Chapter 9 CRM and Content: Two Ingredients for Early Startup Success By Greg Poirier Greg is a seasoned “startup guy,” having been an early-stage employee at numerous startups, as well as serving as COO in his last startup position. He came to Salesforce through the acquisition of Radian6, and he assumed the responsibilities for leading and implementing Marketing Cloud’s overall strategic online activities. Greg is a respected advisor to the startup community and now devotes his time to helping startups accelerate success through proven sales and marketing programs at his consultancy, CloudKettle. As we have seen throughout this book, there is a common theme about sound planning and execution as a driver for success. Greg discusses the need to invest in a customer relationship management system, as well as defining your content marketing strategy early in the genesis of your startup. You’re a small organization, you know your customers already, and you really don’t have that many to keep track of. A simple, shared spreadsheet can probably do the trick. Do you really need to be wasting money and headspace on a customer relationship management (CRM) solution? It may be tempting to set the idea of purchasing a CRM solution aside, especially if you’re a startup. After all, CRM solutions consume precious resources. At a minimum, they require license costs and configuration fees, but on top of that, they demand the most precious startup resource of all — founder attention during their planning and implementation.