As we can see in these five case studies, one of the most common elements of all CRM projects is building a comprehensive 360-degree client view that will be a supporting pillar for sales, marketing, and services processes automation. It is also important to support the company in building long-lasting relationships with clients, while managing the business and resources more efficiently based on insightful decisions, at a reduced cost of operation.

A comparison of these five case studies also reveals that every organization must implement its own unique sales process based on its vertical, products, industry, culture, and market position. What works for one company will often totally flop for another. As a case in point, I remember implementing a CRM solution for a company in Hungary that had the mother company in Norway. It was the same company, the same product, and the same industry, but each location had different sales processes that had to be optimized to the local company's culture and market position.

When you start the daunting task of designing the architecture of your CRM solution, you will find that you have some architectural questions that need to be answered in order to build a solid foundation:

Then there are a few concepts that you need to think about when you're finding a balance of these viewpoints:

Stakeholders, architectural description, viewpoints, and perspectives will be in your Solution Blueprint (SBP), along with a process catalog, use cases, and integration points, all of which we will cover in later chapters.

There are many dependencies to be considered; for example, the main users claim to need totally different information from what the staff members at the head office need. This is really connected information that supports a multistep process, which is often built on top of the same data from the central repository of customer data.

The business managers say it's crucial to have real-time summary reporting throughout the day, which may slow the transaction flow significantly, which is not acceptable to the main users of the system. Meanwhile, IT members are worried about adopting new technology, security, and compatibility issues. As you can see in the figure that follows, there are a number of different stakeholders involved in any CRM system.

The design of a sustainable CRM architecture will have to consider many dependencies, such as stakeholders, data centers, functional requirements, business processes, the feedback loop, and review management. In Figure 1.18, you can see these dependencies mapped out:

Figure 1.18: The dependencies illustrated

The case studies we've looked at in this chapter also demonstrate the need for an architect to identify and connect with all the key stakeholders. They need to understand stakeholders' objectives, perspectives, and conflicting priorities, and design an architecture that satisfies all the business requirements effectively within a reasonable TCO/ROI.

On top of a great CRM architecture design, there are a few important success factors that I will introduce here and discuss in more detail throughout this book: