What you need to know

• CRM still failing 70% of the time – not because of bad tech, but because businesses treat it as a platform, not a strategy, says CRM strategist, Kristen Makin.
• A new book and community has launched to fix that: Move Your Customer lands May 1, while the Move community launches May 30 to equip “accidental admins” and business leaders with the tools and shared language to drive CRM success.
• The ambition is ownership and fluency: Most CRM projects lack strategic ownership, leaving one or two isolated business-side users to make it work. The Move framework helps them translate business needs into tech outcomes.
• Paid peer-led community ($700/year) aims to cut through vendor noise with monthly themes, expert speakers, and open Q&A sessions. No consultants selling wares, and offenders get kicked out.
• The goal is to halve the CRM failure rate by building strategic muscle, shared understanding, and a safe space to tackle real-world CRM challenges collaboratively.

CRM isn’t broken. But the way business thinks about it is, says Kristen Makin, co-author of The Move Methodology, along with Ian Sampson and Fiona Nilsson.

Despite billions in spend and two decades of vendor promises, CRM failure rates still hover at between 50 and 70 per cent according to Makin, whose CRM provenance goes back over 16 years and includes bet-the-business transformations at William Hill, Metcash. Most recently, she was at Kayo as director of Customer Engagement.

The culprit is not typically bad software, but rather bad strategy. According to Makin, most organisations treat CRM like a platform install, not a business discipline. There's no ownership, no alignment and therefore no chance of succeeding. That’s not a tech problem, it’s a thinking problem, Makin argues.

Now, a new book and peer-led community aim to flip that script, arming the “accidental admins” and under-resourced operators with the frameworks, language and support to finally make CRM stick.

Along with her two co-authors, Makin has launched a new book, and shortly, perhaps more importantly, a community, designed to arm business leaders with the strategic muscle memory required to make CRM work. The book lands on May 1, while the community goes live May 30.

“CRM is a strategy. It’s not a platform,” she stresses. “That’s, I think, the number one reason [it fails].”  

The Move methodology, outlined in the book, seeks to provide a practical scaffold for business leaders to operationalise their customer strategy in a language developers can execute on.

Rescue missions, not greenfields

The book, Makin explains, was born over a few wines with fellow consultants, each fresh off another CRM rescue mission. “We were coming in and doing a lot of rescue missions for people that weren’t getting what they expected out of CRM… the tech is not the problem. The tech can do whatever you want. It’s about ownership.”

It’s a familiar story to Mi3 readers: A CRM is selected, often led by IT or pushed by a vendor, built out without cross-functional alignment, then tossed over the fence to marketing or ops to make it work.

“What we found through our consultants and our agency services,” Makin says, “is that usually there is maximum one or two people in a small to medium business that are actually from a business perspective, responsible… and so we found a lot of people felt quite isolated.”

This isolation isn’t just operational, but strategic. CRM spans data, process, marketing, customer support, product and beyond. “CRM hits everyone from the beginning of the funnel right through to support to the end product development.”

Think better, together

The book, available on Amazon and via the Move Your Customer website, is just the start. “The book lays a foundation… but we realised pretty quickly a book wasn’t enough," says Makin.

Enter the Move community, built to provide that connective tissue between CRM strategy and execution.

A free tier includes templates and a video walkthrough of the book. But the real action happens in the paid community. For $700 per year which is a price pitched deliberately below the cost of a one-day according to Makin, members get access to monthly themes, challenges, guest speakers and “Ask Anything Wednesdays”.

More importantly, it’s a peer-driven environment. “We don’t like to say advice… we’re hosting a community where you can talk to other people who are like you.” No pitch-slapping from consultants. “If we find anyone trying to sell their wares, we will be asking the community to notify us and they will be removed immediately.”

For Makin, CRM is not just a nice-to-have, it’s essential infrastructure for change. “CRM from a marketing discipline is kind of unusual… it is a lot of data, it is a process, it is marketing ops," she comments.

The CRM community Makin and her partners want to create is designed to provide a safe, peer-driven space to recalibrate the conversation, and where members throw their real-world issues into the ring. “If you've got a challenge… you can throw it out to the community, and they can share stories of how maybe they've solved something similar.”

There’s also a member directory designed to help users find peers in similar roles or industries, and start real conversations. “That’s nothing to do with us,” Makin stresses. “We want to build this community of people, of like-minded individuals.”

And while the initiative is clearly aimed at business users, Makin isn’t shutting the door on developers entirely. “Some of the technical implementation partners may get a lot of value out of this… we sort of position ourselves in between that business and tech.”

Building strategic fluency

The most potent part of Makin’s pitch isn’t technical, it’s cultural. “For years, there’s been no real way to collect requirements in the right way… to articulate, as a business person, your requirements in a way that actually a technical person or a developer can implement against.”

The Move framework is designed to do just that. It teaches strategic fluency, such as how to translate customer intent into system requirements, and system functionality into meaningful outcomes.

Per Makin: "There’s a lot of accidental admins out there. This shouldn't be just one person sitting in the corner trying to figure this out. This should be business-wide thinking. CRM hits everyone from the beginning of the funnel right through to support to the end product development.

"Fifty to 70 per cent of CRM implementations fail. Our big, lofty mission is to get that down to… 30. By everyone speaking the same language and being able to clearly articulate what they want.”