I am writing this article from my own experience as CEO and from dozens of projects with companies in the Swiss mid-market. The questions that come up in the boardroom at the start are never “Which CRM should we buy?” They are different. How do we start, and where? What do we do so we don’t get lost and the whole thing doesn’t become too complex? And how do we break such an initiative into sensible steps? The good news up front: there is a proven, pragmatic path that takes a few weeks and costs your leaders only individual half-days.
At the end you hold three things in your hands: a target picture (where I want to go), a digitalization roadmap (the path to the goal), and a high-level budget (what it will cost me).
They connect technology from the outset with their processes and goals. McKinsey’s “The State of AI” study (2025) makes this clear. Almost all companies now use AI, but the group that achieves a measurable profit contribution stands out for one factor in particular. These companies have fundamentally redesigned their ways of working, rather than putting new tools on old processes. This is exactly where the opportunity for the mid-market lies. Those who first clarify the customer process and then digitize it belong to the successful group from the start.
For Switzerland, the digitalization study by the School of Business FHNW, with more than 2,500 companies surveyed, confirms the link. Those who proceed in a structured way with a clear direction are significantly more satisfied with the results of their own digitalization. What matters is what structure means — and what it does not. You do not need an enterprise-wide digital strategy that takes months to develop and ties up leadership capacity. You need your existing corporate strategy as a compass, and from it a focused target picture for the concrete digitalization initiative — here, the customer process.
A clear current-state picture consists of three things: a picture of your customer process as it actually runs today, an overview of which systems are in use and where which customer data sit, and an honest list of friction points and gaps. That is lean and focused, and it is doable.
The reassuring part is that all the knowledge for this already exists in your company. Your sales lead knows which customers used to order regularly and no longer do. Your inside sales team knows which details they have to gather by hand from several systems for every quote. Your IT knows which systems are connected to what. So you need neither a weeks-long survey nor prepared documents on your side — you need the right method to make that knowledge visible together with us.
The core of this method is a well-prepared workshop with representatives of the executive team and dedicated subject-matter experts from marketing, sales and service. There we walk through the customer process from lead to loyalty with you.
The exercise sounds simple, and that is exactly its power. Not infrequently it shows that leadership, sales and service had three different pictures of the same process in their heads until then. At the end of the workshop, for the first time, the one shared picture is on the wall, and the biggest opportunities are visible to everyone.
The target picture describes how your customer process will work in future — digitized, reasonably automated and with integrated AI. It emerges from the comparison with the current state. This is where we stand; that is where we want to go.
An example makes it tangible. Take a trading company with 8,000 customers, 2,000 of whom have not ordered in more than a year. The target picture then states, for instance, that inactive customers will in future be recognized automatically and reactivated with matching offers, measured by revenue from reactivated customers after twelve months. A vague intention (“we want to become more digital”) becomes a concrete, measurable initiative.
A target picture is clear when it is prioritized and owned. Prioritized means few fields of action with a clear ranking by business benefit. Owned means the entire executive team and the key users in your company stand behind it, because they developed it together.
In a structured way, in the workshops and short alignments per area, and always along the customer process. The key users — the people who work with the processes every day — bring in their concrete issues, such as double data entry, missing information in customer conversations, or manual workarounds. From that, business cases are derived, prioritized by benefit and bundled into work packages. The executive team decides the ranking.
For most mid-sized companies the answer is a clearly ordered interplay of two cores. The ERP remains given and, as the financial-operational truth, owns orders, articles and finance. Alongside it sits a customer platform or CRM with marketing, sales and service functions. The webshop and other tools connect via defined interfaces. Why these two core systems form the foundation of every company, and how third-party systems are added cleanly, we have set out in the article Best of Breed is not a choice, it is reality.
The target architecture emerges as a high-level target picture based on the existing system landscape, and its central element is clarified data ownership. For every data domain — from the customer master through orders to marketing and service data — it is defined which of the two core systems owns the data and which systems only use them. That way the data stay consistent everywhere: the foundation for reliable reporting and for every use of AI. In this architecture, AI is not a system of its own, but a capability that sits on clean, connected customer data and makes sales and marketing measurably more effective. Why the sequence is use case, data architecture, then AI, we have explained in the article First the use case, then data architecture, then AI. Also worth reading in more depth: AI has made its way into sales sales – but without clean data, it’s a waste of timeThe alignment follows five steps and takes four to ten weeks, depending on how deep you go:
Condensed, you receive a target picture (where I want to go), a digitalization roadmap (the path to the goal) and a high-level budget (what it will cost me). The roadmap deliberately starts with an MVP — a first initiative with quickly visible value. After that you decide on the investment, with a complete basis.
By four statements your entire executive team can sign. We have a shared, documented picture of our current state. We have a prioritized target picture with metrics that everyone stands behind. We know which system will take on which role in future, and which requirements from the business units will be implemented in which order. And we know the investment and the expected benefit over the coming years. Anyone familiar with the term will recognize a Target Operating Model (TOM) for the customer process — here in a lean form that fits the mid-market. How this thinking model gives a CRM implementation the larger frame is shown in our article Target Operating Model: How your CRM implementation moves the whole company forward [INSERT LINK ONCE PUBLISHED]. With these four answers you take your investment decision in a focused, professional and confident way.
This is exactly the path we take with you in Alignment, our offering for the start of digitalizing marketing, sales and service. Together with your executive team and your subject-matter experts, we develop the current state, the target picture, the target system architecture and the prioritized requirements, condensed into a digitalization roadmap with high-level budget as the decision basis.
