Hello everyone.. so we’re on the process of reevaluating our CRM setup for a growing 12-person b2b sales team. Grateful for blessings 😄 We need something that handles inbound lead routing and email sequencing smoothly without requiring a full-time admin just to keep custom objects working.

RIght now we're looking at them both, anyone knows how do they compare when it comes to reporting flexibility, automation usability, and data cleanliness for bigger number of records (around 10k+ and growing)?? Thanks ! 😄

The Gap in the Market
The industry is dominated by massive legacy platforms built in the 90s/2000s. They cost small agencies $500–$1,000+ a month, take months to onboard, and are crammed with complex enterprise features a 2-person team will never use. Most scratch agencies either overpay for these bloated systems or run their entire business on messy spreadsheets.
What I’m Building
I’m building a clean, modern alternative focused strictly on speed, zero setup time, and core operational pain points:
Automated Rate Increase Flags:Instantly spotting client policy price hikes so agents can check in before clients shop elsewhere.

Account Bundling Identifiers:Automatically highlighting single-policy clients for easy cross-selling.

Instant Search Navigation: Allowing agents to pull up any client or file in under a second while on a live phone call.

Simplified Client Workflows:Streamlining public client intakes into a clean visual workspace for the agent.

My Question for the Community
My target audience consists of business owners who are heavily non-technical and used to clunky legacy software.
For those who have launched B2B SaaS into traditional, non-tech-savvy industries:
Onboarding: Do non-tech users prefer self-serve CSV imports, or should I mandate a 10-minute guided setup call?

Early Feedback: What’s the best way to extract honest, actionable product feedback from busy small-business owners who aren't used to testing beta software?

Would love to hear your thoughts or learn from anyone who has tackled a similar legacy industry!

For those using HoneyBook, Dubsado, 17hats or another CRM for an event-based business:

What does it handle really well for you?

More importantly, what do you still end up using Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, Notes, Google Calendar or other apps for?

Is there anything you wish your CRM handled that would actually make a noticeable difference in your day-to-day business?

And if you’re happy with your current setup, I’d love to hear that too.

This is a weekly post for you to let out about something which happened this week for you in CRM that mattered: features, client requests that were either great or awful this week, and just generally chat CRM / CRM consulting chatter.

No self promo, just a place to share tales from the front-line of CRM!

Looking for input from people who know CRMs better than I do. Long post, but the details matter.

Background: I’ve run my business on Salesforce since 2019. Started as a single license for just me. We’re now 12 people and the whole company lives in it. We’ve customized it heavily — it’s not a stock sales pipeline, it’s a system of record built around our specific operating model.
Where we are now: We’ve hit the point where we need to automate more, integrate across platforms, and cut friction so we can keep scaling. The use cases are legitimate and specific. But we’re boxed in on three fronts.

1. Professional Edition limits.
   We’re capped at 5 active flows. No native API access — that’s a $25/user/month add-on. Our current per-license cost is roughly $50–75, so we’re paying somewhere in the $8–10k/year range. To get API access and unlimited flows — features that cost Salesforce essentially nothing to enable — the real answer is upgrading to Enterprise at $165–175/license. That’s 2.5x our current spend before we’ve added a single new capability.

2. Everything else is a third-party subscription.
   Dialer. Call recording and transcription. Accounting sync. LLM integration. Forms — Formstack alone quoted at $4,800/year. Each one is a separate vendor with a separate 12-month lock-in. Stack them up and the per-seat cost gets absurd.

3. The comparison is brutal.
   HubSpot is comparably priced or cheaper and includes a native dialer, automatic call recording and transcription, real workflow automation, SMS, and dramatically better marketing tooling — out of the box. And it’s not just HubSpot. There are a lot of platforms doing this now.

The Agentforce demo.
When we started looking at what we needed, everyone was talking about Agentforce, so I asked for a demo. I told them in writing beforehand: I’m price-sensitive, I assume this requires a license upgrade, and I need to be confident it actually helps my business. No problem, they said.
I got on a call with four people — two from Salesforce, two from a separate implementation firm. The presentation ended at $85,000 for year one and roughly $30,000 ongoing. Nobody had spent enough time on my business to show me a single application relevant to what we actually do. It was generic Agentforce material. I told them they’d missed the mark and moved on.

The retention call.
We demoed HubSpot and were getting ready to switch. Before pulling the trigger, I went back to my rep and was completely candid: seven-year customer, seriously considering not renewing, here’s what I need, I’d rather stay if there’s a path. He said he couldn’t discuss pricing over email and asked for a 15-minute call.

I got on the call. It was him plus another third-party implementation team, and another prepared demo I couldn’t watch because I was driving. They started pitching without asking about my use cases. I cut in and asked for the annual number.

They’d moved me up to Unlimited — their top tier. $35,000/year. Plus the implementation firm on the call. Plus all the third-party apps I still need. When I pointed out I’m planning to double headcount this year, which puts me north of $70k, the answer was a four-year agreement for a better rate.

Where that leaves me.
I can’t spend $70–100k a year on a CRM at 12–24 people. But our workflows are deeply dependent on Salesforce, and switching to HubSpot means trading one set of problems for another plus a painful migration. I don’t know enough about the rest of the market to know what actually handles heavily customized, custom-object-driven workflows.

What I’m asking:
1. Has anyone negotiated Salesforce down meaningfully at this size? What actually moved the number — timing, escalation, multi-year, threatening non-renewal?
2. For those who left Salesforce after heavy customization: what did the migration actually cost you in time and money, and would you do it again?
3. What platforms should I be looking at besides HubSpot for a business with a lot of custom objects and non-standard workflows? Zoho One, Creatio, Attio, something else?
4. Anyone actually getting business value from Agentforce, or is it the emperor’s new clothes?
5. At what point does hiring an engineer to build something in-house stop being a bad idea?
Happy to answer questions about our setup. Not looking to bash Salesforce — it genuinely helped me grow this company. I just can’t make the math work anymore

Just curious