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CRM Strategy is the second of the six capabilities in the Customer Relationship Maturity Model (CRMM), developed by Kate Barrett of eFocus Marketing, and the first of three in the Grow stage. It measures whether an organisation has a defined CRM strategy tied to customer progression and commercial goals, and whether that strategy is what actually decides what gets sent, to whom, and why.
Nearly every organisation says it has a CRM strategy. The test the CRMM applies is a harder one: could someone outside the team explain what it is for, and does it change a decision when the evidence changes?
In practice, the document most teams call a strategy is a content and campaign calendar with a budget attached, and the difference matters because a calendar tells you what is going out while a strategy tells you why, and only one of those can be wrong in a way you would notice.
Four questions. Who are your customers at each stage of the relationship? What do you want each of them to do next? What is stopping them? And which commercial objective does each piece of CRM activity serve?
If the plan you have cannot answer those in a sentence each, it is describing activity rather than driving it, however detailed the calendar behind it is.
The other half of this capability is backing. A strategy with clear objectives that senior stakeholders have never seen (or have seen and quietly ignore) tends to survive precisely one budget round, and the pattern I see most often in consulting is a good strategy sitting in a shared drive while the actual plan is decided in a weekly trading meeting by whoever shouts loudest about revenue.
The CRM Priority Check asks one question about this capability, with five statements describing how organisations actually define and execute strategy. The levels below describe the evidence at each point.
There is no defined CRM strategy. Activity is decided campaign by campaign as needs arise, with nothing connecting one decision to the next, and the plan for next month is whatever the business needs to sell next month.
A CRM plan exists, but it is mainly a content and campaign calendar. It tells you what is going out and when; it does not say how any of it connects to customer progression or to a commercial goal anyone outside the team would recognise.
The strategy is built around the customer lifecycle and progression, with clear commercial objectives and support from senior stakeholders. People outside the team could explain what it is for, and the calendar is derived from it rather than the other way round.
Strategy is continuously reprioritised using predictive insight and commercial signal rather than fixed to an annual planning cycle. The organisation responds to what is changing in the customer base instead of defending what was agreed months ago.
CRM strategy is treated as a living capability that evolves with customer, commercial and market change, and what it learns feeds back into how the wider business sets direction. It is a function rather than a document.
At Level 1, do not try to write a full strategy document; you will stall before you finish it. Get one page written this month that answers three questions (who are our customers at each stage, what do we want them to do next, what is stopping them), and let the campaign-by-campaign decisions start pointing at it.
At Level 2, take the calendar you already have and add one column: which commercial objective does this send serve? Anything you cannot answer for is either a candidate to cut or a candidate to define properly first. It is the cheapest way I know to turn a calendar into a strategy without starting from a blank page.
At Level 3, the risk is the review cycle rather than the strategy. Fix a quarterly point to check the strategy against what is actually happening in your customer base, not just whether the plan is being delivered on schedule, because a strategy that was right and is never rechecked slowly becomes wrong.
At Level 4, make reprioritisation visible. Keep a short running log of what changed, what signal triggered it and what you did differently, or continuous reprioritisation reads as inconsistency to everyone outside your team.
At Level 5, find the forum where business strategy gets set and get a standing slot for what CRM is seeing. If that insight is not reaching that table, the capability has plateaued at excellent but contained.
CRM Strategy is capability two of six in the Customer Relationship Maturity Model and the first of three in the Grow stage. It depends on Customer Progression Design, because a strategy needs a designed lifecycle to be a strategy for.
It is delivered through Execution Excellence and enabled (or constrained) by Technology and Enablement. Whether it is working is the job of Measurement and Optimisation.
When this scores lowest in a CRM Priority Check it is flagged as the capability to fix first. Strategic Advisory is the engagement that builds it.
It depends on what the deck does now. If your calendar is derived from it and someone checks the two against each other, Level 3. If the deck was approved and your calendar has since drifted back to trading priorities, Level 2: the document exists, the strategy does not.
Retention is one outcome a CRM strategy should produce. A strategy that only covers retention (win-back, lapsed, loyalty) has skipped the stages where relationships are formed and grown, which is usually where the retention problem started. The CRMM scores the whole progression, not the end of it.
Less than you think. Three questions answered in plain sentences, one row per lifecycle stage. Its job is to give every campaign decision something to point at; the detail comes once it has survived a quarter of being used.
Then start with the commercial objective column on your calendar rather than your strategy document, because a list of sends with no commercial purpose attached is a conversation a finance director will engage with. Backing tends to follow evidence rather than precede it.
Yes, and it is one of the most common profiles in the assessment: a Level 3 strategy delivered by Level 1 or 2 execution. That is why the CRMM reports six capabilities rather than one score: the fix in that profile is in delivery, and rewriting the strategy again would waste a quarter.
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