Custom CRM vs Salesforce

The symptom is always the same. People have started keeping a spreadsheet alongside the CRM, half the custom fields are abandoned, and nobody fully trusts the pipeline report. Somebody suggests the CRM is the problem.

Occasionally it is. More often the CRM is doing its job and the frustration is coming from somewhere next to it. The four causes below look identical from a management meeting and cost very different amounts to fix.

Which of the four you have

The cheaper fix nobody offers you

Most CRM frustration is a gap between what sales promised and what operations knows. Sales has no visibility of capacity, stock or job status, so they commit to things the business then has to absorb. Operations finds out when the order arrives.

Replacing the CRM does nothing about that, because the missing information was never in the CRM to begin with. Building a connection between the CRM and the operational system does, and it costs a fraction of a replacement while keeping every process your sales team already knows.

When somebody quotes you for a bespoke CRM without first asking what operations runs on, that is the question they skipped.

The seat arithmetic, done honestly

This is the one case where replacement can pay for itself, and it turns entirely on headcount. Work it out rather than arguing about it.

1. 1Take your annual CRM licence cost. Include the tier upgrades you took to get one feature, and any per-user add-ons.
2. 2Add what you pay a partner or consultant each year for configuration and support. For a lot of companies this is the larger number and it never appears in the comparison.
3. 3Add the annual increase. Ask what it has actually been for the last three years rather than what the contract caps it at.
4. 4Project all of that over five years at your expected headcount, not today’s.
5. 5Compare against a build plus a support retainer over the same five years.

A build is almost never cheaper in year one. It is frequently cheaper by year three and usually cheaper by year five, because the capital cost stops and the per-seat cost does not. Whether that matters depends on whether you would rather hold cash now or spend less later, which is a finance decision rather than a software one.

When a bespoke CRM is genuinely right

There is a real case for it, and it is narrower than the people selling it suggest.

• Your sales process has stages the mainstream products have no concept of, so everybody fakes it by misusing a field.
• The data you track is specific to your industry and currently lives in six custom fields nobody maintains.
• You have bent a generic CRM so far out of shape that it now needs a consultant to change anything.
• The pipeline and the delivery work are genuinely one process in your business, and splitting them across two systems is the thing causing the pain.

One of those is not enough. Two or three together usually is.

What replacing it actually involves

The build is the easy part. Migration is where these projects get expensive, because twenty thousand contact records accumulated over a decade are never as clean as anyone expects. Deduplication, deciding which of three spellings of a company name is right, and preserving correspondence history are usually the longest lines in the scope.

Bands and timescales are published. A system covering one team starts in the lower band. Something several departments run on sits in the middle band or above, and migration is the line that moves it. How we build a bespoke CRM sets out what is included.