Most CRM leaders arrive with a mandate to improve things. The ones who actually do it spend the first 30 days (minimum) listening before they act.

There is a version of the first 90 days that goes badly.

The new hire arrives, sees problems immediately, they have experience to know what good looks like after all, and they start changing things. Within three months, they’ve made enemies in other departments, their team is unsettled (top performers are about to hand in their notice, and the rest are disengaged), the likelihood of hitting KPIs is looking shaky and the key stakeholders who staked their reputation on hiring them are wondering whether they made the right call.

The problems spotted were probably real but they were approached badly.

For you, the first 90 days as Head of CRM is not about coming in guns blazing to prove that you know what needs fixing. You need to understand why things are the way they are before you identify what to change, building the relationships you’ll need to make those changes stick, and identifying where you can demonstrate early commercial value without burning credibility you haven’t earned yet.

Days 1 to 30: Listen and map

Chanel is famous for having its unique “90-day rule” for new senior executives, where they are instructed not to speak in meetings during their first three months of employment, to encourage better listening.

Before you change anything, understand everything you can about the current state. That means understanding the CRM platform and its configuration, the data model and its quality, the team’s capability and confidence, the current campaign calendar, performance and operating model, and the commercial context the function sits within. This is your onboarding phase.

It also means working out the stakeholder landscape. Who influences CRM’s budget and priorities? Where does CRM sit in the marketing hierarchy? What does the sales or commercial team think of the CRM function? (Do they see it as a strategic partner or a campaign delivery service?) What does the Product or Data team think about their challenges and how CRM can help drive forward their deliverables? These relationships will determine what you can realistically achieve and how fast.

In the first month, your job is to ask questions, listen carefully to the answers and audit in detail. What’s working? What isn’t? What has been tried before and why did it fail? What does the team wish they had more time to do? What does the business expect from CRM that CRM is not currently delivering?

You will learn more from these conversations, combined with data quality and reporting audits than from a single dashboard and gut feel.

Days 30 to 60: Diagnose and prioritise

By the end of the first month you should have a clear picture of the gap between where the function is and where it needs to be. The second month is about turning that picture into a prioritised list.

Not every problem deserves equal attention. Some things are urgent and relatively easy to fix. Some are important but will take time, internal politics and budget to address. Some are things the business doesn’t have the appetite to change right now and pushing too hard will only cost you credibility if you create the opinion about you that you’re not commercially aware. Pop them into a four quadrant matrix and see where things lie.

Being honest with yourself about which is which is one of the most important skills a leader can have.

Some things are urgent and complicated. Say the issue is that you inherited a broken team. Disruptive individuals, poor morale, low capability. If you were brought in to drive growth, it’s not happening with this team. You need to address it urgently and highlight the impact this is going to have on your OKRs. The expectations for the impact you were brought in to deliver will need to be managed carefully.

In this phase, if you don’t have any significant blockers, then identify your quick wins. These are improvements that are commercially meaningful, visible to stakeholders, and achievable within your first quarter without requiring significant new resource or organisational change. A better triggered programme. Fixing something that was broken. A segment that isn’t being contacted at all. A reporting structure that finally connects CRM activity to revenue. These are things you’ll have found in your audit.

Quick wins matter not because they solve the big problems but because they demonstrate you know what you’re doing and buy you the trust to tackle the harder things later.

If not much is broken then your focus shifts from fixing to scaling & innovating. Quick wins are good confidence boosters for your stakeholders but your strategy can be weighted to growth.

Days 60 to 90: Present and commit

By day 90 you should be in a position to present a clear, evidence-based view of the function’s current state and a credible roadmap for where it’s going. A prioritised 12-month plan with commercial rationale, resource requirements, and measurable outcomes.

This presentation is as much about stakeholder alignment as it is about the plan itself. You are telling the business what you’re going to focus on and, equally importantly, what you’re not going to focus on right now. Getting sign-off on that prioritisation protects you from being pulled in every direction simultaneously and gives you a shared basis for measuring progress.

The plan should include: a commercial baseline (what is the CRM revenue attribution today), a gap analysis (what is the realistic opportunity), the three to five things you’ll do in the next six months to close that gap, the resources and dependencies required, and how success will be measured.

What the first 90 days is really about

What it’s always about is NOT CREATING MORE PROBLEMS THAN YOU STARTED WITH! The first 90 days, done well, means you arrive at day 91 with a team that trusts your judgment, stakeholders who understand what you’re trying to do and why and how it benefits them, and a clear mandate to get on with it.

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