Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Head of CRM

🎯 Role Definition

The Head of CRM is a senior marketing and product-adjacent leader accountable for end-to-end Customer Relationship Management strategy, execution and team leadership. This role defines the CRM roadmap, leverages customer data and segmentation to design personalized, cross-channel campaigns, measures impact through robust analytics and experimentation, and partners with product, engineering, analytics and operations to scale lifecycle programs that maximize retention, engagement and lifetime value. The role requires deep experience with CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Klaviyo, Iterable), data tools (CDPs, analytics, SQL), marketing automation, and a strong bias for testing, measurement and process optimization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior CRM Manager / CRM Lead
Head of Lifecycle Marketing
Director of Retention / Director of Lifecycle

Advancement To:

VP of Marketing
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Head of Customer Experience / Chief Customer Officer

Lateral Moves:

Director of Growth Marketing
Head of Product Marketing
Head of Lifecycle & Retention

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own and articulate the company CRM strategy and roadmap, setting quarterly and annual goals for retention, engagement, customer lifetime value (LTV), and churn reduction while aligning CRM KPIs with overall business objectives.
Lead and scale a high-performing CRM team (lifecycle marketing, email & messaging, CRM operations, data analysts), including hiring, mentoring, performance management and career development.
Define end-to-end lifecycle programs that drive activation, onboarding, reactivation and retention across email, push, in-app, SMS, direct mail and web personalization, ensuring cohesive omnichannel experiences.
Design and implement segmentation and personalization strategies based on behavioral, transactional and demographic data to increase relevance and conversion at every stage of the customer journey.
Partner with analytics and data engineering to build and maintain robust audience definitions, SQL-backed segments, reporting dashboards and attribution frameworks to measure CRM program impact on revenue and retention.
Drive A/B testing and experimentation frameworks for subject lines, send cadences, creative, offers, and personalization logic; analyze results and scale winning variants.
Select, implement and optimize CRM and marketing automation platforms (e.g., Braze, Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, HubSpot) and integrate them with CDPs, data lakes and e-commerce or subscription systems.
Implement data governance and best practices for customer data (consent, preferences, suppression lists, unsubscribes), ensuring compliance with GDPR, CCPA and anti-spam laws across all markets.
Own campaign planning, calendar, budgets and resource allocation to ensure timely launches, prioritization of high-impact initiatives and alignment with product and commercial calendar.
Collaborate with product and engineering to design lifecycle product features (onboarding flows, nudges, reminders, retention hooks) that improve activation and continuous engagement.
Build and maintain reporting on retention cohorts, churn drivers, LTV, ARPU and revenue attributable to CRM; present insights and recommendations to executive leadership.
Develop communications frameworks and playbooks for lifecycle use cases (welcome series, win-back, VIP programs, subscription retention) to standardize execution and scale personalization.
Lead cross-functional initiatives to reduce churn, such as recovery flows for failed payments, proactive retention offers, or operational triggers tied to customer events.
Manage vendor relationships and budgets for CRM, analytics and personalization tools, ensuring optimal SLAs, cost-efficiency and feature alignment to business needs.
Translate business objectives into technical requirements for CRM automations, audience syncs, API integrations and event tracking; oversee QA and implementation to ensure data fidelity and timing.
Create and maintain escalation processes for urgent CRM issues (deliverability incidents, blacklisting, suppression errors) and work with security/ops to mitigate risk and restore service quickly.
Drive deliverability and inbox placement strategy, including warm-up plans, sender reputation monitoring, authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and engagement-based segmentation to protect sending domains.
Oversee creative and content strategy for lifecycle communications, ensuring messaging consistency, brand tone, accessibility, localization and relevancy across customer segments.
Lead revenue-driving experiments such as personalized pricing, targeted promotions and behaviorally-triggered offers; analyze uplift and implement guardrails to protect margin and brand integrity.
Implement and optimize loyalty, VIP and advocacy programs in partnership with retention and customer success teams to increase repeat purchases and referral rates.
Establish data-driven SLAs for cadence, frequency caps and fatigue mitigation to improve customer experience while maximizing revenue and retention metrics.
Partner with sales, customer success and support to operationalize feedback loops that turn qualitative insights into tactical CRM tests and long-term product improvements.
Monitor competitive CRM initiatives and market trends in personalization, generative AI and CDP capabilities; recommend adoption where it drives measurable advantage.
Report directly to senior leadership with clear, actionable insights, forecasting, and scenario planning to influence strategic decisions and prioritization.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide subject-matter expertise on CRM best practices to other marketing channels and international teams.
Document playbooks, runbooks and SOPs for campaign launches, data QA and incident response.
Conduct quarterly training sessions for marketing and product stakeholders on segmentation, personalization and CRM tooling.
Work with finance to model CRM-driven revenue and calculate ROI for major lifecycle initiatives.
Coordinate with legal and compliance teams for policy updates impacting customer communications.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

CRM Platform Expertise: Deep hands-on experience with at least one major CRM/marketing automation stack (e.g., Braze, Klaviyo, Iterable, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot) including campaign orchestration, event-based triggers and audience management.
Data & Analytics: Strong SQL proficiency for building segments, cohort analysis and ad-hoc queries; ability to interpret analytics dashboards (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) and translate insights into actions.
Customer Data Platforms (CDP) & Integrations: Experience designing and operating integrations between CRM, CDP, data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and transactional systems.
Experimentation & Measurement: Fluency with A/B testing frameworks, statistical significance, uplift measurement and test-to-scale processes.
Deliverability & Email Best Practices: Knowledge of deliverability, inbox placement diagnostics, sender authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) and reputation management tools.
Segmentation & Personalization: Expertise in behavioral segmentation, RFM modeling, propensity scoring and dynamic content/personalization strategies.
Marketing Automation & Workflow Design: Ability to architect complex, event-driven workflows, suppression logic and multi-step campaigns with durable error handling.
Technical Requirements & API Knowledge: Experience specifying API integrations, webhooks and event schemas to ensure real-time audience updates and two-way system communication.
Privacy & Compliance: Practical knowledge of GDPR, CCPA and other privacy frameworks as they relate to customer communication and data handling.
Performance Marketing Collaboration: Understanding of acquisition channels, tracking and how CRM tactics complement paid and organic channels to optimize CAC and LTV.

Soft Skills

Strategic Thinking: Ability to define long-term vision for CRM and translate it into an actionable roadmap with measurable outcomes.
Leadership & People Management: Proven track record of building, coaching and scaling cross-functional teams, fostering accountability and professional growth.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Strong stakeholder management skills; comfortable influencing product, engineering, analytics and commercial teams.
Communication: Clear storyteller who can present complex data and insights to executive audiences and non-technical stakeholders.
Customer-Centric Mindset: Empathy for customer needs, advocacy for exceptional experiences and rigor in reducing friction and churn.
Problem Solving & Prioritization: Comfortable making data-informed trade-offs and leading through ambiguity in fast-moving environments.
Attention to Detail: Meticulous approach to QA, data integrity and campaign execution to minimize operational risk.
Change Management: Experience driving adoption of new tools, processes and ways of working across distributed teams.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Data Science, Computer Science, Economics, or related field.

Preferred Education:

MBA or Master’s degree in a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience in senior CRM/marketing leadership roles.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Marketing, Digital Marketing, or Integrated Marketing Communications
Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, or Information Systems
Business Administration, Economics, or Analytics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

8+ years in CRM, lifecycle marketing, growth, or retention roles with 3+ years in a managerial or leadership capacity.

Preferred:

10+ years total experience with proven ownership of CRM strategy in B2C, e-commerce, subscription, fintech or SaaS environments; demonstrable track record of improving retention, LTV and ARR through lifecycle programs.
Experience scaling teams from small to medium/large, owning multi-market rollouts and managing cross-functional, remote teams.