Treat Your CRM Like a Product

Most football clubs treat CRM as software. Something you install, configure, and then mostly forget about. Yet, this mindset is precisely why many CRM systems underperform or become cluttered and inefficient over time. The secret to unlocking your CRM’s full potential? Start treating it like a product.

When managed as a product, your CRM transforms from a stagnant database into a strategic engine of fan engagement and commercial growth.

1. Why CRM Admins Should Think Like Product Managers

CRM administrators at mid-sized clubs often wear many hats. Without realizing it, you’re not just managing software, you’re effectively managing a product that impacts end-user experiences and drives business outcomes.

Just like any digital product, your CRM has users who interact with it daily, adoption metrics that reveal user engagement, feature requests that can significantly improve user satisfaction, bugs and maintenance tasks critical for smooth operations, and versions and updates essential for continued relevance.

Adopting a product manager mindset allows you to not only increase CRM adoption among staff but also to develop clearer improvement goals. It facilitates improved internal buy-in and collaboration by creating a shared understanding and purpose around the CRM system. Shifting to a product management approach turns your CRM from a passive tool into an active strategic asset.

2. Roadmaps Aren’t Just for Products: They’re Essential for CRM

A product roadmap is essential for any successful digital product and your CRM is no different. A structured CRM roadmap aligns your system improvements with club objectives, ensuring strategic alignment and measurable progress. Without a roadmap, CRM initiatives risk becoming disjointed and reactive rather than strategic and proactive.

Your CRM roadmap should include clearly scheduled releases, clear milestones for key integrations and new features, and a prioritization framework that ranks initiatives based on their business impact. By aligning CRM updates and enhancements with your club’s strategic goals—such as improved fan engagement or increased sponsorship revenue—you ensure each iteration delivers tangible value.

Practical Steps to Start Your CRM Roadmap:

• Clearly define your CRM’s vision and strategic objectives to ensure alignment across your club.
• Establish regular release cycles to build user expectations and consistency.
• Build and share a simple visual roadmap using accessible tools like Miro or Notion to maintain transparency and manage stakeholder expectations.

3. Ownership is Not Optional: Why Every CRM Needs a Product Owner

Without clear ownership, CRM systems quickly become cluttered, fragmented, and ineffective. Every successful product has a dedicated product owner, and your CRM should too. The CRM product owner serves as the primary advocate for user needs, ensures accountability, and continuously manages improvements.

Qualities of a Strong CRM Product Owner:

• Deep understanding of end-user workflows and the club’s strategic objectives
• Proactive project management and swift resolution of issues to maintain user trust
• Technical proficiency to effectively bridge end-users and developers/vendors, facilitating clearer communication and faster problem-solving

Common Pitfalls of No Ownership:

• Scattered accountability leads to confusion and inefficiency.
• Delayed fixes and slow responses to issues can degrade user trust and adoption.
• Increasing complexity and CRM clutter results in diminishing returns and increased frustration among users.

4. Adoption is Everything: How to Make Users Love Your CRM

CRM adoption remains the biggest challenge at clubs. Yet, it’s also your most significant lever for driving value. Low adoption typically stems from poor user experience, unclear benefits, or inadequate training. Without high adoption, your CRM investment will fail to realize its potential value.

Actionable Ways to Boost CRM Adoption:

• Offer comprehensive user onboarding sessions that demonstrate real-world benefits, not just technical training.
• Run regular surveys and structured end-user interviews to capture candid feedback.
• Establish user councils to foster continuous dialogue and direct input from diverse club departments.
• Internally market new features through engaging release notes, clear communication, and demonstration of tangible user benefits.

5. Handling Technical Debt: Yes, Your CRM Has It Too

Technical debt—those accumulated shortcuts, small issues, and unused fields—inevitably creeps into CRM systems over time. Left unchecked, technical debt can lead to significant performance issues, user dissatisfaction, and inefficiencies.

Proactive Management of CRM Technical Debt:

• Regularly schedule cleanup sprints to maintain system hygiene and usability.
• Enforce clear naming conventions and robust documentation standards to ensure consistency.
• Prioritize simplicity: Every field, automation, and feature should clearly justify its existence in terms of real value delivered.

6. End-User Interviews: The Secret Weapon to Great CRM

Regular end-user interviews are the secret sauce of every great product and your CRM is no different. They reveal the true pain points and unmet needs of your users, guiding your continuous CRM improvements. User feedback is essential in avoiding assumptions and ensuring real user problems are effectively addressed.

Running Effective End-User Interviews:

• Schedule brief, recurring monthly or quarterly conversations to maintain regular engagement.
• Ask targeted and open-ended questions to encourage honest and useful feedback:
  • "What frustrates you most about our current CRM?"
  • "If you could add one feature, what would significantly improve your workflow?"
  • "How does the CRM fit into your daily tasks and routines?"

Listening regularly ensures your CRM evolves based on real user feedback, not assumptions, significantly increasing its relevance and effectiveness.

7. Continuous Evolution: Never "Set and Forget"

Your club evolves, sponsors change, fan behaviors shift, so your CRM must continuously evolve too. Treating CRM as a "set and forget" tool risks diminishing returns and declining user engagement. Continuous evolution ensures that your CRM remains relevant, responsive, and valuable.

Ensuring Continuous CRM Evolution:

• Run frequent retrospectives to proactively identify issues and opportunities.
• Embrace iterative, incremental improvements to avoid disruptive major changes.
• Communicate transparently about upcoming CRM enhancements and clearly articulate their benefits to users.

8. Your CRM as a Profit Center

Finally, a CRM system managed with a product mindset directly contributes to your bottom line by improving sponsor reporting and ROI measurement, enabling more targeted and effective fan campaigns, and reducing operational costs through automation. Viewing your CRM as a profit center rather than a cost center transforms perceptions and investments around CRM management.

Changing the Game by Changing Mindsets

In my own experience building CRM systems for clubs, the biggest wins never came from dramatic overnight changes. They emerged from consistently adopting a product-oriented mindset: small improvements, user-driven feedback, clear ownership, and regular evolution.

Every feature added or removed, every field streamlined, and every user trained makes a tangible difference.

Ask yourself:

• How are you currently viewing your CRM?
• What would change if you treated your CRM like a product, not just software?

When you shift your mindset, you transform your CRM into one of the most valuable products your club will ever build.

Next Steps

• Adopt the product mindset for your CRM system.
• Create your first CRM roadmap.
• Set up end-user interviews.
• Regularly measure adoption and satisfaction.

Feel free to reach out to discuss how your club can fully leverage your CRM as the strategic product it truly is.

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