Why Your Business Needs a CRM Manager

Managing your customer relationships is critical to business growth. To build any business requires you to win keep and grow customers as efficiently as possible. To do that you have to understand your customers intimately and turn customer data into insights and communication strategies.

As businesses grow, managing these customer and prospect relationships becomes increasingly complex. It often requires technology in the form of a CRM system to manage the customer data and at a certain point you will likely need a CRM manager to extract the true value of the CRM system and the data inside it.

In this article we’ll explain what a CRM manager is, what value they add to a business, what they do, and what to look out for when hiring a CRM manager.

‍

What does a CRM Manager do ?

At a high level a CRM manager is there to enable customers and prospects to have a seamless and optimised experience as they move through the business. The CRM manager will use the tools, systems, processes at their disposal to make the customer lifetime journey a good one that provides value to both the customer and business.

‍

⚙️ Setting up the CRM system

A CRM Manager will set up the CRM system to capture and organise the customer data in a way that fits with your business. In the first instance this may require some customisation of the CRM to fit your operations. Determining what data needs to be captured, how it should be labelled stored and retrieved is an important part of the role. If you set off one degree in the wrong direction at this point it will be a real challenge further down the line unpicking all your customer data and re-assembling it into a new framework is hard, so getting the set up right is critical. As part of the set up the CRM Manager will also look at the integration with other systems to ensure seamless flow of customer data across the organisation.

‍

✋🏼 Data Governance

Once you’ve set up your CRM it’s critical that the right data is in the system. Some customer data collection may be automated e.g sign up forms that populate the CRM with individual and corporate info. But this is not where CRM’s usually fall down. Usually it is the lack of rigour in the necessary human data entry, that reduces the efficacy of your CRM. People not inputting the right data e.g meeting updates, notes, changes in customer details - if these are missing then the customer data is incomplete and the end result will ultimately be a poor customer experience. The CRM manager will set up the organisation with the right training and processes so that every individual knows when, why and how to input data into the CRM. And the CRM manager will ensure that happens and bridge any gaps as they emerge to ensure the data is up to date at all times.

‍

🔎 Reporting and Insights

A key part of the CRM manager role is to equip the business with useful data and insight into their customer relationships. For senior management this may just be high level business critical info. For sales and marketing it may be information about the quality of leads, channel preferences, buyer objections, new customer sales opportunities or existing customer expansion areas. For customer support and product teams it may be identifying common problems, questions, themes that need to be addressed through customer support or tech. The CRM Manager can add value across the entire organisation - equipping the teams with relevant insights (not just lumps of data) to help the business build better more fruitful customer relationships.

‍

↔ Communication Strategy and Implementation

A CRM manager will help develop the comms strategies that are triggered by the CRM across different platforms. They will design and execute communication based on the customer data signals accumulated by the CRM system. Those signals could generate an automated email to a prospect at a specific point in the customer journey or it could be the development of a call script for the sales team tailored towards another customer segment. Whether the communication is developed by the CRM manager or the system itself, the end goal is the same: a seamless experience between customer, sales, marketing, product and other stakeholders both internal and external.

‍

CRM expert Matthew Watson

“CRM is one of the most critical elements of the commercial infrastructure, yet for most businesses out there, CRM is still a bit of an unknown specialism. Without a CRM Manager, no-one is governing the flow of customer information in and out of the business. Yet with a CRM Manager at the helm, their skills and expertise will allow you to unlock a whole world of information and insights that will help nurture the relationship between your brand and the customer, ensuring you genuinely receive lifetime value and an eye-watering return on investment.

‍

‍

A day in the life of a CRM Manager

CRM Managers have a varied role - interfacing with customers, technology and teams on an ongoing basis. Some day to day tasks may include :

• Updating accounts and contact data in the CRM system
• Monitoring performance of existing customer communication programmes
• Developing new customer comms programmes
• Building and maintaining automation and system integration - fixing stuff when it breaks
• Generating reports and insights for key internal stakeholders
• Developing process documents, sales scripts and other content for use in CRM
• Telling people off when they don’t update the CRM

‍

How to spot a good CRM manager

Perhaps stating the obvious, but good CRM people must have a customer centric attitude. They need to have a deep understanding of customers and what drives them. Technically they should have an excellent grasp of the CRM systems; what systems are out there, pros and cons of each. They should know how to set up and integrate CRM systems with other aspects of the business. They will need to be organised and have appetite for governance in order to maintain the quality and integrity of the CRM system. Generally good CRM people are very good process people - they enjoy putting together and adhering to process. And finally good CRM people need to be good communicators; able to connect and communicate with internal stakeholders up, down and across the organisation.

‍

Hire a CRM Manager

If you'd like to hire a CRM manager you can submit a short brief here (takes just two minutes).

‍