'But you already have a CRM!'
We spent over a year rebuilding a product we already had: a Contact Relationship Management system for PR and IR professionals. And we’re very happy that we did. Why did we make that decision?
Technology developments
Presspage has been around for 15 years already. 15 Years of continuously innovating on PR and IR technology and improving the workflows for PR and IR teams means that we have a robust, feature-rich and very mature product. We are far beyond all the growing pains of a startup and don’t need to compromise on quality or security.
One inevitable trend that all software companies deal with however, is the fast-paced development of technology world-wide. This makes the technology market a very exciting space: who would have thought, five years ago, that we could let AI help us draft replies to inquiring journalists today? But this also means that all the technology you wrote yesterday, would be better technology if you’d write it today.
Is that a problem? Usually not. If software solved an issue yesterday, it doesn’t matter if a slightly more modern approach would solve it again today, but with a slighter cleaner code base. The end result is the same, the user is satisfied, the issue is still solved.
However: if the old approach is blocking you from innovating, because the old technology doesn’t allow you to adopt newer practices that solve new problems, then an ambitious company such as Presspage does have a problem. And that was our issue with the old CRM.
Unlocking innovation in Media Relations
Elevating media and investor relations for PR and IR teams is one of the major missions for Presspage. We believe that standing out from the crowd is crucial when it comes to your relations with the media and your investors. Moreover, meaningful connections based on values such as reliability, mutual interests, transparency, responsiveness and consistency will make you a valued and reputable partner for the media and for investors.
Our “old” CRM solved many issues for PR and IR professionals, such as managing their contacts, creating distribution lists, subscription management and showing engagement statistics. To give an indication: The contacts of our top 15 CRM using customers received on average 13 emails sent from our systems from the company, with a high of 187 emails and a low of 3 emails per year.
However, to achieve our mission, we wanted to be able to do more than that. We wanted to tackle the issue of having to do double work in different local teams. Be able to support and track more engagement with journalists. Do easier mass contact management. Pitching. Insights and recommendations about engagement, interests, inquiries. And at the same time get more mundane tasks out of the way of PR and IR specialists, so they can focus on human relations. And those things were hard, if not impossible, to accomplish on our old CRM system.
So that’s why we rebuilt our CRM, with the future of Media Relations in mind. A huge endeavour, where every feature had to be rebuilt. Because we also changed the underlying data structure, this also meant having to reconsider a lot of workflows while always keeping our strict data privacy policy in mind. For instance: if somebody shares a distribution list with another team, should this team then also be allowed to add contacts from that list to other, non-related lists? (The implemented answer is: it depends).
Once we figured it all out - with the huge help of our customers who showed us their preferred workflows, their wishes and their limitations - we were extremely happy with the result. We are now able to innovate on Media Relations faster than ever before. And this will become apparent very soon in our upcoming Product Releases.
One major step in the CRM rebuilding process was the migration of all our customers from one system to another. If you would like to read more about that, you can find our behind the scenes blog here.
If you’re curious what Presspage’s CRM and Media Relations involve, read about it here or reach out to us for a demo. If you have any questions or suggestions for our CRM, please reach out as well!