In the fifth episode of FLYDE Talks, Paco Herranz, founder and CEO of FLYDE, sat down with Enrique Miralda, an expert in digital strategy and ecommerce with over 20 years of experience. More than an interview, it was a dialogue between two professionals who work day-to-day with companies at very different stages of digital maturity. The conversation focused on why most companies don’t have a real customer strategy and what it takes to build one.
WHO OWNS THE CUSTOMER IN YOUR COMPANY?
If you ask most organizations who is responsible for the customer, the answer is usually silence. And according to Enrique Miralda, that silence is the clearest sign that no real customer strategy exists.
Customers are the primary asset in any business. Yet what typically happens is that marketing has one view, the CRM team has another, and the customer experience department limits itself to handling complaints. Each department manages its own version of the customer and those versions rarely match.
The result is that the same customer can receive contradictory messages from three different departments on the same day, without anyone realizing it. Paco reinforced this from his direct experience with FLYDE clients: the absence of a clear owner isn’t just an organizational symptom; it’s the most telling sign that no real customer strategy exists.
THE IMBALANCE BETWEEN ACQUISITION AND RETENTION
Enrique noted that around 70% of marketing investment goes towards acquiring new customers, with barely 30% directed at retention. This happens despite the fact that retaining a customer is five times more profitable than acquiring a new one.
And there’s an even more critical insight: unless a company has a gross margin above 45-50% or a very high average order value, its business will not be profitable until the second purchase happens. A new customer is not profitable the day they arrive. They become profitable when they come back.
Paco added another angle he sees repeatedly in FLYDE’s own sales process: often there are several departments talking to the customer through different channels, with no coordination, and none of them actually listening. The problem isn’t too much communication but rather the lack of a unified customer view to back it up.
CRM VS. CDP: THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING
One of the most common misconceptions is that a CRM is enough to manage customer strategy. Enrique is clear: the CRM has a concrete and valuable function, but it has important limitations.
A CRM provides a snapshot of current customers, but it doesn’t work with anonymous users, has no real predictive capability, and doesn’t unify the customer view across all channels. A customer who buys in a physical store, on the website, and through an app can appear as three different people.
A CDP (Customer Data Platform) is designed to solve exactly that: unifying all customer information into a single profile, diagnosing behaviors, predicting future actions and prescribing the best strategies for each segment.
EVERY BUSINESS IS A FINANCIAL BUSINESS
Enrique is particularly critical of the lack of financial perspective in marketing and ecommerce teams. Measuring profitability through gross margin is a common mistake. What matters is the contribution margin, which deducts all real costs: payment commissions, shipping, packaging, returns and marketing campaigns.
It is perfectly possible to have a positive ROAS and still be losing money. Everyone making decisions about customers should be able to answer this question: at what point does this customer start to be profitable for my business?
THE CDP AS AN INVESTMENT, NOT A COST
For Enrique, there is no room for doubt: he knows of no more profitable investment in ecommerce than a well-implemented CDP. With the right agility, it is common to see a return that covers the platform cost within 60 to 90 days. In some cases, a single use case has generated enough margin to pay for the tool for two years.
The key is speed of implementation. Tools like FLYDE are designed so that business teams can operate with maximum independence from IT, activating use cases in weeks, not months.
CONCLUSIONS
Companies that build a real customer strategy share five characteristics:
- They have defined who owns the customer within the organization.
- They balance investment between acquisition and retention.
- They understand the difference between CRM and CDP, and use each tool for what it was designed for.
- They measure in terms of contribution margin, not gross margin or ROAS in isolation.
- They start with concrete use cases that demonstrate fast ROI, and scale from there.
The question every company should ask is not what new tool they need, but who is responsible for ensuring their customer is treated with excellence at every touchpoint.
DOWNLOAD ENRIQUE’S EBOOK
If this conversation has raised questions about how to implement a CDP, how to measure its return, or how to structure the use cases that generate the most value, Enrique Miralda has just published the book that answers exactly that.
CDP – Customer Data Platform: How to Convert Data into Business is a practical guide covering everything from the minimum technical requirements you should demand, to a 90-day roadmap with real use cases, contribution margin metrics and step-by-step numerical examples. It also includes chapters on AI applied to CDP, weekly operating models and a comparative guide to the leading platforms on the market.
This is not a book about concepts. It is a manual for going from “we have a CDP” to “the CDP is generating value.”
The ebook is currently available in Spanish.
