From the Inside Flap
Marketing professionals already acknowledge the value and necessity of a customer-centric approach to ensure sustainable growth and to achieve long-term organizational success. The challenge, now that there’s universal buy-in on the customer-centric philosophy, is how to achieve that goal within each organization’s unique structure. How do you successfully implement a comprehensive, data-driven, customer-centric business strategy? The answer is called Connected CRM???, and it is the focus of this book.
In Connected CRM: Implementing a Data-Driven, Customer-Centric Business Strategy, David Williams, CEO of Merkle, explains why customer-centric marketing is much more than a tactical implementation plan. Executed correctly, it is a fundamental shift in your organization’s framework, affecting every department, and putting marketing at the heart of the business and leadership strategy. Customer centricity can become a new source of visibility and accountability for the CMO and a new basis of competitive differentiation for your company. Within Williams’s Connected CRM model, CMOs and marketing professionals of the future will play a much larger role in all aspects of marketing, sales, service, and technology.
Through years of work in data-driven customer relationship marketing and observations of successful (and unsuccessful) implementation efforts, Williams has developed a Connected CRM blueprint for organizations, regardless of industry or business model. This book explains in practical detail exactly how to make customer centricity a reality for your business by achieving organization-wide commitment from every department, resulting in a sustained competitive advantage.
Today, there are generations of consumers who have grown up in the digital age, never having known a life without the free flow of information and consumer data. Companies that utilize this data and master CRM as an organizational competency will thrive. To do this, brands must put the customer at the center of their business strategy. What marketers have been talking about in theory for more than a decade is now a reality. You now have the power to communicate, with individual precision, to the right person with the right message at the right time through the right touchpoint.
Connected CRM: Implementing a Data-Driven, Customer-Centric Business Strategy goes beyond the what and why, with the intention of helping businesses delve into the how. How to gain vital executive sponsorship; develop overarching customer strategies; define measurement platforms; execute campaigns; and make the necessary operational preparations that will bring a customer-centric business strategy to life. In other words: How to monetize your customer strategy.
About the Author
DAVID WILLIAMS is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Merkle, the largest and fastest growing privately held customer relationship marketing agency in the United States. He acquired Merkle in 1988 and became its twenty-fourth employee. Today, Merkle has more than 2,000 employees in locations in the United States, China, and United Kingdom.
Under David’s leadership, Merkle has sustained greater than 20 percent annual growth over the past 25 years and was recognized as a market leader by Forrester Research. In 2013, Advertising Age ranked Merkle as the twenty-second largest agency of any discipline worldwide and the seventh largest CRM/Direct agency in the United States. In 2012, Merkle was named to the “Ten Agencies to Watch” list in Advertising Age’s A-List Issue. David was recognized by Winning Workplaces and Fortune magazine as one of America’s Best Bosses of 2006, and was the 2007 Maryland Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
David is a frequent speaker at industry events and has written numerous articles and white papers about topics such as Customer Relationship Marketing, Database Marketing and Analytics, Digital Media, and Marketing Technology.
David can be reached at davidwilliams@connectedcrm.com.