The situation
A B2B firm runs its sales operation on one of the big-name CRMs — Salesforce, Dynamics and HubSpot are the usual suspects, and they are excellent products. They are also built for everyone, which is the problem: this firm’s deals don’t follow a generic pipeline. Quoting depends on engineering review, approvals cross two business units, and the renewals process — where most of the revenue actually lives — is held together by exported spreadsheets.
Say 150 seats at around £100 per seat per month: roughly £180,000 a year, every year, forever. On top of that, the consultancy spend on customisation, the third-party add-ons for the gaps, and the admin time spent fighting the workflow rather than working it. Five-year cost: comfortably over £1m — for software the sales team half-uses and the renewals team works around.
The old options
Until recently there were two: keep paying and keep bending, or commission a traditional bespoke CRM build — historically a six-figure-plus, multi-quarter project that few boards would sign off against “just keep the licences”. That maths is what changed.
What we’d build
A CRM shaped to how this firm actually sells — nothing more:
- The real pipeline: enquiry → engineering review → quote → two-stage approval → close, as first-class workflow, not configuration gymnastics
- Renewals as a core object, not an afterthought — with the reminder, repricing and escalation logic the spreadsheets were doing
- Integration with the systems that already hold the truth: the ERP for orders, the finance system for invoicing and credit status, email and calendars for activity
- Reporting the managers actually asked for, on screens, not exports
- Every record, every workflow, every report: owned by the firm. No per-seat fees. Seat 151 costs nothing.
The build
A 30-minute discovery call, a written scope within days, then a working prototype in days — real screens on a copy of the firm’s real pipeline data, so the sales managers can judge software rather than promises. Production build, migration and parallel running: weeks. The team that built it stays on managed support, or hands it to internal IT with full documentation.
The economics
Typically 60–80% less than a traditional CRM build — and against the SaaS route, the comparison is starker: a one-off build plus modest support costs less than a couple of years of licences, and at the end of it the firm owns the asset. The licence bill simply stops.
Month three
The renewals spreadsheets are gone. New starters get a login that costs nothing. The workflow matches the sales process because it is the sales process. And when the firm wants the next change, it asks the engineers who built it — not a vendor roadmap.