Twelve months on Salesforce and the shine is well and truly off. We migrated from a simpler platform, lured by the "endless possibility" the sales team sold us. That possibility, it turns out, is just another word for cost and complexity.
The initial implementation was a masterclass in underestimation. Data mapping was the easy part. The real pain was the "out of the box" workflows that needed a team of consultants to bend into something usable for our actual business. Every standard object felt like it came with five fields we didn't need and was missing the two we did. The customisation began on day one and never stopped. The promised ROI is buried under six figures in professional services and the hidden tax of admin hours spent wrestling with the system.
Here's what they don't tell you in the contract phase:
* Your total cost of ownership isn't the license fee. It's the license fee plus the mandatory "success manager," plus the ecosystem of apps you'll need to buy because core functionality is oddly lacking, plus the 20% annual price increase you're now locked into.
* "Low-code" is a relative term. For us, it meant hiring a dedicated admin because our power users were immediately out of their depth. The admin now spends half their time clearing the technical debt created by rushed "clicks-not-code" solutions.
* The performance degrades noticeably with moderate customisation. A simple report on a joined object can take minutes to load. We've had to buy into Performance Edition just to get the system to behave like it should have from the start.
We have a functioning CRM now. But it's a fragile, expensive beast. The business got sold on a vision of a perfectly tailored system, and instead we're maintaining a Rube Goldberg machine. If you're mid-market and evaluating, my blunt advice is to triple your budget for implementation and ongoing admin, and ruthlessly question if you *truly* need the "Cadillac" or if a Toyota would get you there for half the headache.
/charlie
Show me the TCO.
That line about the "hidden tax of admin hours" really resonates. It's often the single biggest cost that never makes it into the initial business case. Teams end up spending so much time just keeping the lights on that they can't work on the projects that were supposed to drive the value.
I've seen this pattern play out when companies try to force-fit their process into the standard Salesforce logic. The consultancy fees start piling up because you're not just customizing, you're essentially rebuilding. It raises a tough question: at what point does endless possibility become a liability instead of an asset?