Before You Rebuild Your CRM, Start With the Questions You Need It to Answer

I’ve been spending more time on database architecture lately, and one thing has become increasingly clear:

The best place to start a CRM project is with the questions your business needs the CRM to answer.

It sounds simple, but think about how often marketing teams want to know:

• Who bought Product A but hasn’t purchased Product B?

• Who participated last year but hasn’t returned this year?

• Who is engaging with us but has never converted?

• What topics or offerings has someone shown interest in?

• Who are our most valuable or engaged audiences?

• Who should receive this campaign—and who shouldn’t?

If those questions are difficult to answer, you don’t just have segmentation problem. You may also have a database architecture problem.

Start with “Things We Want to Know”

I’ve been using a simple exercise before getting anywhere near properties, fields, workflows, lists or automations.

I first sit down with marketing, sales, product and other key stakeholders to make a list of the questions the business wants confidently “ask” the database.

From there, I work backward.

What do we want to know?

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What data do we need to know it?

↓

Where should that data live?

↓

How will we collect and maintain it?

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How will we use it?

Only then should you start designing the architecture.

Otherwise, it’s very easy to create a beautifully organized CRM that still can’t answer the questions your business wants to know.

Simply put: Your database needs to make it easy to understand more than just who someone is.

You also need to understand the relationship someone has with your business.

For example, a person might be a customer today and a former customer next year. Someone might attend an event one year, speak at it the next and sponsor it the year after that. Or a seemingly unqualified lead may begin to download several assets and visit your pricing page, then reach out for a qualified sales call.

The contact’s interests and engagement changes as does their relationship with your organization.

That’s the kind of information that ultimately fuels better segmentation, personalization, lifecycle marketing, sales outreach, reporting and customer experiences.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about those things from the campaign side, but that only works when the upstream data is collecting the right information and structuring it properly.

There’s a point where your marketing strategy becomes more sophisticated than the infrastructure supporting it.

You can’t build sophisticated lifecycle marketing on top of data that can’t tell you where someone is in the lifecycle.

Just like you can’t personalize around interests you aren’t capturing. You also can’t confidently segment audiences around relationships your CRM doesn’t understand.

So, if you’re considering a CRM cleanup, migration or rebuild, please (please, please) resist the urge to start with:

“What fields should we create?”

Ask a more important question first:

“What do we need to know?”

The architecture should follow from there.