Prior to the Rethink! MAD Minds Europe 2016 we got the chance to talk with Luisella Giani, Head of Digital Strategy & Operations EMEA at Axalta Coating Systems. During the interview Luisella gave her opinion on how to maximize ROI with customer management 2.0. She also made a prediction on the future of the marketing sector as getting connected and digital is steadily increasing in importance. Luisella started dreaming digital at early age, she got a degree in Artificial Intelligence and she spent her career launching and building Web & Mobile products (e-commerce/m-commerce, mobile apps, social networks, portals, CRM, loyalty programs) both for start-ups (Skype, Netlog) and for mature large multinational corporations (Lycos, Yellow Pages, Goodyear). Her motto is: simplicity wins, without fail.

The biggest challenges I found during my experience are related to not updated infrastructure (e.g. systems not able to communicate via API) and to a silos‐working culture (IT, marketing and sales not working together). The recipe to success? Upgrade the infrastructure, prioritizing the features to be upgraded based on business needs. Start changing the internal mind-set building an environment promoting and rewarding trust, innovation, small risk taking, cross teams collaboration.

I believe that CRM will become more and more a key tool as well for marketing and it will be a must to integrate it with Marketing automation tools, ERP, brand websites, e-commerce and their analytics. Marketers of the future will need not only to be creative, but as well to be able to manage technical tools and data: some of the activities currently managed by programmers and data scientists will become marketers daily’s job.

Einstein once was asked how he would solve a life or death situation if he had only 1 hour. He replied “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Often companies jump into social media just because is hype or their competitors have a social media presence. The first step is to define the right question: what are the business goals we want to achieve being present on social media? The answer will guide into selecting the right channels, a consistent content and media strategy, the correct KPIs, focusing not only on number of fans and followers but as well on engagement and conversions.

I will present a case study showing the business and sales advantages obtained by revamping the CRM following a user‐centric approach. Adoption, users engagement, a satisfactory user experience, a friendly user interface, a strong framework defining business objectives linked to an accurate data matching, are the key ingredients to efficiently manage your customers and to unleash the digital quotient of sales and marketing team.

Interview partners: Nikolaos Kapetanis and Luisella Giani