A Connected CRM At The Heart Of Your Growth

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Times have been testing for companies in almost every industry in recent years. After nearly 24 months where so much has changed in Media and Entertainment, from how we work, to how we consume content, to how we engage with audiences, it has certainly meant that many organisations have been forced to rapidly adapt to the change that has been thrust upon them. While many media brands have registered significant growth as a result of spikes in content consumption, it also important to recognise that different sub-industries have had to react very differently to the challenges posed. The legacy, fundamental challenges that the media & entertainment industries are facing have only been growing stronger: siloes across data and different brands/ business units; stagnation in growth due to manual, outdated processes, operating and monetisation models; old systems and new platforms that don’t play nicely together; a lack of a single customer view. Times like these make it clear that the old ways don’t work in the new world, so the question is: what does a future strategy look like? And what would be the key ingredients to driving growth?

The difference between struggling or thriving is often the ease with which businesses can change course and adapt their offerings. In fact, more than half (57%) of companies say that their Salesforce investment made it easier to pivot during the Covid-19 crisis (IBM’s State of Salesforce 2020– 2021). These businesses could more easily create intelligent workflows to serve customers in real-time, making them more agile and better able to weather the storm. Those without such capabilities and abilities to adapt and automate will be left behind. Consolidating your CRM not only enables a consistent experience across the customer lifecycle, but builds the foundation of a resilient business for decades to come. You may think that this all sounds great, but you still can hear the voice of your CFO loud and clear asking if there is a quick ROI, and what exactly will the cost for a rationalised and connected CRM be? We encourage you to not let your CFO become an outsider to this conversation.

We get it – sometimes it can be challenging to bring people together, while putting forward a successful business case for change that makes financial sense. For this reason, we’ve decided to consolidate this debate into a playbook, where we tell you step by step about the importance of connecting your CRM and all your siloed applications, teams, and data to a central system of reference. Throughout this guide, we’ll encourage you to see your CRM in the context of your organisation-wide tech ecosystem, because ultimately, it’s a core, foundational piece of the puzzle that you’re building. We also provided some tested practices to help you build your business case (see Part 2 in the playbook). We see it with many media clients, as budgets become more constricted, the focus shifts from optimisation and innovation to cost cutting. Because we get the budget limitations, we challenge you to ask yourself how this can be done differently, and what are the different ways to realising business value quickly (see Part 3 in the playbook). Could you deliver quality programs at enterprise scale and start-up speed? If not, then what’s the real cost for your organisation to delivering a program in 24 months instead of 6 months? How many years will this set you back in terms of growth and speed to market?

By connecting the dots, integrating, and consolidating the tech stack, and bringing together teams, you will better understand your audience and serve them in a more complete way. More specifically, by redesigning processes, strategically leveraging your capabilities along with your existing and emerging tech, you’ll open new opportunities to differentiate, innovate and become a more personal brand. As we noted before, the time to start is now: consumers have never demanded more from the brands they do business with. It’s every company’s job to be consistent, personal, relevant and to the point. Your rewards will be greater agility, resilience, and customer loyalty, which all contribute to the bottom line.

We hope that you will find this playbook helpful, educational, and easy to digest. If there is one piece of advice that we’d like you to take away from our guidance, it’s this: it can be done. We know it, because we have done it ourselves (see Part 4 in the playbook). We’ve got the scars, the learnings, and the benefits, so we tell you from experience that there is no better time to take your business to the next level.