The journey of a company from startup to enterprise-level is accompanied by rapid growth and increasing complexity of business processes. What could previously be solved with a simple spreadsheet or a basic CRM system now requires a complex, multi-level customer relationship management system.
Take, for example, a large industrial equipment manufacturer. At the dawn of its development, the company could manage its customer base with a standard CRM. However, as the business grew, it became necessary to integrate CRM with the production management system, warehousing, and service management. It was necessary to implement complex pricing algorithms that take into account dozens of parameters. There was a need to create a portal for dealers and a tender sales management system.
Standard solutions could no longer cope with such a volume of requirements. The company faced a choice: either develop its own CRM from scratch, or find the most flexible solution that could quickly adapt to the ever-changing needs of the business.
At this point, the concept of Time-to-Market appears – an indicator that defines the period between the emergence of a business need and its realization in the working system. This indicator reflects a company’s ability to quickly adapt its tools to the changing requirements of the market, customers and regulators.
Short Time-to-Market is the ability to implement complex system changes quickly and relatively cheaply. It allows us to quickly support new business processes, new operating procedures, new standards and regulatory requirements. As a result, we can respond faster to new requirements of customers, partners and consumers of our products and services. This has a direct impact on customer loyalty, helps to retain them and increase the company’s profitability with low implementation costs.
The Risks of Prolonged Time-to-Market
A long Time-to-Market CRM system creates a barrier to company growth. When this figure is stretched, the company faces a number of difficulties:
- Lagging behind market trends: While CRM changes are being implemented, the market can change again, making those changes irrelevant before they are even implemented;
- Inefficient use of resources:Long development and implementation of changes results in time and cost spent on functionality that may be obsolete by the time it goes live;
- Loss of competitive advantage: Companies that can adapt their CRM systems faster gain an advantage in competing for customers and responding to their needs.
These problems entail risks to the business:
- Financial loss: Not only does the company waste resources on lengthy system rework, but it also loses potential profits due to the inability to respond quickly to market changes;
- Decreased efficiency of business processes: Outdated or suboptimal CRM processes reduce employee productivity and customer service;
- Loss of relevance to customers: The inability to quickly adapt CRM to new customer needs leads to decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty;
- Loss of analytics: Results from re-engineering, data analysis, and strategic planning can become irrelevant if they cannot be implemented into the CRM system in a timely manner.
The importance of rapid CRM system adaptation is supported by the Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites for 2022 report, with 72% of business leaders identifying the speed of CRM system adaptation as a critical factor in maintaining a competitive advantage.
«A long change implementation cycle creates a gap between company needs and CRM capabilities. This leads to inefficient processes and wasted time on finalizing already outdated solutions. All changes in business processes take a long time, and when they reach implementation, the market is already changing again. In fact, we lose money not only on system revision, but also on unproductive elaboration of these changes. That’s why when choosing a CRM you should pay attention to the flexibility of the system and the ability to make changes quickly without the risk of it “falling apart”»,
– comments Alexander Starodubtsev, PhD in Economics, methodologist/productologist at SimpleOne B2B CRM
The Architecture of Modern CRM
The architecture of a CRM system plays an important role in providing short Time-to-Market. Modern solutions are built on the principle of separating the platform and business solution, which greatly enhances the ability to implement complex business logic.
What a modern CRM system consists of:
- Data structure: The foundation of the system, usually realized in the form of database tables with fields. A flexible data structure allows the system to be quickly adapted to new business requirements.
- User interface: Forms, widgets, pages for interaction with data. Modern CRMs provide tools for quick customization and interface customization.
- Customization of the interface.
- Client scenarios: Logic of user interaction with the interface: reaction to actions, highlighting of elements, etc.
- Server processing: Logic for processing data before it is stored in the database. Includes validation, calculations, and other operations.
- Integration potential: Enables CRM to interact with other systems in the corporate landscape.
- Analytical tools: Reports, dashboards to analyze data and make management decisions.
Features of CRM-system architecture that affect Time-to-Market:
- Modularity: Decomposition of the system into separate components allows you to make changes locally without affecting the entire system.
- Ease of customization: The ability to modify data structure, interfaces and business logic using visual editors (no-code), more complex logic using simple scripts embedded in visual editors (low-code) and develop your own components (interface elements, complex handlers, integrations) in the built-in programming language using standard system elements (pro-code).
- Multilevel environment: Support for different environments (development, testing, production) with the ability to automatically transfer changes between them.
- Version Control System: Tracks all changes to the system, including object settings, form visualization, access rights, etc.
- Change merge mechanisms: Ability to merge changes from different developers with automatic conflict detection.
- Ability to rollback changes: Ability to quickly revert to a previous version of the system in case of problems when implementing changes.
- Live Customization:Customize the appearance and behavior of the system directly from the user interface with the ability to instantly apply the changes made.
CRM components affecting Time-to-Market
Modern CRM-systems for enterprise-level companies include a number of components that directly affect the reduction of Time-to-Market. They allow you to quickly adapt the system to changing business requirements.
1. Visual editors for forms, portals, workflows, lists, reports, integrations, etc.
They allow you to customize the system in visual mode using drag-and-drop interface. This makes it possible to quickly adapt the application to new requirements without having to write code.
2. Version control and staging system
Provides a controlled development process by allowing tracking of all changes made to the system. Staging, in turn, provides the ability to test changes before they are deployed into the production environment, minimizing the risk of failures.
3. Integration capabilities
Modern CRMs must integrate seamlessly with other systems in the corporate landscape. This includes a well-documented and example-driven API, REST clients for accessing other systems, and support for various integration protocols. Availability in the API of tables and fields independently added by the user, both from within the system and for external applications (when setting up appropriate access rights).
4. Flexible system of access rights
Allows you to quickly configure access to information for different groups of users, which is critical when changing business processes or organizational structure. The following features of the access rights system enhance time-to-market:
- Inheritance – allows you to use as a basis a set of rights previously defined for another, broader access rights group or role, change access rights cascading, managing only the parent group or role
- Impersonation – allows an administrator to quickly test the permissions granted to a user by looking at the system in the mode in which that user sees it
- Delegation – automatically transfers all access rights to a deputy for the duration of the employee’s absence
5. Widgets and portals
Modular approach to building interfaces, allowing you to quickly assemble new workspaces from ready-made components.
6. Low-code/No-code
These tools allow you to make changes to the system without deep programming knowledge. Low-code platforms make it possible to implement complex logic with minimal use of code, which significantly speeds up the process of development and implementation of changes.
7. Pro-code capabilities
Support for the ability to develop your own system components, tools and interfaces that work seamlessly with the vendor’s CRM platform in a popular embedded programming language allows you to quickly and cheaply implement improvements of any level of complexity to meet the needs of the business, without waiting for the long appearance of such functionality in the supply from the vendor.
The combination of these components allows you to significantly reduce the time from the need for change to its implementation in the working system, which is critical to maintain the competitiveness of the corporation in a dynamically changing business environment.
SimpleOne B2B CRM – system providing high performance time-to-market
SimpleOne B2B CRM embodies all of the above principles and mechanisms, providing fast Time-to-Market for corporate clients. This allows businesses to respond quickly to market changes.
A unique feature of the SimpleOne platform is the use of the Record Extended Model (REM, Record Extended Model ). REM is a modern approach to data organization, which allows you to dynamically expand the structure of records without changing the underlying data table. Unlike the traditional approach with table inheritance, REM uses a single base table and supplements it with its own system of attributes. This greatly simplifies and accelerates the development and customization of complex business processes. This approach reduces Time-to-Market, ensuring that the system can be quickly adapted to constantly changing requirements.
In the area of integration, SimpleOne offers capabilities including REST APIs and out-of-the-box connectors. This allows you to quickly integrate CRM with your existing enterprise IT infrastructure, ensuring the integrity of your business processes.
Importantly, SimpleOne maintains a balance between simplicity and power. Along with no-code and low-code tools, the system supports pro-code development of complex, non-standard scenarios and interfaces.
Thus, the system provides large companies with everything they need to achieve exceptionally short Time-to-Market.
Conclusions
The Time-to-Market of a CRM system directly affects a company’s ability to adapt to market changes and customer requirements. A short Time-to-Market allows companies to:
- React faster to market changes;
- Operatively implement new business processes;
- Reduce system development and support costs
Choosing a CRM system with this criterion in mind is a decision that affects the long-term performance of the business. Companies that are able to quickly adapt their tools gain a competitive advantage in working with customers, improving the efficiency of business processes and developing new lines of business
