Which CRM should you actually be using?

I've been in the RevOps space for over twenty years. My first CRM was CBIL CRM. I was an admin at age twenty, which tells you everything you need to know about how long I've been watching this space evolve. And evolve it has, faster in the last few years than in the previous two decades combined.

So when we talk about CRM decisions today, we're really talking about something much bigger than features and integrations. We're talking about your foundational platform for AI strategy, your data layer, your entire go-to-market infrastructure. The stakes are different now. The decision-making process needs to be different too.

I want to walk you through a framework I use, share a real story from my own recent experience, and give you some honest perspective on the questions that keep coming up in our community right now. This isn't the definitive playbook. There are plenty of ways to approach this. But it's a useful lens, and I hope it sparks some thinking for you.

The CRM landscape has shifted under our feet

Let's start with some honest market context.

Salesforce is still the market leader. That's not changing overnight. But HubSpot has been gaining serious ground, particularly in the enterprise space. And from where I sit, having just completed my first full end-to-end HubSpot enterprise implementation, I can tell you it's a very different product than it was even a few years ago. The gap has narrowed considerably.

Here's an interesting data point that reflects this shift. If you're operating in an M&A environment or work with private equity, you'll know that Salesforce used to carry a valuation premium. If a target company ran on Salesforce, that was seen as a positive signal.

More recently, private equity firms are treating HubSpot and Salesforce as roughly equivalent. They're looking at both platforms as viable foundations for post-acquisition integration, and they're weighing ease of consolidation and speed to value just as heavily as the platform itself. That's a meaningful shift in how the market perceives these tools.

And then there's AI. This is no longer a nice-to-have conversation. AI capability has become a core factor in CRM selection. We're hearing more and more about companies exploring the idea of removing the CRM layer entirely and replacing it with a data layer that an AI interface sits on top of.

That's a big idea, and it's not mainstream yet, but it tells you where the thinking is heading. Especially when you consider the technical debt sitting inside twenty-year-old Salesforce implementations, which makes it genuinely difficult to take advantage of modern AI tooling.

The question you're probably carrying around is: how do you manage your current tech stack while building toward what you actually want? That tension is real, and it's not going away.

Why most of us don't actually choose our CRM

Before we get into the framework, let's acknowledge something. Most of the time, you don't choose your CRM. You inherit it.

You join an organization that's been running on Salesforce for fifteen years, or HubSpot that someone set up when the company was twelve people, or Dynamics that nobody quite understands anymore. The decision was made before you arrived.

That context matters a lot. Because a lot of the energy in this space gets spent debating which CRM is theoretically superior, when the more useful question for most RevOps professionals is: given what we have, what do we do with it? How do we make it work harder? How do we prepare it for what's coming?

That said, there are moments when the choice is genuinely on the table. Post-merger integrations. Rapid scale-up phases. Contract renewals with a hard deadline. Those moments are worth being ready for, because they don't wait around.

A four-pillar framework for CRM decision-making

When you do have to make the call, or advise someone who does, here are the four areas I think deserve the most attention.

1. Business model fit

This one gets skipped more often than it should. The question isn't just "what features does this CRM have?" It's "how well does this CRM support the way our business actually works?"

Think about the complexity of your sales motion. Do you have multiple sales cycles running simultaneously? Multiple product lines with overlapping territories? A significant indirect channel through partners? Partner operations is a whole discipline in itself.

If you're managing your own pipeline alongside a partner pipeline, where partners have their own deal registration processes and their own ways of tracking opportunities, that changes your requirements significantly. Some CRM platforms handle that complexity more gracefully than others.

Understanding your business model deeply before you start evaluating CRM options will save you from making a technically sound but operationally wrong decision.

2. Capacity for change

This is probably the most underrated factor in the whole conversation, and I've seen it derail more implementations than almost anything else.

Changing CRM isn't just a technology project. It's a transformation. It requires stakeholders to sit in workshops, define processes, make decisions on requirements, and then actually change how they work day to day. That takes time, attention, and goodwill. All of which are finite.

Sometimes the honest answer is that you stay with Salesforce not because it's the best possible tool for your situation, but because it's what your team knows, and the cost of transformation outweighs the benefit of switching. That's a legitimate business decision. Pretending otherwise leads to failed implementations and frustrated teams.

There's also the IT dependency question. I've experienced this firsthand: you're mid-implementation, things are moving well, and then IT gets pulled onto a higher-priority project. Suddenly your CRM rollout stalls. If your implementation depends heavily on IT resources that aren't ring-fenced for this work, build that risk into your planning from the start.

3. Data and AI readiness

We've all been talking about this. Your CRM is increasingly the foundation on which your AI strategy sits. So the state of your data, your approach to deduplication, data ownership, governance, all of it matters more now than it did even two or three years ago.

How clean is your data? How well do you manage duplicates? Do you have a clear model for data ownership across the organization? These aren't new questions, but the urgency around them is new.

If you want to actually use AI effectively, you need a data foundation that's worth building on. A messy CRM with years of technical debt will limit what you can do with AI tooling, regardless of which platform you're on.

4. Total cost of ownership

License fees are the visible part of the cost. They're rarely the biggest part.

The full picture includes implementation costs, ongoing maintenance, contractor or consultant fees, the internal time required to support users, and the cost of technical debt clearance if you're inheriting a complicated legacy environment. I've seen organizations where the cost of maintaining a heavily customized Salesforce instance, with an external contractor on permanent retainer because only they understand what was built, dwarfs the license cost several times over.

When a vendor tells you their platform will cost you significantly less in licensing, run the full calculation. What does it cost to switch? What does it cost to maintain? What's the realistic level of internal support you can provide? The answer might still favor the switch, but you need the full picture to know.

One more thing: customer journey mapping

A point that came up in the discussion that I think deserves its own mention. Before you make any CRM decision, you need to understand the full customer journey and where data points and processes intersect across it. If you skip that step, you risk making decisions that look sensible in isolation but create problems downstream.

I have a vivid example of this. A legal team I worked with, about ten years ago, independently purchased a contract management tool called SpringCM. It was a genuinely capable tool for managing contract versions and approvals. The problem was that we were closing around twenty thousand deals a year.

The tool simply couldn't accommodate that volume in a way that fit our process. It was chaos to generate anything from it. The technology was fine. The fit was completely wrong. And nobody had mapped the customer journey before the purchase decision.

That kind of misalignment is expensive and demoralizing to fix. Map the journey first.

What actually happened when I had to make the call

Let me tell you about the most recent time I had to put all of this into practice.

I joined Vintra a little over a year ago as the first RevOps hire. The mandate was clear: deliver the go-to-market integration following a post-merger combining a Belgian company and a Swiss company. Two of everything. Slightly overlapping ICPs but mostly different. Different sales cycles. Different processes.

One of those companies had invested heavily in a full Salesforce implementation just two years before I joined. The board, before I even arrived, had made a decision at board level that we were consolidating everything into Salesforce.

I came in, did my assessment. Looked at the processes, the data, the technology. Built out the full tech stack map. We had around thirty different tools for a company with ten sellers. Thirty tools.

The more I looked at the Salesforce environment, the clearer it became that maintaining it was going to be expensive, complicated, and not right for where the business was heading. The implementation was heavily customized. The only people who fully understood it were the external agency that built it, and they were on a retainer that reflected exactly that dependency.

So I had to go back to the board, the same board that had already made a decision, and propose something different. I recommended we move everyone to a new HubSpot instance, rather than migrating one company's data into the existing Salesforce setup.

There was a hard deadline. Our Salesforce contract was coming up for renewal in March. If we didn't hit our go-live date, we'd have to renew, and all the projected savings would evaporate. We kicked off at the end of September. We went live on January 29th.

It was intense. An MVP approach, absolutely. But we went live with enterprise HubSpot, we have a clear roadmap for what comes next, and in year one alone, we saved around half a million dollars in license fees. That's before you factor in implementation costs and the ongoing maintenance savings from not carrying that external contractor dependency.

The lesson I'd draw from that isn't that HubSpot is always the right answer. It was the right answer for that specific situation, at that specific moment, with those specific constraints.

The lesson is that the framework matters. Business model fit, capacity for change, data readiness, total cost of ownership. Run the analysis honestly, even when it means challenging a decision that's already been made.

A few things that made the implementation work

Since I'm sharing the story, it's worth mentioning a couple of things that helped us execute under that kind of time pressure.

First, we did a lot of work before we engaged the implementation contractor. I'm a strong believer in the workshop before the workshop. By the time we sat down with the HubSpot SMEs who were doing the build, we had already worked through a significant amount of process definition internally.

That meant we weren't burning expensive contractor time on conversations about what an MQL is or how we define a stage. We came in with answers, or at least well-formed questions.

Second, we were deliberate about picking our battles. Early on, I had ambitions to transform more than we ultimately did in that first phase. At some point, I made a conscious decision to focus on the go-to-market sales integration and do a more straightforward lift-and-shift for the professional services side.

That was the right call. Getting everyone onto the same system, with the same look and feel, created more collaboration than we'd had before. The deeper transformation can happen now that we have a stable foundation.

Third, on the contractor question: finding someone who genuinely understands your type of business matters. Many implementation consultants have done excellent work across a wide range of industries, but that breadth can mean they don't deeply understand your specific context.

When you're qualifying an implementation partner, push hard on whether they have experience with your business model. It makes a real difference.

The question that's really worth sitting with

As AI capability becomes more central to the CRM conversation, the decision you're making when you choose or commit to a CRM platform is increasingly a decision about your AI strategy. Those two things are converging.

For enterprise organizations with heavily customized Salesforce environments, the question of whether to change platform is genuinely complex. The cost and risk of change are significant.

There are very few scenarios where that case is easy to make. A major acquisition might create the opening. A contract renewal with a hard deadline might force the conversation. But outside of those moments, the more practical question is probably: how do we prepare the environment we have for what AI requires?

For smaller organizations, scale-ups, or anyone going through a merger or integration, the window to make a different choice may be open right now. If it is, use the framework. Map the business model, assess your capacity for change honestly, look hard at your data foundation, and run the full cost of ownership calculation.

The CRM conversation has always been complicated. It's more complicated now. But it's also more consequential, because the platform you choose is increasingly the platform your AI strategy runs on. That's worth getting right.