A growing B2B SaaS with a 35-person sales team replaced Salesforce + four bolt-on apps with a custom CRM tuned to their actual sales playbook. Saved ~$14k/month, sales team adoption finally hit 90%+. Client name on request after qualifying call.
Salesforce Enterprise + Sales Engagement + four Marketplace apps had become a $20k/month line item that 60% of reps actively avoided — they tracked their real pipeline in a shared spreadsheet because the official tool was too slow and required too many clicks. Custom-objects sprawl, two-year backlog of "we'll fix it next quarter" admin tickets, no clear path off the seat-per-rep ratchet.
Two-week audit mapped which Salesforce objects/fields/automations actually carried business value (~30% of the configured surface area) vs which were vestigial (~70%). Replicated the live ones as a Postgres + Next.js CRM with the team's existing auth (Auth0). Native Gmail + Outlook email sync, Calendar two-way, AI activity-summarization on every account. Pipeline view designed against the team's actual stages — not Salesforce's default ladder. Parallel-run for 5 weeks; rep-by-rep cutover.
~$14k/month subscription saved (Salesforce + 4 apps retired). Sales-team weekly-active jumped from 38% to 90%+ within 6 weeks of cutover — the spreadsheet died. Pipeline reporting now lives in the same SQL the rest of the company queries; no separate "Salesforce data team" needed. Internal team ships pipeline-stage changes themselves.
"We were paying twenty grand a month for software our best reps were avoiding. The new system, our reps actually open."
— VP Sales · B2B SaaS (name on request)