Salesforce

This question usually comes from businesses that have priced Salesforce at the enterprise tier and assumed it applies to them. It often doesn’t. Salesforce has plans that suit smaller teams, and the economics tend to look different once you account for what a broken process actually costs. If your business is losing two or three leads a month to slow follow-up or poor visibility, that’s a recoverable number. Over a year, it usually dwarfs the cost of a proper CRM setup. The more honest question isn’t “can we justify it” but “what is the current cost of not having it.

Because the last one was probably set up by the software vendor or an IT person following a setup guide, not someone who spent time understanding how your team actually works. CRM adoption fails when the system adds steps to a process instead of removing them. If a sales rep has to log into three screens to record a note they used to write in an email, they won’t do it. The configuration work we do is specifically aimed at making the system faster to use than whatever your team is doing now. That’s the only reason adoption actually sticks.

For most businesses, a foundational setup runs four to eight weeks. That includes a discovery process where we map your current workflow, the configuration work itself, any data migration from existing systems, and a handover where your team learns the system in the context of their actual job. Businesses with more complex sales processes, multiple service lines, or large existing databases take longer. We’ll tell you which category you’re in before any work begins.

In most cases, yes. Salesforce has native integrations with a wide range of platforms, and where native integrations don’t exist, there are well-established third-party connectors. The more important question is whether those integrations are configured correctly, because a poorly connected stack can create worse data problems than no integration at all. During our initial review, we map your existing tools and flag anything that will need custom work before we start building.

There are two costs: the Salesforce licence and our setup and ongoing work. We’re direct about both from the first call. What we won’t do is give you a number before we understand what you need, because a CRM setup for a five-person services firm and one for a 40-person real estate group are genuinely different bodies of work. What we can tell you is that every client we’ve worked with has been able to point to a specific place in their business where the system paid for itself.