THE SITUATION
A software development company had spent several years building and evolving a bespoke CRM platform for a long-term strategic customer.
The system had grown around that customer’s requirements, processes and priorities, with the client heavily influencing the development roadmap. It worked well in that environment and both the customer and the software company’s board believed the product had the potential to serve a much wider market.
Oak Consult was initially brought in to develop a go-to-market strategy.
Before a credible launch plan could be built, however, there was a more fundamental question to answer:
Was this a product ready for a wider market, or a successful bespoke system that still needed to become one?
CLARITY
The original brief focused on proposition, pricing, market positioning and launch.
Our first task was to understand what was actually being taken to market.
We worked through the product in detail, defining its core proposition, modular structure, pricing options, target customers and the internal sales and service processes that would be needed to support it.
Alongside this, we benchmarked competing CRM products, their functionality, pricing, positioning and routes to market.
That work began to expose a gap between the product as it existed for its anchor customer and the product the wider market would expect.
The issue was therefore no longer simply how to market the CRM.
It was how to turn a successful customer-specific solution into a credible, repeatable and commercially viable product.
OVERSIGHT
That required looking beyond the software itself.
Oak worked with the company board and non-executive directors, development teams and the existing customer to understand the product from several perspectives.
We considered the competitive market, prospective customer needs, pricing, product functionality, development capacity, support requirements, sales capability and the practical implications of onboarding additional customers.
Looking across those different lenses changed the shape of the challenge.
A product could be technically capable and valuable to its existing customer while still being difficult to sell, support or scale in a wider market.
The go-to-market plan therefore had to address not only marketing and sales, but also the product, operating model and development roadmap behind them.
REALITY
The evidence showed that the CRM had real potential, but it was not yet ready for a broader commercial launch.
It lacked a distinct brand identity and had important gaps in functionality when compared with established competitors. Its user interface had also developed unevenly over time as functionality had been added around the needs of one customer.
There were operational issues too.
Development priorities needed greater structure, customer requirements needed clearer agreement and communication, and the business needed a roadmap that separated strategically important product development from individual customer requests.
The reality was that launching immediately would have meant marketing a product before the product and organisation behind it were ready to scale.
That changed the plan.
EXECUTION
Oak developed a revised go-to-market strategy and implementation plan for board approval.
Once agreed, we stayed involved to help deliver it rather than stopping at the recommendation stage.
Working alongside the development, sales and marketing teams, Oak coordinated multiple workstreams required to prepare both the product and the business for launch.
These included product-roadmap development, brand and proposition work, a new website and supporting content, email marketing capability, suspect and prospect development, proposal templates, sales presentations and a structured product-demonstration capability.
The development team also introduced clearer ways of prioritising and agreeing new requirements so that product development could support both existing customers and the wider commercial roadmap.
THE RESULT
Within six months, the bespoke CRM had moved from a largely customer-specific system to a fully launched and modular commercial product with its own standalone, trademarked brand.
A sales pipeline was developing, new customers were coming on board and recurring monthly revenue was growing alongside additional income from customer-specific development.
The underlying product had also improved significantly for the original anchor customer.
What emerged was a more flexible modular bespoke CRM platform capable of supporting different markets and integrating with wider back-office and online systems.
Just as importantly, the development operation had become more structured. New requirements were prioritised and agreed more clearly, internally and with customers, rather than simply being added to an evolving development queue.
THE CORE LESSON
The original challenge appeared to be a go-to-market problem.
It wasn’t.
Before the business could successfully take the bespoke CRM to a wider market, it needed clarity about what the product actually was, oversight across product, customer, commercial and operational realities, an evidence-based view of what was and wasn’t ready, and a practical plan to close those gaps.
Only then did go-to-market execution make sense.
That is the kind of problem CORE is designed for: the presenting requirement may be clear, but the real work is often understanding what has to be true across the business for the desired outcome to succeed.