. That impacts closed-won deals. And that impacts internal respect, if you will, for marketing and how it’s viewed strategically within the organization, which impacts its ability to get funding. And, in an era where we are often being asked to do more with less, I think that gets immediately back to the question that you asked Carman, which is, why did we get this in the first place?

If we simplify and we do two things well, versus 20 things poorly, how much more return on the investment are we going to get? CRM is a big one that could be applied to many other places and within an organization as well. But yes, I do think. That identifies what are the core use cases or core use cases. Maybe it’s service, maybe it’s sales and then service, right? Okay, align around these two tentpoles and figure out what is needed to support them. How does the data flow for them, et cetera? But then you’re much more likely to over the next 12 to 24 months, get a better bang for your buck. 

Jeff White: So what you’re saying is that marketing and sales have to have a CRM in order to save the relationship and the company.

Caleb Rule: I think that would, so there’s no such thing as a silver bullet for technology despite what account-based marketing companies may have promised around intent data there’s no technology that can fix processes and can fix how people work. Technology is an accelerator as to how the processes work and the people are working together or aren’t.

If there are gaps between sales and marketing, the CRM is only going to highlight that in a very expensive way. It, if they are working harmoniously, it’s going to accelerate and a healthy go-to-market motion, I think is the key here. The CRM, I can’t, because it is so foundational to what sales and marketing do, I do think there is high potential around it, but is it the only, impact? No, it’s not. 

For instance, I’ll give you an example within your CRM, you’re going to have sales stages, sales pipeline stages, and you’re going to have, for instance, you might have leads might have marketing qualified leads, might have sales qualified leads, or even sales accepted leads before that. Then you might have the opportunity being worked, et cetera, et cetera, it, you can name it however you want. When was the last time sales and marketing sat down and actually determined what a good lead is? Because if you’re sending over a bunch of marketing-qualified leads that sales are going, nope, CRM is not going to fix that. CRM is just going to show you a report that says, wow, marketing generates all these names that do nothing. That’s only going to exacerbate the problem is all it’s going to do. So healthy processes, I think, lead to a healthier use of the CRM, but no, the CRM cannot fix your underlying process problems. 

Carman Pirie: It can’t fix it. I agree with that point, but I do think there’s something interesting that you’ve either intentionally or not stumbled upon here, this notion of. It occurs to me as you were saying that I’m not saying this is going to make it sound potentially easier than it is to do in practice, of course, but I believe it’s possible to design, if you will, a roadmap of CRM implementation and adoption that is mindful of both the sales and marketing use cases. And do so with a view to fueling sales and marketing alignment, to actually have it align KPI, drive KPIs that are aligned to sales and marketing alignment via a CRM adoption and doing so, but doing so intentionally versus seeing the alignment being a bit of a free prize inside from CRM adoption.

That strikes me just as an interesting kind of thought experiment. It seems very. The CRM is the cultural Trojan horse, if you will, that can come in and if that implementation and adoption are carefully managed on both sides of the house, I think it could have that alignment benefit that you desire.

Caleb Rule: I love the fact that you’ve touched on this because I think it highlights a huge either win or loss scenario. And what I mean by that is, all right, let’s say you want to implement or you’ve had an implementation, did whoever was implementing it, whether it was in-house internally or a third party consultant, whomever it was this entire project aligned to your overarching business goals? Because the answer determines a whole lot in terms of whether you’re getting this or not. For instance, all right, the CRM use cases around sales. All right how does marketing play into that? If marketing was never brought into the conversation, marketing is now playing catch up for the next years, trying to get what they need to bed, to align with what sales is doing.

That makes the problem worse. Actually, I would argue that it’s one way to tell a good consultant from a bad one. If you are bringing in a third party, are they trying to understand your business goals and aligning these projects to your outcomes? If the answer is yes. And in a way that you can understand, you probably have a good one. If the answer is no, and they’re just saying, Hey, we want to do X, Y, Z. And that’s what you get. They just do a list of tasks I would run. Because a bad implementation has years of impact, years. I wish I could state that more powerfully, but it is such a hindrance to companies who pump six figures into a project. For it to go wrong is very bad now but to the sales and marketing alignment. Yes. If you are implementing a new system or a process, Hey, we have this process designed. We need to now activate it. Essentially. Absolutely. It can be a huge magnifier of something good that is happening, but it’s the process is the alignment to the KPIs the same. If marketing is being held to lead KPIs and sales are being held to revenue KPIs, you already have a misalignment. And so I don’t think the implementation is going to work. Unless you have, there can be some handoffs to, okay, the lead to cash. How is that really working together? The CRM can help with that. But again, it goes back to, it depends, right? Because of this, every situation is a little bit unique. And that is what I think makes it so challenging because we can’t just say blanket statements. It really does depend on marketing relationships with other departments, whether it’s sales, whether it’s support or even finance or IT.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I want, look I’m not gonna directly disagree, I don’t think with anything that you just said. I think I just, where I’m what I’m wondering about is, look, the last thing you want to tell somebody is that you need to fix all problems inside of your organization before you decide to adopt a CRM. Because the CRM adoption is never going to happen then. So if I was. In listening to you just now, Caleb if I’m a particularly cautious person, which I’m not, but if I were that could inspire a bit of paralysis, you might say, okay I think it was you actually in our prep call for this conversation. You mentioned the notion of IT being a firewall against bad decisions. Sometimes that becomes, no decision ends up becoming the rule of the day. So I guess how do you think about balancing this concern or demand for, some decisions to be made some organizational fixes to be done prior to a CRM being implemented, how do you balance that with the fact look, CRM is probably better than no CRM, and we may need to change the wheels on the bus as it’s rolling down the road here, so let’s not try to solve everything at once it’s a bit of the Frosted Mini Wheat, I gave you the two sides of it. And I’m curious how you balance that. 

Caleb Rule: Love me some Frosted Mini Wheats. Always happy about that. I think you bring up a great point, which is if you have a problem doing nothing does not solve the problem. And to your point, Carman. We know we have these underlying problems that have led to this problem, and without speaking in concepts, let’s say, okay, we have, we’ve been relying on our ERP for far too long. We have, we’ve tried the CRM module that was slapped onto the ERP. It’s not working sales and marketing are crying, uncle. Please and support probably is too to be candid. Let’s not forget them finance even in some cases, because there’s a lot of add-ons that just maybe don’t flow properly to automated invoicing and may sometimes it’s manual, et cetera. So you might have different departments all saying, hi, can we stop this? Please, can we please fix this? I do think there are some scenarios where internally it’s going to be easier to get the project moving and then you’re going to have to just pivot as you get to the problem, it all depends on what’s the internal culture and what’s the alignment, right? So I’m going to harp on that again, which is the alignment to the core KPIs. If you are saying this project is going to solve this problem and it aligns with our overarching KPI of maybe we’re trying to save 10 percent SG&A. For the air, right? We need to do more with fewer budgets being slashed. Okay. How do we get what we need, but, and, but in there, right? Maybe the CRM helps us with that. The implementation will then make sales more efficient by this marketing, more efficient by this finance will get a, maybe a billing add-on implemented or something to that effect. Again, I’m speaking in very large hypotheticals. And then, oh, as we run into roadblocks, oh, sales and marketing aren’t talking about why.

Okay, now we need to fix that. It can be done. I would say I’ve seen this firsthand where it often doesn’t. It can, and sometimes does. But if you have a, if how you operate is, for instance, marketing is measured on leads. Getting a great system in there might allow marketing to start guiding the conversation, right? Hey sales, can we start hopping on some customer calls and just listening in? Can we maybe join your pipeline calls so we can, Oh, this customer’s stuck. Maybe we can whip up something in marketing to help with that. Or maybe we need to blanket them a little bit more in some of our value props, right? There’s some more down-funnel alignment. Sometimes you’re shut out entirely. And technology, I’m going to go back to what I said earlier, which is technology magnifies either existing gaps or existing harmonies. But to your point, Carman, that also can lead to business evolution. All right, now we’re here.

Now we’ve identified this gap and now it really hurts. Now we really have pain because this technology is helping us feel that pain more than we previously should have. Now it’s time to fix it. And sometimes you’re just brought before, your back’s literally against the wall and you have to fix it. But it is how the business evolves for the better. So I’m not going to fully disagree with you because I do think, these changes can be hugely beneficial. Absolutely. And I’m a big progress-over-perfection guy. I have two young children. That’s literally what I’m having to deal with every single day, whether I like it or not please brush your teeth. All right. You’re brushing your teeth. You. Didn’t brush half of them, but we have progress. It’s not gonna be perfect for another three years, probably, but it’s progress. You’re actually holding the toothbrush, right? Um, and sometimes you do have to just take what you can get. Sometimes that’s even marketing’s reality, or sometimes it’s just the business reality. You take what you can get and then you live to fight another day. 

Jeff White: Man, I miss when the toothbrush conversation was one of the harder ones. My kids are between 17 and 21. It’s a bit different now.

Carman Pirie: Conversations get more challenging as time goes on it seems. And I just listened to them third-hand. So you can imagine.

Jeff White: there’s gotta be some metaphor we can make. Parenting about CRM implementation. I don’t know. 

Carman Pirie: Trouble is we’re going to come up with it after this show ends, but it is coming to a close I guess, Caleb this has been a fascinating conversation. I’ve enjoyed this kind of peek into the dynamics of CRM implementation, and how to think about it. And really how to focus on value extraction from that initiative. This has been a really helpful exploration. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and expertise with us today.

Caleb Rule: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. And if marketers, if you take one thing, it is know, the internal dynamics around your CRM, if you have one, and then know who to ally with and how to align to their core KPIs and align your KPIs to theirs, because if you do, you’re gonna be much more effective. And that is the key takeaway, whether finance owns it, whether IT owns it, whether sales owns it, that’s a, or rev ops, even there’s a whole discussion around that. I know we don’t have time for it today, but, that drives how you prosper over the next 12 to 24 months. So thanks so much for having me on and letting me geek out a little bit on the CRM.

Jeff White: And that’s good advice too. Thanks so much, Caleb. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Kula Ring with Carman Perry and Jeff White. Don’t miss a single manufacturing marketing insight. Subscribe now at Kulapartners.com/thekularing. That’s K U L A partners dot com slash the Kula Ring.