Gustav There is a particular kind of company problem that looks like a technology problem but is actually a fit problem. The CRM is technically working. Everyone has logins. The data is in there somewhere. And yet the sales team still tracks their pipeline in a shared spreadsheet, the account managers still keep notes in email threads, and nobody really trusts what the CRM says.
This is not a failure of the people. It is a failure of the system to match the actual work.
How off-the-shelf CRM is sold versus how it is used
Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive - these are serious products built by serious companies. They are also built to serve every possible business, which means they are optimised for none of them specifically.
The sales pitch is that you get a full-featured system in an afternoon. The reality is that an afternoon gets you a generic setup that probably does not match your pipeline stages, your customer vocabulary, your team structure, or your process for how a deal actually moves through your organisation.
So you customise. Or you pay a consultant to customise. Or you just leave it as-is and work around the parts that do not fit. Most companies end up doing some combination of all three.
The pricing problem
The monthly cost per user for enterprise CRM platforms is real and it compounds. Salesforce starts at around 25 EUR per user per month for the most basic tier, and that number climbs quickly once you add the features most businesses actually need. A ten-person sales team running a mid-tier Salesforce plan can easily be paying 1,500 EUR per month or more. That is 18,000 EUR per year, every year, indefinitely.
HubSpot has the same pattern. The free tier is genuinely useful, but the features businesses typically want - deal automation, custom reporting, sequences - are in the paid tiers, and those tiers are not cheap at scale.
None of this makes these platforms bad. It makes them a specific kind of investment: one that never stops costing money, and one where the vendor controls the pricing.
The question worth asking is not "what does this cost per month?" but "what will this have cost us in five years, and what do we actually own at the end of it?"
Why people do not use the system they have
CRM adoption failure is one of the most documented problems in business software. Companies buy systems, spend months implementing them, and then watch adoption rates stay low.
The usual explanation is that people resist change or do not like learning new tools. Sometimes that is true. But more often the real reason is simpler: the system is slower than the workaround. If it takes four clicks and three fields to log a call in the CRM, but ten seconds to type a note in a spreadsheet or send yourself an email, people will do the faster thing.
The best CRM is the one that is actually used. A custom system built around how your team already thinks and works has a significant adoption advantage over a generic platform that asks people to adapt to it.
What a custom CRM actually means
When I talk about a custom CRM, I do not mean something exotic. I mean a web application built to do the specific things your business needs, with the fields and stages and views that match your actual process, and nothing else.
No features you do not use. No subscription fees beyond hosting. No vendor deciding next year that a feature you rely on is now in the enterprise tier.
The upfront cost is higher than signing up for HubSpot. A straightforward CRM covering the core use cases typically runs in the 20,000 to 50,000 DKK range. But it is a one-time cost that you own. For most companies running a team of five or more on a paid CRM platform, the payback period is under two years.
When off-the-shelf is still the right answer
A custom CRM is not right for everyone. If you are a solo operator or a very small team with straightforward needs, a free or low-cost SaaS product is the sensible choice. The setup time is low and the monthly cost is manageable.
It is also not right if your process is genuinely underdeveloped. If you do not yet know how you want to manage your pipeline, building a custom system locks in that uncertainty. Spend time in something off-the-shelf first, figure out what you actually need, and build when the requirements are clear.
And there are companies where a well-configured HubSpot or Pipedrive genuinely is the right tool. If your sales process is close to standard and the platform's default features cover your needs, there is no good reason to build.
The actual question to ask
The question is not "Salesforce or custom?" It is "what does our team actually need, and which option gets us closer to that at a cost that makes sense over the next three to five years?"
Most businesses I talk to have never properly answered that question. They either adopted what they knew, copied a competitor, or went with whatever the consultant recommended. A proper assessment - what are we actually trying to track, what do our people actually do, where does the current system fail us - is usually more valuable than the platform decision itself.