Paying for a platform, working in spreadsheets
You chose Salesforce because it was the safe choice. Years later, your team uses accounts, contacts, opportunities and a few reports. The parts of your process that are specific to your business, such as how you schedule work, price jobs or manage renewals, live in spreadsheets or a separate system beside it. Every change to the setup needs a consultant or an admin you share with another department. Licence renewals arrive and someone asks what you are actually getting for it.
Why the fit drifts
Salesforce is built to be configured for almost any business, which is its strength. The cost of that flexibility is that fitting it to your process takes skilled configuration, and keeping it fitted as the process changes takes ongoing administration. When that administration is under-resourced, the setup freezes, the business moves on, and the gap fills with workarounds.
The question is not whether Salesforce is good. It is whether the way your business uses it justifies what it takes to run it.
A fair comparison
| Factor | Salesforce | Custom CRM |
|---|---|---|
| Breadth of features | Very wide, including marketing, service and analytics add-ons | Only what you need, built for your process |
| Fit to unusual processes | Achievable through configuration and development | Built around them from the start |
| Ongoing cost structure | Per-user licences plus admin or consultant time | Hosting plus maintenance and development you choose to do |
| Ecosystem and integrations | Large marketplace of connectors | Integrations built for the systems you use |
| Change speed | Depends on admin capacity and platform limits | Depends on your developer's availability |
| Ownership | Data yours, platform rented | Code and data yours |
| Risk | Low platform risk, risk of poor fit | Build and maintenance risk, which needs managing |
A custom CRM is not automatically cheaper. It moves cost from licences to development and maintenance. The case for it rests on fit, ownership and removing the workarounds, not on a lower bill alone.
How we approach the decision
- Map what your team actually does day to day, including the spreadsheets and side systems, not just what is in Salesforce.
- Review your Salesforce setup: which objects, fields, automations and reports are used, and which are not.
- Identify the gaps: processes that sit outside Salesforce and why.
- Compare options honestly: reconfigure Salesforce, move to a simpler off-the-shelf CRM, or build a custom CRM. We set out what each would involve.
- If custom is right, design it around your process: the records you really use, the workflows specific to your business, and integrations with your accounting, operations and email systems.
- Plan migration from Salesforce through its APIs and data export, including history, attachments and the automations that need rebuilding, with a period where both run side by side.
If the answer is that a well-configured Salesforce would serve you better than anything we could build, we tell you that, and we can help reconfigure it or recommend a specialist.
What a good outcome looks like
Either a Salesforce setup your team actually works in, with the spreadsheets retired, or a CRM built around your process that you own and can change when the business changes. In both cases, one system holds the truth about customers and deals, and the workarounds disappear.
Whichever route you take, the review itself tends to be useful. Writing down how the business actually sells and delivers, and comparing that with what the CRM holds, usually exposes a few process problems that no software choice would fix on its own, such as unclear ownership of a stage or two teams recording the same thing differently. Those are worth fixing before any build or reconfiguration, because software tends to set whatever process it is given in concrete.
Signs it is time to review your Salesforce
- Your team uses a small fraction of what you pay for.
- Key parts of your process live in spreadsheets next to Salesforce.
- Simple changes need an external consultant.
- Licence renewals prompt the question 'what are we getting for this?'
- Users describe the system as something they have to feed rather than something that helps.