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Measurement is the fifth of the six capabilities in the Customer Relationship Maturity Model (CRMM), developed by Kate Barrett of eFocus Marketing, and the first of two in the Evolve stage. It measures whether an organisation can tell whether its CRM activity is succeeding, against customer and commercial outcomes rather than campaign metrics, and whether its reporting explains why something worked, not only that it did.
Almost every CRM team reports. Far fewer measure, and the difference is whether the report changes a decision or documents a week.
When it comes to email and CRM, so many organisations focus most of their analysis effort on the open rate, and after Apple Mail Privacy Protection and now AI-mediated inboxes that number tells you less than it ever did (a machine opened it on the customer’s behalf; the customer may never have seen it). The CRMM scores what you can prove about outcomes, which is a different and harder question.
How do you know whether CRM is working? Which commercial outcome would move if you stopped sending for a month? Can you say which piece of activity a repeat purchase came from with any confidence? And who, outside your team, reads your report and changes something because of it?
Those four questions separate the levels more reliably than the sophistication of the dashboard, because I have seen a Level 2 measurement capability running on an enterprise BI tool and a Level 3 one running on a spreadsheet with a “so what” column.
The capability has two halves: the outcome half (are you measuring customer and commercial results rather than opens and clicks?) and the explanation half (does your reporting say why, so that the next decision is better than the last one?). A team can be strong on the first and weak on the second, which is the profile of an organisation that knows revenue is up and cannot say what to do more of.
The CRM Priority Check asks one question about this capability, with five statements describing how organisations actually find out whether CRM is working. The levels below describe the evidence at each point.
Measurement does not go beyond basic campaign metrics such as opens and clicks, so there is no clear view of whether CRM activity improves customer or commercial outcomes at all.
Standard KPIs and reporting exist, but they describe what happened rather than why, and they are not consistently tied to outcomes the rest of the business would recognise as its own.
Performance is measured against customer and commercial outcomes rather than campaign activity, and the reporting explains what is working and why. The insight exists and it is in a form a decision-maker can use.
Measurement is granular and near real-time, letting the organisation attribute outcomes to specific CRM activity with confidence, without needing a formal experiment to get there.
Measuring whether something is working is continuous and embedded in every decision, rather than a periodic report the organisation waits for.
At Level 1, do not try to build a full measurement framework; you do not yet have the reporting maturity to sustain it. Pick one commercial outcome that actually matters (repeat purchase rate or retention are the usual candidates) and connect one piece of CRM activity to it. Proving that single link is what earns the case for measuring properly everywhere else.
At Level 2, take the report you already produce and add one line to every metric: “so what”. Force a sentence on what the number means for a decision. If the sentence will not come, the metric is being reported out of habit rather than because it changes anything, and it is a candidate to drop.
At Level 3, check who is reading the “why” rather than who is receiving your report. If your report and the decision-maker are not in the same meeting regularly, the insight is real but it is not landing.
At Level 4, remember that confidence without a formal test is still an inference. Pick the highest-stakes attribution claim, the one a budget decision rests on, and validate it properly at least once, so the shortcut you rely on elsewhere has been checked where it matters most.
At Level 5, keep continuous measurement visible externally, to the board and to budget holders, in a form they can follow. The capability that is hardest to defend at renewal time is often the one that has become so normal nobody explains it any more.
Measurement is capability five of six in the Customer Relationship Maturity Model and the first of two in the Evolve stage. It measures progress against the lifecycle set out in Customer Progression Design, the objectives in the CRM Strategy, and the reliability of Execution Excellence, using data that Technology and Enablement makes available.
Its partner capability is Optimisation: measurement tells you what happened, optimisation proves what caused it.
When this scores lowest in a CRM Priority Check it is flagged as the capability to fix first. Measurement design sits inside every Customer Momentum Review.
Cadence does not set the level; content does. Weekly opens, clicks and revenue-per-send with no link to retention or repeat purchase is Level 2, however regular. Weekly reporting that shows which activity moved a customer outcome and why is Level 3.
Anything the finance director would recognise without a glossary: second-purchase rate, retention at 90 days, active customer count, revenue per customer over time. Opens, clicks and even conversion-per-send describe the campaign; the outcomes describe the customer.
As a diagnostic for deliverability and subject line testing within a controlled comparison, yes. As a measure of whether CRM is working, no, and every time I have looked at it since Apple MPP it has drifted further from anything a customer actually did. Report it in the engine room; keep it off the board slide.
It requires data at the granularity and speed that lets you attribute outcomes to activity with confidence, which some teams get from a platform and some from a well-built warehouse and one analyst. The tool is a Technology and Enablement question; the capability is whether the attribution is trusted enough to spend money on.
Measurement tells you what happened and, at Level 3 and above, why you think it happened. Optimisation is the discipline of proving it, by isolating cause from correlation through a genuine test. Strong measurement with no testing gives you confident stories; the CRMM scores them separately so the gap is visible.
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