Mark Lollback’s big regret as McDonald’s CMO: Flushing ‘$3m down the toilet’ on Salesforce
In his four years as chief marketing officer at McDonald’s, Mark Lollback regrets spending too little time on media – “probably less than 5% of my time” – and too much money – $3m – on CRM service Salesforce.
“I think we’re all guilty, and I say this as a marketing guy, I think we’re all guilty [of] chasing down the next Holy Grail that’s going to solve our business problems,” said the former CMO and current chief executive of WPP’s media investment arm, Group M. “Whether that’s buying a Salesforce CRM system or whether it’s doing whatever, and I personally blew $3m on Salesforce at McDonald’s. I thought it was gonna be the Holy Grail.
“I got the sales pitch, I bought it, we execute it, total waste of time. We wound it back, and said ‘That was a waste of $3m’. I never said that to the board, it was a great investment [according to what I told them]. But, in reality, we blew $3m down the toilet.”
Think that’s supposed to be “malus”, not “malice”?
Hi Alex,
Indeed. What an unfortunate, if not amusing, typo.
Thank you for flagging. It has been amended (but I think I preferred it before!)
Vivienne – Mumbrella
I was today years old when I found out it wasn’t actually called a Malice Clause
Good to hear a senior executive talk about their transformation disasters, particularly outing a vendor like Salesforce too.
Does anyone remember which listed realestate group dumped SF after a botched transformation, and booked a significant write down as a result.
Always refreshing to hear some honesty about past mistakes – and how they influence future learnings. There was a lot of integrity on the stage for this panel.
It’s pretty clear that the issue with maccas move to use Salesforce and CRM was misguided because there wasn’t a clear strategy or the right objective. It doesn’t mean Salesforce is a shit product suite – quite the opposite. Clients just need to know what they need it for, and how to implement it properly to achieve that – and have an agency partner that is clued up to help them navigate it.
“Understanding the business, understanding the consumer” – put that first, and only then the systems and the platforms. It’s all about the order of operations.
Makes a lot of sense for platforms and agencies to be helping answer those fundamental questions first, so they don’t end up being the (sometimes inadvertent) cause of the next marketing dumpster fire.
Interestingly while Salesforce obviously didn’t work for them (in Oz, or globally I wonder?) McDonald’s bought a company called Dynamic Yield last year – which is entirely around 1:1 personalisation. It’s behind things such as the in-store electronic screen ordering, and things like car licence plate recognition in drive-through in the States. Broad sweeping statement like “I’m not going to all of my customers one-to-one” simply aren’t true…..because they are. It’s just not powered by Salesforce anymore.
Perhaps that’s because Mark Lollback left McDonalds 4 years ago so can only talk to his experience before leaving?
If you did the ROI projections, then you would have found the answer prior to implementing a Salesforce CRM solution. Payback potentially could have taken up to 34 years.
The power of Salesforce seems to lie more when you have a customer base who purchase and engage online – I struggle to see its use it as a tool for a vague attribution model tracking online to in-store behaviour.