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RevOps Guide
A New Era Alternative to Legacy CRM
The Business Case for New Era CRM
Introducing Creatio: A New Era CRM for RevOps
RevOps has emerged as a pivotal function in organizations striving to align their sales, marketing, and customer success teams around a unified strategy. RevOps acts as the connective tissue that ensures these departments work cohesively toward driving predictable revenue growth and delivering exceptional customer experiences. By focusing on process optimization, technology integration, and data-driven insights, RevOps enables businesses to break down silos, streamline operations, and maximize the efficiency of the entire revenue engine.
However, to achieve these ambitious goals, RevOps professionals need tools that are as dynamic and adaptable as the challenges they face. Traditional, legacy CRMs often fall short, with rigid architectures, complex user interfaces, and a heavy reliance on IT resources. These limitations hinder RevOps teams from implementing new processes, optimizing workflows, and responding quickly to changing market demands. Without a New Era CRM, RevOps professionals are left battling inefficiencies and delays, which can stifle innovation and slow growth.
Creatio represents the vision of New Era CRM innovation as outlined in part 1 of this series. Creatio was designed from the ground-up to address the limitations of legacy systems and empower RevOps teams with
Creatio Advantages Over Legacy CRM Systems
As outlined above, RevOps professionals need a New Era CRM system like Creatio, powered by cutting-edge technologies and innovative approaches that can significantly enhance operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance. Figure 1 illustrates a summary of the key advantages.
Figure 1. Business advantages of Creatio over Legacy CRM
Below, we explore the key advantages of a New Era CRM solution over legacy systems:
1. Speed and Cost Efficiency
New Era CRM systems offer composable architectures and user-friendly interfaces that accelerate the customization and integration of CRM functionalities. These systems streamline the creation and enhancement of business processes and workflows, encouraging business users to take on tasks traditionally handled by IT professionals. As a result, organizations can significantly shorten the implementation cycle for new features and updates. Allowing them to benefit from innovations much faster.
Example:
Creatio’s New Era CRM has reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) for its customers by dramatically simplifying the effort typically associated with legacy systems and by minimizing reliance on specialized technical expertise and extensive IT support.
With RevOps and sales users empowered to manage Creatio independently with no-code tools, organizations can reduce technical support costs. This allows resources to be reallocated to more strategic initiatives, all while keeping operational expenses in check.
2. High User Engagement and Adoption
Organizations using New Era CRMs experience higher user engagement and adoption rates compared to legacy systems. Users are more likely to embrace New Era CRM software thanks to intuitive interfaces and user-friendly
Example:
Creatio customer RevOps teams experience a much higher rate of adoption, which has resulted in streamlined processes, reduced manual work, and accelerated response times —all contributing to enhanced customer satisfaction.
By leveraging no-code tools, intuitive interfaces and seamless integrations, Creatio encourages teams to work more efficiently and simply, and adopt the system with ease and virtually no stress. Moreover, by providing deeper data insights and enabling more personalized interactions, Creatio helps organizations improve decision-making and achieve higher sales conversion rates.
3. Agility and Scalability
New Era CRM systems' flexibility allow businesses to scale rapidly and adapt easily to changing needs, emerging challenges and growth opportunities. As organizations evolve, they can add or modify CRM components as needed without the limitations of a rigid, one-size-fits-all architecture. This adaptability is key for organizations operating in dynamic markets, where the ability to pivot quickly is essential to staying competitive.
Example:
Creatio’s ability to quickly integrate new functionalities or adjust processes helps businesses remain agile in the face of changing customer demands or shifting market conditions.
Whether it’s launching a new product, expanding into new regions, or introducing a new service, Creatio supports these growth initiatives with minimal disruption. This flexibility allows businesses to align their CRM systems with evolving business goals, leading to long-term success and sustained growth.
Defining a Business Case for Migration
Migrating from legacy CRM systems to modern alternatives can yield substantial returns on investment (ROI) for organizations. According to Nucleus Research, many companies transitioning away from traditional CRM platforms have experienced a positive ROI within 12 months. This swift payback period is attributed to enhanced usability, reduced maintenance costs, and improved alignment with business processes offered by contemporary CRM solutions. By adopting more adaptable and user-friendly platforms, organizations not only streamline operations but also empower their teams to engage more effectively with the system, leading to increased productivity and customer satisfaction.
Below, we outline the key areas that contribute to the overall improved ROI of migrating to a New Era CRM, supporting business growth and long-term value:
Direct Cost Savings
Legacy CRMs licensing costs typically include upfront payments and hidden fees. Even though basic pricing models can be advertised for as little as $25 per user per month, since their scope of features is very limited, businesses can quickly outgrow them. This forces companies to upgrade to more advanced packages which can increase the licensing costs to $200-300 or more per user monthly, especially when including premium features like AI, or marketing automation tools that often come as separate add-ons.
Additionally, businesses need to consider setup and implementation costs that can range from $10,000 for small deployments to even $50,000 annually for mid-sized organizations, with extra fees sometimes applied for additional data storage or mobile app access. IT support for ongoing maintenance can cost smaller companies about $10-25,000 per year, while larger organizations might spend over $100,000-200,000 — or higher — annually ramping up the total cost of legacy CRM ownership.
In contrast, New Era CRM should include essential features like AI-driven automation in all versions of the product, with no additional charges for core capabilities. It is important to consider these as “table stakes” for the future and not require additional add-on fees to gain access to these features.
A New Era CRM platform provides no-code tools which minimizes the need for technical assistance, reducing IT overhead and eliminating complex maintenance requirements. Customizations are performed directly by non-technical users as desired, eliminating high costs associated with lengthy development cycles and IT support. Businesses migrating to New Era CRM can potentially save anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, depending on the scale of their operations.
Increased Operational Efficiency
Legacy CRM systems usually require many months to be fully implemented. According to CRMfresh, implementations can take between 6-12 months (or longer) for larger companies with extensive customization and integration needs. Similarly, implementing changes in the system can take months as it requires IT professionals to code all components by hand.
In contrast, a New Era CRM with a no-code approach significantly speeds up the development timeline with business users configuring many aspects independently using pre-built components that can be quickly assembled using drag-and-drop tools. As a result, organizations can reduce IT department involvement and cut development and implementation times from months to just weeks. This way businesses can quickly roll out new features or updates, increasing their operational efficiency.
To illustrate, Howdens, the UK's leading specialist kitchen supplier, faced the possibility of a lengthy 18-month deployment process with a legacy CRM (Salesforce), which would have cost them millions of dollars. However, by choosing a New Era CRM (Creatio), they successfully implemented the platform in just 12 weeks, significantly cutting down the deployment time and associated costs.
Since its deployment, Howdens continues to scale Creatio across its hundreds of depots, adding filters, features and functionality to continuously improve the efficiency of its employees and the business. According to Martin Mercer, Director of User Experience at Howdens, “Using traditional developer techniques this would have taken us months to change but utilising the flexibility of the Creatio platform meant we were able to make these changes in just three weeks.”
Enhanced User Adoption and Productivity
As outlined above, traditional SaaS CRM systems often face significant challenges with user adoption due to their complexity and the high costs associated with customization. These platforms are typically rigid and require extensive technical expertise to tailor to specific business needs, leading to user frustration and reluctance to fully engage with the system.
When organizations move to New Era CRM, they see greater user engagement and higher adoption rates. For example, at BSN Sports, one of the leading sports apparel and equipment suppliers, the user adoption rate reached 100% thanks to the platform’s user-friendly features that directly support employees in their daily tasks. It was only natural then for employees to seamlessly integrate the system into their workflow and significantly improve their productivity.