← All work

Case Study

Replacing Salesforce with a CRM that actually fits how the team sells

A professional services firm ditched their bloated Salesforce instance for a purpose-built, event-sourced CRM that matched their existing sales workflow instead of forcing a new one.

Industry

Professional Services

Company Size

30 employees

Timeline

2 weeks

Tools Replaced

Salesforce + 3 workarounds → 1

Before

  • Paying recurring enterprise Salesforce licensing for a team that used less than 20% of the features — most of the platform sat untouched.
  • Sales reps maintained shadow spreadsheets because the CRM’s pipeline stages didn’t match how they actually moved deals forward.
  • Follow-up reminders buried under Salesforce’s notification noise. Reps missed warm leads because the system couldn’t distinguish signal from clutter.
  • Every quarterly “CRM cleanup” burned a full week of the ops team’s time reconciling spreadsheet data back into Salesforce.

After

  • Purpose-built CRM with only the views and actions the team actually uses — one-time purchase, self-hosted on their existing cloud infrastructure, no recurring licensing fees.
  • Event-sourced architecture captures every interaction as an immutable event, giving leadership a complete audit trail and the ability to replay any deal’s history.
  • Pipeline stages mirror the team’s real sales process. Reps stopped fighting the tool and started trusting it.
  • Automated follow-up surfacing based on prospect activity patterns — the system tells reps who to call next and why, not just when.

$0/mo

Ongoing licensing cost

0

Shadow spreadsheets

2 weeks

Built and launched

“For the first time, the CRM works the way we work — not the other way around. Our reps actually use it now, which tells you everything.”

— Head of Sales

Built with

TypeScript · React · Node.js · PostgreSQL · Event sourcing · Custom activity scoring

Have a similar problem?

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