Something just for....the CFO

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Why going evergreen with your solution stack makes financial sense

While your CIO ponders the weight of technical debt hanging over the business, you’re probably thinking about how to avoid investing in technology that costs you more to run and maintain in the long term than it returns in value.

As CFO, that requires a strategic view of how you invest and in what. That includes understanding why choosing a standalone system (e.g., a CRM) - no matter the promise of savings - without an underlying evergreen business platform will eventually stop delivering an ROI.

Driving value from today’s technology isn’t about comparing one CRM (or Sales or Marketing) solution against another, but investing in a single tech stack that will:

1. 1. Support the business’s desire to be customer-centric and enable employee collaboration
   2. Not turn into a financial millstone or a point of cybersecurity vulnerability
   3. Have a committed support and development lifecycle (that goes well into the foreseeable future)
   4. Grow with you (so you don’t have to reinvest all over again)
   5. Cost you less than never ending upgrades to multiple, non-integrated solutions

When you compare Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement vs a single standalone CRM application, you can bank on the first option to deliver far more value and longevity.

With its underlying low-code platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is part of a broader, comprehensive add-as-you-need-it business ecosystem with unified communications and shared data, and has an evergreen roadmap. So, you’re going to reap financial and operation efficiency benefits and savings even if you just want CRM capabilities and low OPEX to start with.

When you invest in a Microsoft ecosystem, you may initially buy an application to offer customer service or sales or marketing. But, what you're really investing in is the underlying Power Platform - in other words, the potential to add, grow, develop and transform without having to do a complete upgrade or a costly reimplementation. And you’ll no longer have to live with the frustration of keeping budget aside to keep your business-critical legacy system up and running.

You’ll also be investing in a platform which allows your business to cost-effectively develop or add a range of enterprise applications – from secure portals and Power Pages (for websites), to ERP, without having to reinvent your technology infrastructure. As you become more sophisticated in how you want to sell, communicate, convert, transact, and report, so does your technology. And with Microsoft behind you, you know that the platform is being continually invested in, improved, and updated. So, when, for instance, you need to add a new communications channel, it can be set up with a minimal budget – usually because Microsoft has already added an out-of-the-box capability.

With Microsoft at the heart of your business, your future technology is going to be cheaper and more flexible. The cost of ongoing innovation will be lower – but not slower. You’ll be investing in a strategic platform that's going to support rather than hold you back, and deliver a better, bigger and brighter return on investment – and a whole new approach to customer-centricity.

So, our advice? Invest once. Invest well.