Tom Burrell — Retention/LTV strategy (Exco/P&L) + agentic execution for igaming, streaming, sports & subscription apps | 26 years driving the retention P&L
Retention/LTV strategy (Exco/P&L) + agentic execution for igaming, streaming, sports & subscription apps | 26 years driving the retention P&L
Tom Burrell ranks #391 of 19,190 LinkedIn creators in Management Consulting, and is a standout voice in United Kingdom. They have 11.6K followers and published 22 posts in the last 30 days at a 0.9% average engagement rate.
- 11.6K followers
- 22 posts / 30d
- 0.9% avg engagement
- 415 follower growth / 30d
The roast
Tom claims he’s spent 26 years mastering retention, yet he’s currently paying to use LinkedIn as a glorified megaphone to beg 11,000 strangers to acknowledge his newsletter. It’s an impressive career arc: two decades of high-level consulting just to end up as a guy lecturing bookies on how to stop people from leaving their apps.
About Tom
I've spent 26 years in commercial retention and CRM.Over the last decade, most of my work has sat in high-frequency, engagement-led, recurring-revenue businesses where retention & LTV depend on usage.Sectors like streaming, igaming, sports and subscription apps.More recently, I've been working at the intersection of retention strategy and agentic AI. In practice, that means helping brands use AI agents to:- Make better predictions about customer behaviour- Deliver better interventions at the right moment- Build complex lifecycle journeys much faster- Scale personalisation so every customer gets the right interaction at exactly the right timeI have written extensively about customer retention in my newsletter (which reaches nearly 3000 readers), have trained over 2000 on retention strategy & CRM (via my courses and in-person training) and have worked with 7 global brands over the past 2 years through my retention consultancy.What I do in a nutshell: I help the person responsible for retention design and build AI systems to structurally improve retention & LTV. Recent work:- iGaming (Evoke: William Hill & 888): AI-enabled Customer Lifecycle Management transformation "Tom made a significant impact at a key time: strong framework, clear accountability, high value delivery." Mark Kemp, Chief Commercial Officer, Evoke- iGaming (Kindred, now FDJ): Retention & CRM training for 100+ team "Tom's depth of knowledge had a big impact: it immediately translated into business impact." Matt Ramsden, Director, Customer Growth- Subscription app (Subconsciously): Strategy, product rebuild and AI lifecycle execution "Tom transformed my business from regularly making a loss to self-funded in 5 months: 7X increase in subscribers." Aaron Surtees, CEO-- SaaS (Subsets AI): Retention & CRM strategy. “Tom developed strong retention and churn prevention strategies for our AI SaaS startup. Highly recommend" Nikolai Skelbo, Chief Operating Officer- Fitness (The Gym Group): Retention roadmap. "He is clearly an expert in his field. If you are looking to improve retention, he can help." Nick Shelmerdine, Strategy Director- Airline (Emirates): Omnichannel customer strategy across marketing, operations and airport experience (Emirates PR do not permit references, but it's available upon request).If you're responsible for retention/ CRM at a recurring-revenue business and want to discuss the impact of AI, or just want a conversation with someone who's been in your shoes, DM me.
Highlights
- Top 5% in United Kingdom — Ranked #73 of 1849 creators
- Consistent Creator — 19 posts in 30d · top 5%
- Top 10% in Management Consulting — Ranked #25 of 485 creators
- Big Audience — 11,562 followers · top 25%
Recent posts
"Our data isn't good enough for AI." It's the most common reason agentic projects don't start. And mostly, it's wrong. Yes, agentic CRM lives or dies on data. And the projects that fail often fail because of poor data. But you don't need a perfect 500-event schema to start. For one moment of truth, you often need 10 to 15 events. Sometimes from a single source. - A failed payment. - An onboarding stall. - A usage change from 4 sessions a week to 2. Pick one moment, a low-risk / high-impact moment. - Get those few events right. - Prove it on a slice of your base. - Then expand. The teams
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Last Thursday, 467 people signed up to watch me argue that the CRM journey canvas is about to be replaced by agents. 156 joined live. For 20 years, CRM has had one audit trail: the journey. You build it on a canvas. You could point to it. You could tell the board "here's why Sarah got that message." Agentic CRM 3.0 breaks that. Every journey becomes 1-1. Every customer gets a different path. Bespoke to them In real time. There's no journey canvas. So some people conclude: too risky, not now, unauditable. They're auditing the wrong layer. You don't audit a million journeys. You au
29 reactions · 20 comments · 1 reposts
Netflix and Uber already run CRM 3.0 Most brands are still debating send frequency in a Monday meeting. Here's what Netflix actually does. • An agent builds a weekly pacing plan for every user. • It weighs the value of messaging you against the cost. • Then a real-time engine decides what to send, in the moment. • The decision is separated from the send. • The frequency is governed. • The agent carries pointers, not payloads. • It never free-writes content. Uber does the same with contextual bandits and a real-time feature store. Change location, and the offer in your queue updates in
37 reactions · 105 comments · 0 reposts