Is your marketing plan still built for a world that moved on?

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Monday - and that means it’s time for your CRM Dispatch - an issue where we dig into ways your CRM is failing you, and then figure out how we can make it shine. ✨

This week, the results of a report stood out like a sore thumb, mostly because I’ve been having these conversations with multiple clients.

Grab your coffee, this one is a gut check - and if you are spending a ton on net-new marketing and not seeing the client acquisition, this one may be an eye-opener.

Let’s dive in.

It’s no secret that AI has changed things. We hear it daily. Jobs are cut, expectations are changing for employees, and it’s becoming a way to streamline operations.

But AI is also severely affecting marketing, good and bad.

Close to 60% of growth budgets this year are going toward customers companies already have, and marketers rate retention work higher than acquisition, according to the latest CMO Survey by Duke and Deloitte.

Yet most CRM dashboards still cannot answer which accounts are expanding, which are flat, and which are quietly drifting toward churn.

Most CRMs are set up to capture a net-new pipeline. “I want to track what is moving and shaking that’s driving growth.” And for many companies, that’s net-new.

What’s coming inbound that we can convert? Is the inbound pipeline healthy? It’s always been the same strategy, and when the cost-per-acquisition went up, the only things that changed were a dry pipeline and a slowdown in leads.

But that is changing now.

Budgets are now shifting toward existing customers. But the scorecards and goals most teams report on monthly are still built for a world where growth meant new logos, so leadership funds retention and expansion work while still measuring the team against acquisition metrics, then wonders why the wins never quite match the strategy.

I do think this goes deeper than a budget reallocation, because growth itself is being redefined, moving from a new customer count toward expansion revenue, and the survey shows marketers already trust their retention work more than their acquisition work, which tells me the confidence arrived before the incentives did.

While acquisition should continue to fill the bucket, the wins lie in strengthening the retention component and building post-acquisition funnels for upsell, cross-sells and retention.

Anything to avoid churn. The deeper the investment, the harder it is to move.

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Pull your sales team's actual time and budget split between acquisition and retention or expansion work, then compare it honestly against the roughly 60/40 split this survey just reported. If it does not match, that gap is worth raising before someone else raises it for you.

Q2 is wrapping up, which means we are finalizing all of our findings across the CRM universe and consolidating them into our SIGNALS report. It will be released in July!

TL;DR

The reality is that the budget has already moved for quite a few companies - and we’re not talking change here. The only real question left is whether your strategy moved with it, or whether you end up explaining the gap two quarters from now, when it is far more expensive to fix.