Stop flushing money down the toilet with your marketing technology investment
TrinityP3’s Anton Buchner loves customer relationship management (CRM), but only when it’s done well. Here, he does some calculations to help marketers stop ‘flushing money down the toilet’.
Clicking into Mumbrella, I read the headline: ‘Mark Lollback’s big regret as McDonald’s CMO: Flushing ‘$3m down the toilet’ on Salesforce‘. He was speaking as part of a session moderated by Mi3’s Paul McIntyre, at The Future of TV Advertising conference held recently in Sydney.
Now I’m not one to rip into customer relationship management (CRM) technology for the sake of bashing it.
I love direct-to-consumer marketing, or CRM, when it’s done well.
And by well, I mean when it has been strategically identified as to its role in helping a client improve its marketing.
Sometimes companies spend money on things that dont have a proper return on investment.
Wow.
Are you saying that the average person who owns or runs a business doesn’t understand this basic? In short:
How much do I need to sell to make a profit?
If this is true, no wonder so many go to the wall.
Hi David,
Thanks for your comment.
They may have understood it, yet may have made the decision on other factors such as ‘everybody else is talking CRM/targeting/1:1/personalisation so we’d better jump on board’. Or it may have been in the global business case to ‘get to know consumers better’ and AUSTRALIA may have been a test bed. Who knows. But I’ve assessed many such programs, data-driven activity, and MarTech installations post implementation. And invariably it’s the same answer. A simple ROI was never projected nor used throughout decision making. That seems to have been echoed by the ex-CMO