How to build a roadmap toward lower costs for your small business
An increasing number of small and medium businesses (SMB) are placing technology at the core of their operations strategy. And in the current economic headwinds, it’s important that any solution you choose contributes to lower overall costs.
But where do you even begin? Learn why a technology roadmap is a crucial starting point for any SMB and how to create your own.
Time to read: 3 minutes
Technology has never been more critical to SMBs’ long-term and short-term success. We’ve seen an era of unprecedented technological innovation, stemming from the unpredictable market conditions caused by the pandemic. 71% of growing SMBs say their business survived the pandemic because of digitisation.
While the sudden need to support remote and hybrid work has seen many businesses invest in technologies for operations and team collaboration, buying into one-off technical solutions has left a large amount of room to find efficiencies. There are budget considerations too – SMBs have an opportunity to consolidate their tech stack and reduce costs by uniting their teams on one trusted platform. In fact, in a recent study by Salesforce, we found that 89% of Customer 360 clients achieve positive ROI in just nine months.*
In the latest SMB Efficiency Toolkit, Salesforce’s Adrian Towsey explains why your streamlined technology stack has become a business fundamental.
What do we mean by ‘technology roadmap’ and why is it important?
When it comes to your business technology, a roadmap outlines where you are now, where you need to go and why – and how you’re going to get there. It requires a step back, getting a plan in place and then executing against it. This plan can take plenty of different forms, including diagrams or flowcharts. The key is that it needs to sit hand-in-hand with your business strategy.
With almost every industry and company type at risk of disruption from new digital business models, businesses of all sizes use roadmaps to guide their digital transformation. Successful roadmaps tend to incorporate deep understanding of businesses’ current practices, tools, people and skill sets – a hint as to why SMBs may have an advantage when it comes to creating and executing a roadmap.
Before creating a roadmap, what are the risks – and opportunities – SMBs should know?
Many SMBs tend to adopt stop-gap technology solutions in a reactive way due to the intense day-to-day pace of a smaller business – being so busy working in your business that it’s hard to work on your business.
That reactivity can lead to a loose patchwork of technology, with siloed, disconnected apps that may not offer the full benefit of any technology because they’re not part of an overarching strategy.
Less time and fewer resources are major challenges for SMBs, but there’s also a massive opportunity. You’ll often be dealing with less complexity in your systems and organisation, unlike the international conglomerates who might struggle to get visibility into operations across different functions or regions. Most SMBs will also have less ‘technology debt’ – that is, the amount of future technical rework caused by a short-term solution.
In other words, SMBs tend to have a clean slate that can drive faster innovation. That’s why taking the time to create a solid roadmap is so important, potentially making the difference between a fast, successful transformation or a lumbering technological ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ that can’t keep up with your business needs.
Take Go1 for example. The Brisbane-based SMB is an online platform that curates professional development courses and has seen fast growth. To scale with this demand, Go1 President Marc Havercroft knows that an integrated technology stack is now crucial to moving at the pace they need. Get Go1’s full story in the SMB Efficiency Toolkit.
5 considerations when planning a technology roadmap
- Strategy. How do your tech roadmap and business strategy work together? How will future solutions integrate with your small business CRM? Is your business strategy reflecting the importance of digital transformation, and is your roadmap reflecting your broader business needs or goals?
- Vision. What’s the end state you want to see for your business? As a fast-growing and evolving business, where will it end up? Does your roadmap serve the business where it is now and where it’s going next?
- Priorities. Consider the impact, the effort, the cost and the dependencies that will drive the prioritisation of each piece.
- Single source of truth. Which platform will be at the core of your tech stack to enable a single source of truth? How will new or existing tools and systems connect to this single source of truth and to each other?
- Alignment and execution. Look to get buy-in across the entire business. Is everyone aligned? What are the roles and responsibilities? Are they clearly defined? What sort of oversight will you use to stay on track?
Your roadmap will be unique to your business, but most likely it will need these basic elements
- Goals: the business capabilities your tech will deliver.
- New system capabilities: features and functionality.
- Release plans: phases and sequencing within the roadmap.
- Milestones: time-bound deliverables within each phase.
- Resources: people, roles and responsibilities, and cross-functional dependencies.
- Training: a rollout or change management plan that drives adoption and equips employees to use new platforms or processes.
- Risk factors: internal and external factors that might impact delivery of a milestone.
- Status reports: progress updates and communication of any delays, complications or adjustments.
Who should be involved in creating a roadmap for the business?
IT teams often own the creation of a tech roadmap, to the point where the term ‘IT roadmap’ is common. No matter what, top-to-bottom alignment is vital. Once the business strategy and technology roadmap are in sync, the goal should be getting everyone in the business aligned to both.
But let’s back up a bit. Getting your strategies in sync starts with mapping out business processes – end-to-end and cross-functionally – empowering you to optimise the technology in a holistic way, not just for one team. That requires collaboration with functional leaders, whether it’s sales, service, marketing or operations.
On-the-ground input from end users will also be critical, both for rolling out the right tools in the right form and for driving long-term adoption after new capabilities go live.
Once you’ve started executing against your map, how can you stay on track – or even adapt as you go?
Iteration is key to both. To make sure your roadmap delivers successful changes, you’ll want to encourage a constant feedback loop from everyone, including end users, leaders and executives. Stakeholders should feel empowered to share feedback, knowing that systems and tools can be iterated and optimised.
That’s when you can build momentum around the tech that’s in place and buy-in for what the roadmap will deliver in future phases. This can help absorb short-term pain points and keep everyone aligned to the bigger picture laid out in the roadmap. And adapting to new circumstances, events or business needs tends to be a lot easier once people are aligned to a broader vision.
*Source: 2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study.
Data is from a survey of 3,706 Salesforce customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of Salesforce. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
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