Finance Is Ready to Invest in CRM. Here’s What It Wants to See Improve First

CRM’s standing with Finance is high. Most Finance leaders see it as a strategic growth partner, and almost all expect CRM investment to increase. They’re also clear about where they’d like to see CRM improve: making customer data easier to access, proving which campaigns drive return, and getting more from the platforms the business already pays for. For CRM leaders, that list is more useful than any compliment. It shows where to focus before the next budget conversation.

That was the backdrop to The CRM Reality Check, a webinar hosted by Plinc on 4 November. Stuart Russell, Plinc’s Chief Strategy Officer, presented the UK findings from new Plinc research.

The research, commissioned through Savanta, surveyed two groups of senior leaders. The first was CRM and customer marketing leaders. The second was Finance leaders involved in setting or influencing marketing budgets. Respondents ranged from heads of department to the C-suite, at companies with a turnover of £50 million or more. They worked across sectors including retail, travel, transport, automotive and technology. Where possible, both groups answered the same questions, so their views could be compared directly. The study also ran in North America, but the webinar focused on the UK results. The full findings are published in the CRM Reality Check report.

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This summary draws out where Finance sees room for improvement, and what CRM teams can do about it.

1. Finance rates CRM highly, and expects to invest more

The starting point is encouraging. Both groups were asked to rank marketing disciplines by importance, and both put CRM, customer marketing and retention first. 60% of CRM leaders and 57% of Finance leaders placed it top, ahead of performance marketing and brand. 81% of Finance leaders described CRM as a strategic growth partner, or leaning towards one.

Finance also broadly agrees on what CRM should be accountable for. Retention and churn came out on top, followed by lifetime value, revenue, loyalty and margin. Those are long-term business measures rather than campaign metrics. Stuart suggested the same questions asked a few years ago might not have drawn such a strong response. In his view, the work CRM teams have put into explaining their contribution is starting to show.

Investment intentions point the same way. Most Finance leaders think current CRM funding is about right, yet 91% believe it should increase.

The harder question is how CRM gets there. On the CRM side, 67% of leaders said pressure on them has grown over the past two years. 95% were confident their teams are already close to their current potential. Doing more of the same won’t create the headroom, which makes Finance’s view of where CRM could improve a practical place to start.

2. Customer data spread across systems: Finance’s top improvement area

Finance leaders were asked where they see the most room for CRM to improve. Customer data spread across systems came top. It’s also where the two groups’ views come closest. Better access to data was the leading shared need, cited by 81% of CRM leaders and 86% of Finance leaders as something that would help CRM deliver the outcomes behind further investment.

CRM leaders report real progress on foundations, with around half describing their data as mostly unified with some gaps. But unified data isn’t automatically available to the people who need it. Stuart described a chain where each link can break:

• connected data isn’t always accessible
• accessible data isn’t always usable
• usable data isn’t always activated

His argument was that fixing this doesn’t always need a long transformation programme. Building capability one use case at a time, and showing value at each step, can make a more persuasive case to Finance than a single big-bang project.

3. Proving CRM value: campaigns that can’t show a return

Second on Finance’s list was proving which campaigns drive return. It’s also where Finance is clearest about its conditions for investment. Asked what would raise their confidence, Finance leaders most often pointed to a clear ROI payback case, ideally proven through a small-scale pilot. Next came retention or lifetime value impact with a pound value attached. A commercial business case and incremental revenue attributable to a campaign followed.

Expectations differ here. Finance leaders were considerably more likely than CRM leaders to say the value of CRM is easy to measure. CRM teams are tracking the right things, but not consistently. A large minority aren’t yet measuring lifetime value, incremental revenue or repeat purchase. As Stuart noted, there’s an irony in that: CRM exists to understand and grow customer value, yet it doesn’t always express its own value in the same terms.

His answer was to treat measurement as a discipline in its own right, producing what he called investment-grade proof. Every significant campaign or programme should be able to show:

• what it changed, and why
• how much of that change was incremental
• what it was worth, in short-term revenue and longer-term customer behaviour
• how long the effect lasted
• what further investment would deliver on the back of it

He offered paid media as a comparison. It has made its value easy for the rest of the business to read, presenting performance as a simple relationship between spend and return. CRM has all the ingredients to do the same: customer-level data, controllable programmes and the ability to run proper tests. It just needs the measurement to be always on.

4. Martech utilisation and manual processes

Joint third were getting full value from the martech the business already pays for, and reducing manual processes that add cost or slow output. The two are closely linked.

CRM leaders’ own estimates suggest much of the technology available to them is underused. The largest group said they use somewhere between two-fifths and three-fifths of its capability. Stuart questioned whether investment in CRM infrastructure has moved faster than teams’ ability to turn it into working capability. For Finance, CRM spend is often closely associated with platform cost, so underuse is easy to see from their side of the table.

Manual work adds to the strain. Asked what holds them back, CRM leaders listed four things:

• lack of time
• legacy technology
• headcount
• too much business-as-usual activity to think strategically

Around half said they’d tried to optimise high-volume BAU communications over the past year, but with limited progress. Automated and triggered programmes are easier to improve because teams control them end to end. Trade-led BAU is harder to shift.outcomes of the work.

5. Spending on high-value customers and activating segmentation

Further down the list were three areas about where value is directed:

• weighting marketing spend towards the highest-value customers
• showing a clear cost or productivity payoff from AI pilots
• turning segmentation insight into revenue

Reducing margin lost to discounts and incentives ranked lower than Stuart had expected.

The segmentation point is a familiar frustration. Many businesses have invested in research-led attitudinal segmentations that help them understand what customers need. But CRM teams struggle to apply those segments to the customers they can actually contact, so the insight rarely reaches campaigns.

High-value spend raises a different question. Knowing who your most valuable customers are likely to be, and not just who they’ve been, makes it possible to test how much promotional pressure each group needs. In some tests run by Plinc’s clients, heavy promotional spend on high-value customers proved unnecessary, as those customers tended to purchase regardless. That budget could then be directed towards customers whose behaviour it can still influence.

6. Fund the proof: CRM pilots that build the investment case

Finance’s preferences point towards testing, and that matches what Stuart sees in Plinc’s client work. Brands increasingly want fixed-scope pilots, typically lasting one to three months. Results are measured at the end, followed by a clear decision to stop, continue or develop the work.

Done well, one pilot can address several of Finance’s improvement areas at once. Stuart described three that clients are discussing with Plinc.

The first is an incrementality pilot on a live campaign. A team chooses a key campaign, sets up target and control groups, and measures the uplift after launch. As well as proving return, this connects campaign history to customer behaviour. Many data foundations still lack that link, and it matters more as brands look to AI to support decisions. Measured at segment level, the results also show how high-value customers respond to particular offers.

The second is a lightweight future-value model. Rather than a full predictive build, it starts with the minimum viable transactional and behavioural data. From that, it estimates how likely each customer is to return and what they’re likely to spend. The result is a forward-looking loyalty measure. It shows whether programmes are moving customers up the value curve, and supports tests of where promotional spend makes a difference. If it works, it can be extended one use case at a time.

The third is segmentation activation. Research-based segment definitions are applied to identifiable customers by predicting how each person would have answered the original survey. Those predictions are then scaled across the base. Overlaying transactional value adds a further dimension.

Each pilot is small enough to fund and measurable by design. “We don’t necessarily want Finance to fund the whole hypothesis,” Stuart said. “We want them to fund the proof.”

Strategic takeaways

Finance already values CRM and is willing to invest further. What it wants is evidence that today’s spend is working as hard as it could, through accessible data, proven campaigns and well-used platforms. Its list of improvement areas works as a brief: tackle the most pressing one, prove the result, then scale what works.

• Ask your Finance team where it would most like to see CRM improve, and start there.
• Fix the data access issue that blocks your most valuable use case first.
• Measure incrementality, lifetime value and repeat purchase on every major programme.
• Propose a fixed-scope test with an agreed stop, continue or develop decision.

The full CRM Reality Check report is available now. It includes how CRM and Finance leaders compare on what holds CRM back and what it would take to increase investment. For the practitioner view, read the debriefs from London and Manchester.

For more perspectives on smarter CRM strategy, follow Plinc on LinkedIn.