Time-to-Market: Why a CRM's Speed of Adaptation is Critical for Enterprise-Level Companies

The journey from a startup to an enterprise-level company is marked by rapid growth and increasingly complex business processes. What could once be handled with a simple spreadsheet or a basic CRM system now requires a sophisticated, multi-layered system for managing customer relationships.

Take, for example, a large manufacturer of industrial equipment. In its early days, the company might have managed its client base with a standard CRM. But as the business grew, it needed to integrate that CRM with its production management system, warehouse inventory, and service department. Complex pricing algorithms that considered dozens of factors became necessary. The need arose for a dealer portal and a system to manage tender sales.

This is where the concept of Time-to-Market comes in. It’s a measure of the time between when a business need arises and when it's actually implemented in a working system. This metric reflects a company's ability to quickly adapt its tools to shifting demands from the market, customers, and regulators.

The Risks of a Long Time-to-Market

A long Time-to-Market for a CRM system creates roadblocks for a company's growth. When it takes too long to make changes, companies start running into several problems:

• Falling behind market trends: While you're busy implementing changes in your CRM, the market can shift again, making those changes outdated before they're even live;
• Inefficient use of resources: Long development and implementation cycles mean spending time and money on functionality that might be obsolete by the time it launches;
• Losing a competitive edge: Companies that can adapt their CRM systems faster gain an advantage in winning over customers and responding to their needs.

These issues lead to real business risks:

• Financial losses: The company not only spends resources on lengthy system modifications but also loses potential profit due to its inability to react quickly to market changes;
• Reduced business process efficiency: Outdated or clunky processes in the CRM slow down employees and lower the quality of the customer service.
• Losing relevance with customers: An inability to quickly adapt the CRM to new customer needs leads to lower satisfaction and loyalty;
• Wasted analytical work: All that great analysis, re-engineering, and strategic planning can become pointless if you can't actually put it into action in your CRM in a timely manner.

The importance of a fast-adapting CRM was highlighted in the Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites report for 2022, where 72% of business leaders said it was a critical factor for staying competitive.

The Architecture of Modern CRMs

A CRM's architecture plays a huge part in keeping Time-to-Market short. Modern solutions are built with a smart separation between the core platform and the business-specific solutions on top of it. This gives you much more freedom to implement complex business logic.

What Makes Up a Modern CRM System:

• Data structure: The foundation of the system, usually implemented as database tables with fields. A flexible data structure allows the system to be quickly adapted to new business requirements;
• User interface: Forms, widgets, and pages for interacting with data. Modern CRMs provide tools for quick interface configuration and customization;
• Client-side scripts: The logic that controls how a user interacts with the interface — how it reacts to clicks, what it highlights, and so on;
• Server-side processing: The "behind-the-scenes" logic that processes data before it's saved, including things like validation, calculations, and other operations;
• Integration potential: Ensures the CRM can interact with other systems in the corporate landscape;
• Analytical tools: Reports and dashboards for analyzing data and making management decisions.

CRM Architecture Features That Affect Time-to-Market:

• Modularity: Breaking the system down into separate components allows for making changes locally without affecting the entire system;
• Ease of configuration: The ability to change the data structure, interfaces, and business logic using visual editors (no-code), more complex logic with simple scripts embedded in visual editors (low-code), and developing custom components (interface elements, complex handlers, integrations) in a built-in programming language using standard system elements (pro-code);
• Multi-level environments: Having separate, safe spaces for development, testing, and live production, with easy ways to move changes between them.
• Version control system: Tracking all changes in the system, including object settings, visual form displays, access rights, etc.;
• Change merging mechanisms: The ability to combine changes from different developers with automatic conflict detection;
• Change rollback mechanism: The ability to quickly revert to a previous version of the system if problems occur during the implementation of changes.
• Live customization: The ability to configure the look and behavior of the system directly from the user interface with the option to apply changes instantly.

CRM Components That Affect Time-to-Market

Modern CRM systems for enterprise-level companies include several components that directly help shorten the Time-to-Market. They allow the system to be quickly adapted to changing business requirements.

1. Visual editors for forms, portals, workflows, lists, reports, integrations, etc.

These allow you to configure the system in a visual mode, using a drag-and-drop interface. This gives you the ability to quickly adapt the application to new requirements without needing to write code. 

2. Version control system and staging

This provides a controlled development process, allowing you to track all changes made to the system. Staging, in turn, gives you the ability to test changes before they are implemented in the live production environment, minimizing the risk of failures.

3. Integration capabilities

Modern CRMs must easily integrate with other systems in the corporate landscape. This includes a well-documented API with examples, REST clients for communicating with other systems, and support for various integration protocols. It's also important that any tables and fields added by a user are accessible via the API, both from within the system and for external applications (with the right access permissions).

4. Flexible access rights system

This allows for quickly configuring access to information for different groups of users, which is vital when business processes or the organizational structure change. Here are the access rights features which improve Time-to-Market:

• Inheritance: Allows you to use a set of rights previously defined for another, broader group or role as a baseline, and to change access rights in a cascade by managing only the parent group or role.
• Impersonation: Allows an administrator to quickly test the rights granted to a user by looking at the system in the same way that user sees it.
• Delegation: Automatically transfers all access rights to a deputy while an employee is away.

5. Widgets and Portals

A modular approach to building interfaces that allows 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 give you the ability to implement complex logic with minimal code, which significantly speeds up the process of developing and implementing changes.

7. Pro-code capabilities

The ability to develop your own system components, tools, and interfaces that work seamlessly with the vendor's CRM platform, using a popular built-in programming language, allows you to quickly and inexpensively implement customizations of any complexity to meet business needs, without waiting for such functionality to appear in a future vendor release.

SimpleOne B2B CRM – A System That Ensures a Fast Time-to-Market

SimpleOne B2B CRM is designed with all the principles and mechanisms mentioned above in mind to ensure a fast Time-to-Market for its enterprise clients, allowing them to react quickly to market changes.

A unique feature of the SimpleOne platform is its extended data model for records (REM, Record Extended Model). This is a modern way of organizing data that lets you dynamically add to the structure of records without changing the main data table. Instead of rigid table inheritance, REM uses a single base table and adds its own system of attributes. This makes developing and adapting complex business processes much simpler and faster, shortening your Time-to-Market.

In terms of integration, SimpleOne offers a REST API and ready-made connectors, making it easy to integrate the CRM into your existing IT infrastructure. This ensures the integrity of business processes.

It's important to note that SimpleOne maintains a balance between simplicity and power. Alongside its no-code and low-code tools, the system supports pro-code development for complex, non-standard scenarios and interfaces.

Thus, the system provides enterprise-level companies with everything they need to achieve an exceptionally short Time-to-Market.

Conclusion

A CRM system's Time-to-Market directly affects a company's ability to adapt to market changes and customer demands. A short Time-to-Market allows companies to:

• React faster to market changes.
• Quickly implement new business processes.
• Reduce the costs of developing and maintaining the system.

Choosing a CRM with this in mind is a decision that will affect your business's effectiveness for years to come. Companies that can adapt their tools quickly gain a real competitive advantage in  working with clients, improving business process efficiency, and developing new lines of business.