It’s not uncommon for CRM projects to fall short of expectations, and there’s rarely a single factor that determines this outcome. Here, I’ll delve into the role technology plays in why companies find themselves wanting to switch away from Salesforce specifically as their CRM.
The system’s role in why CRM projects fail
First things first, the reason for failed implementations usually lies outside the system’s functionality. Workflows and responsibilities were likely unclear even before launch and didn’t become any clearer just by moving to a new tool. Project management disappears once the launch is complete, or perhaps leadership lets go and moves on to other challenges. And those who were actually supposed to use the platform may never have seen the value for themselves in all the fields that need to be filled out every time a deal, a company, or a contact is created or moved one step forward in the deal pipeline. None of this is solved by a platform regardless of which one and there are many reasons why this is the case.
But the system bears some of the risk, and that part has to do with how long the road is before you see your first return on investment. The more decisions that must be made before then, the greater the chance that patience will run out first. Simpler systems are easier to get started with, and that’s not necessarily because they can do more, but because they require less before they start delivering more than what you had before.
The rest of this blog focuses on how the architecture of a heavy CRM affects your chances of reaching your goals and then growing with the system. What I think is worth taking a closer look at is why so many people who have purchased a heavy system never really get the hang of it.
Why does Salesforce feel outdated?
Salesforce does what it’s built to do, and in many areas, its configurability is exactly what you want.
My take is that the platform was shaped during a time when every company was expected to build its own tech stack for marketing, sales, and customer service. That expectation still lingers in how it’s structured today. Marketing, sales, and customer service are separate products that are installed and configured individually, and tied together by integrations.
It’s someone’s job to keep those connections alive. They don’t necessarily alert you when a detail stops working. Instead, you notice it when someone builds a segment that doesn’t quite look right, and after many hours of troubleshooting, you might figure out what caused the problem—and hopefully also who can fix it.
If you want to add a field, you’ll often be told to wait until the next release window, since the change has to go through a test environment and a deployment before it becomes visible. Not that there’s anything wrong with test environments, but you probably get my point.
None of this is a flaw in and of itself. But administration has no intrinsic value, and it’s hard to see what anyone gains from managing permissions for a technical user, just so that two parts of the same platform can communicate with each other. It’s work that’s added, not work that pays off.
Complexity builds up slowly
This is rarely a factor considered when purchasing a CRM. When the decision is made, discussions usually focus on features and what the platform can do, not on what it will require of you in five years. Of course, there are always exceptions to this, but it’s by no means uncommon.
At first, you don’t even notice it, since there’s little to maintain. Each addition after that seems reasonable on its own: a new process needs to be added, a department wants its own view, someone builds an automation to solve a problem that week. But they pile up, and in a system where almost everything is configurable, there’s rarely anything stopping them from doing so. After a few years, no one has the full picture, and the person who should be cleaning things up doesn’t dare to, since no one knows what depends on what, and the ways of working have become so deeply ingrained in the system that the idea of changing them feels unreasonable. Another thing that holds true for all organizations is that the colleagues who had the full picture and understood how everything fit together left and moved on to other challenges. In short, you now have a system that doesn’t quite do what you bought it for, and at the same time, it feels as though the platform is too deeply entrenched in the organization to be replaced.
This isn’t unique to Salesforce; it happens with any platform that’s highly configurable and lacks resources and governance. But if it’s too complicated to keep track of how the platform’s components fit together, less value will be derived from the platform itself—and in this regard, Salesforce is the villain of the story.
How the market is changing with new technology
What has changed in recent years isn’t what the systems can do. The feature lists are similar, and if you ask the platforms themselves, you’ll get answers that all sound reasonable—which means, in practice, you can’t make a decision by comparing them. What actually sets them apart lies in the architecture, and that isn’t visible in a feature map.
In modern platforms, all customer-facing functions operate within the same system, using the same data, because the components are integrated from the start rather than pieced together afterward. This has become more important than it used to be, and the reason is AI. It helps with a lot, but it’s never better than the context it has access to. A system that can only partially communicate with the others provides only half the picture, and then the desired effect is lost no matter how good the model is.
Another trend is that companies have started talking about building their own CRM systems to get them exactly the way they want. I understand the appeal, but it’s also an unusually effective way to create precisely the kind of complexity you’re trying to avoid. As of this writing, this approach makes sense primarily for very small companies with clearly defined needs not as an alternative to a platform.
None of this makes an existing system any worse than it was. But it shifts what’s considered normal, and it’s this shift that makes a previous-generation architecture feel more cumbersome today than when it was purchased.
What we do
Leadfront helps companies transition from cumbersome platforms to more modern ones, and it’s in this work that I’ve seen this pattern play out time and again. We’re partners with several of the platforms we work with, including HubSpot which you’re welcome to take into account as you read through everything above.
Don’t forget that technology is just one part of the bigger picture no system works without proper processes or good governance, and even good processes are ineffective without support.
Want to find out how you can switch from Salesforce to HubSpot? Click here to learn more
