Rethinking our CRM Strategy: The Hidden Cost of Salesforce

For nearly a decade, I was fully immersed in the Salesforce ecosystem. I attended Dreamforce, lived in the platform daily, and managed it as an admin. I knew the system inside and out so I knew and understood it’s true power and potential. I lead the charge in migrations from classic to lightning, so If you had told me then that I would one day willingly lead a migration away from Salesforce, I would have laughed, why would I ever give up Salesforce, the most powerful CRM on the market.

The Hidden Costs of a "Powerful" Platform

The turning point came from a casual—but loaded—question from our Head of Engineering, after yet another automation broke and needed rebuilding:

“What if we just got rid of Salesforce?”

Excuse me!!! How dare you even suggest that!!!! Salesforce is how I manage our customers and leads. I’ve spent years mastering it, defending it, optimizing it. At first, I dismissed the idea as to crazy to even think about. But the question stuck with me. It was the holiday season, and for once, I had some space to think without the usual chaos of the whirlwind. So I sat with it. I ran through the scenarios. And then, I started digging in. What would it look like if we did get rid of Salesforce.

The monthly license fee is just the tip of the iceberg. The reality of using a tool as complex as Salesforce on a small, scaling team is that the platform itself demands a significant investment.

• The Full-Time Admin Burden: Effectively managing Salesforce is a full-time job. It requires specialized knowledge that you must constantly keep up-to-date. Even with super talented software engineers on hand, we found they couldn't jump in to help unless they had specific Salesforce development experience. For a small team without a dedicated admin, this responsibility falls on someone who is already doing another full time job (probably you if you are reading this!)

  • We were rapidly changing our processes and reworking/updating them for a new product and just streamlining our logistics and all of our automations were breaking. Now instead of the processes saving me time I was being pulled away from the work that mattered to the company, just patching and fixing the broken flows. When you are on a small team there is also no one to pass it off too without a significant time commitment to get them up to speed.

• The Consultant Dependency: The moment you need to build custom integrations or pull data via API, you often need highly specialized knowledge. This translates into paying a consultant. If something breaks? You have to pay them again. From my last role I had also learned that if you want to switch consultants, the new firm often wants to rebuild the existing work from scratch rather than learn and adapt to a previous developer's style. This creates a painful "consultant lock-in," where the costs quickly continue to add up.

  • In a start up where you are constantly refining and evolving processes, having to go back and continually change the system was not in the budget.

• The Time Sink: It’s not just about money; it’s about time. The time your team spends wrestling with a complex system or waiting for a consultant is time not spent on revenue-generating activities. It’s also important to remember that your time is not free. That even if you are on salary there is still a cost to you and the team spend fixing or doing work arounds.

The Search for a Flexible, Right-Sized Solution

We knew we needed a change. Our goal was to find a tool that fit our current needs but could give us the flexibility to grow. I tested three different CRMs, but I kept coming back to HubSpot. I had the most familiarity with it, and critically, it could also absorb the functions of our marketing which in Salesforce was an extra cost on top of the CRM.

Why HubSpot Won: Cost Reduction and a Scalable Framework

The shift to HubSpot delivered major wins for us—financially and operationally. Here’s why it worked:

1. Ease of Administration: The difference in admin overhead was immediate. I was able to set up the entire system myself, applying lessons from Salesforce without needing months of specialized training. That freed me up to focus on strategy, not system maintenance.

2. Cost that Scales With You: This was the biggest financial win. We didn't need the entire company to have full read/write access. We moved to a HubSpot starter package, where only a few core users held paid licenses, and the rest of the company could have viewer access for free. We stayed on that starter package for over a year while we built out and perfected our internal processes. We only moved up to a higher tier when our own growth demanded it. The cost savings were huge and we were able to re-allocate the budget into other projects.

3. Flexibility Over Forced Commitment: With Salesforce, you often have to be "all in" from the beginning, or if you do too much you can’t usually take out functionality once you have paid for it. HubSpot allowed us the flexibility to take our time, and grow at our own pace, there were even a few times I added and then removed users if they weren’t using the platform! Since I was able to choose a monthly payment option to really figure out who on the team needed access.
   

An Honest Look at the Trade-Offs

Of course, no migration is perfect. Coming from the robust world of Salesforce, there were a few things I didn’t love about HubSpot. The user interface and views felt less customizable at first, and the out-of-the-box reporting is certainly not as powerful as Salesforce's.

But these trade-offs were acceptable. We learned to live with some of the UI differences, and for reporting, I could still do a deeper analysis in Excel or Power BI. HubSpot’s basic reporting functions covered our daily needs, and the platform’s export capabilities made it easy to pull data for more complex analysis elsewhere.

There were a few tasks that we had automated previously and decided to keep manual in HubSpot, at least for the moment. We were finding that even in Salesforce, we were constantly having to tweak or change these items. Until we could standardize the process and stop having everything be an "exception to the rule," it made more sense to handle it manually than to build a flawed automation.

We also made the decision to better leverage the tools we already had. Our organization uses Retool, and we had several dashboards that were already created and heavily used. Instead of rebuilding them immediately in HubSpot, we used this as an opportunity to audit what data we actually used and needed. This forced us to make a conscious choice to bring only a few critical pieces of data and automation over, rather than migrating everything as we had before. We eventually moved some of this back into HubSpot, but only after proving the process and its value first.

The Right Tool Isn't the Most Powerful—It's the Most Fitting

Leaving a platform I had known for a decade was a risk, but it paid off tremendously. It forced us to be honest about our needs. The "best" tool is rarely the one with the most features. It's the one that gives your team the right capabilities at the right cost, freeing you to dedicate your time, money, and attention to building what's next.