This Is What a CRM Consultant Can Do

By Carsten Bjerregaard, CEO, Marketingcapacity.com

A CRM Consultant can help your company strengthen and leverage relationships with customers and other stakeholders. The CRM Consultant combines deep customer insight with expertise in CRM systems, particularly Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. The consultant can help establish processes that align sales and marketing around converting leads throughout the entire sales funnel, as well as work on customer satisfaction and activities that strengthen loyalty. Email can be your company’s most effective marketing channel when your CRM setup is properly managed.

What Is a CRM Consultant?

The role of a CRM Consultant is to optimize the use of Customer Relationship Management within a company. In other words, the consultant acts as a link with full responsibility for creating value from the company’s total investment in personal relationships with customers and other stakeholders.

What Does the Role of a CRM Consultant Entail?

Typical tasks handled by a CRM Consultant include:

• Preliminary analyses and requirement specifications related to system procurement, CRM software, or evaluation of SaaS solutions
• Assessment of current CRM systems and cost/benefit analyses related to potential replacement
• Establishment of Business Intelligence dashboards
• Implementation of systems for email marketing, e-business, calling teams, etc.
• Description, establishment, and optimization of CRM processes and the customer journey, from search engine optimization to loyalty programs
• Pipeline management and/or lead management
• Initiating and optimizing marketing automation flows
• Evaluating your performance in tools such as Google Analytics
• Reporting to management and functional leads

But above all, the role is about optimizing everyday processes and results by developing concepts such as newsletters and executing campaigns and other lead-generating activities.

What Else Can a CRM Consultant Be Called?

Some refer to them as CRM Specialists, Customer Relations Managers, or Customer Experience Managers.

How Does a CRM Consultant Create Value?

The consultant creates value by developing and commercially leveraging personal relationships with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. Simply by planning and establishing a customer journey that leads to more sales, bigger sales, and sales of more products.

Types of CRM Consultants

Like everyone else, CRM Consultants differ based on their interests and strengths. Some are more technically skilled, some have stronger business insight, others excel in collaboration and aligning the organization around shared goals. Some are specialists; others are generalists who rely on specialists for campaign execution or segmentation.

What Should a CRM Consultant Be Able to Do?

There are many areas a consultant must understand and manage:

• The company’s CRM maturity
• Its technological infrastructure
• The individual systems and how they are connected
• The company’s brand
• Its product portfolio
• The organization
• Budgets – both revenue and cost budgets
• The campaign cycle

Just to name a few. It requires strong overview, solid business understanding, deep customer insight, and drive. The CRM Consultant is responsible for the company’s most effective platform – email – and must maximize its potential.

A skilled CRM Consultant is often both data-driven and commercially driven. They know that data is the gold, and the business is the scoreboard. Data is the means; business results are the outcome.

Examples of Strong CRM Work

Sometimes we see large, integrated direct marketing campaigns – personalized, targeted, attractive, and effective. Campaigns that build real 1:1 relationships with customers and create value both for them and for the company.

Take major companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb or LinkedIn. Even though they are best known as platforms, their personal dialogue setups are exceptional. In fact, it is likely the CRM component that has driven much of their success. They simply maintained a better customer dialogue than the hundreds of competitors they faced. Amazon was not the only online store, and it even started as an online bookstore – but their mantra was to follow customer needs and nothing else.

Why Hire a Freelance CRM Consultant?

Someone needs to take responsibility for CRM in a company. How it is organized varies, but it is often beneficial to have someone with end-to-end responsibility.

Bringing in external expertise for shorter or longer periods can be a strong choice because:

• You introduce fresh ideas into the company
• External consultants are not tied to internal history or “the way we usually do things”
• The need for CRM consulting fluctuates – for example, large technology projects may run for 12–18 months but still not justify a permanent position

If you want this flexibility, you can choose between hiring an agency or finding a skilled freelancer. Here are some key differences:

• With a freelancer, you pay only for the competence – not for assistants, office staff, or overhead
• A freelancer can work onsite when needed. While most agency employees only visit occasionally, freelancers can embed more closely into workflows, which can be a significant advantage

How Do You Find a Strong Freelance CRM Consultant?

At Marketingcapacity.dk, we work daily to identify, evaluate, and recruit marketing competencies. If you choose to contact us, we will present you with three possible candidates that you may freely choose from if you wish. Reach out for an informal, no-obligation conversation.