CRM
Salesforce or a custom CRM? An honest decision guide
Licence cost is the wrong first question. Here is the sequence we actually walk clients through before recommending either.
SoftMIVIX Team2 min read
Most teams arrive with the decision already framed as a cost comparison: per-seat licences against a one-off build. That framing almost always produces the wrong answer, because it prices the software and ignores the thing that actually determines total cost — how far your process sits from the platform's assumptions.
Start with the process, not the price
Salesforce is extraordinary value when your sales motion resembles the one it was designed around: accounts, contacts, opportunities moving through stages, forecasting on top. You inherit twenty years of that model working. Configure it, and you are live in weeks.
It becomes expensive when your process does not fit. Every deviation is absorbed as customisation, and customisation on a platform compounds: more Apex, more triggers, more things that break at the next release.
Three questions worth answering first
Is your object model unusual? If the thing you sell is not really an opportunity — subscriptions with complex entitlements, project-based work with milestone billing — count how many custom objects you would need. Past a handful, you are building an application that happens to be hosted on Salesforce.
How many seats, and who are they? Licences scale linearly. A hundred back-office users who each touch the CRM twice a week is precisely the case where a custom build's fixed cost wins.
What has to integrate? This is the one people underestimate. If the CRM is the hub for an ERP, telephony, a customer portal and a mobile app, the integration work dominates either way — and it is roughly the same work on both paths.
What we usually recommend
For a sales-led organisation with a recognisable pipeline: Salesforce, configured properly, with custom code kept to the edges.
For an operations-heavy business whose process is the product: a custom platform, with the CRM concepts modelled honestly rather than bent onto someone else's objects.
The answer that should worry you is the one given before anyone has looked at your process.
- salesforce
- crm
- architecture
