Replace Salesforce with a CRM built around your business
We build custom CRMs for sales and operations teams. We start with one workflow and a small group of your people. You see it working with your own data before you decide anything about Salesforce or HubSpot.
Building a new CRM, or connecting the one you already have, is welcome too.
The CRM was bought for the company you were
These are situations people describe in public when they ask for help with a CRM. Yours may be different.
You pay per seat for a product most people barely open
Licences are priced per user and per edition. A team that uses accounts, a pipeline and a few reports still pays for the whole product, and the bill grows with headcount.
The real process lives in spreadsheets beside the CRM
Samples, quotes, reorders, approvals. When the CRM does not match the work, reps keep a second system and type everything twice.
Every change is a ticket
A new field, a changed stage, a report someone needs by Friday. Each one waits for an admin or a consultant, so the team stops asking.
No one sees the whole account
Orders are in the ERP, invoices in accounting, conversations in email, requests in a portal. Preparing for one customer call means opening four tabs.
We do not claim this is true of every Salesforce or HubSpot customer. Salesforce keeps most of its customers every year, and for many of them staying is the right call. The question is whether it is true for you, and we will tell you if we think it is not.
One system of record, shaped like your sales process
A custom CRM is the list of things your people do every week, built as screens and rules, connected to the systems that already hold your data.
- Sales rep
- Prepares for an account, logs a visit, sends a sample, follows up, places an order and sees its status.
- Sales manager
- Sees pipeline, coverage and exceptions without asking anyone for a report.
- Operations and admin
- Approve, correct and reconcile. Every change leaves an audit trail.
- Customers and partners
- Reach their own orders and requests through a portal connected to the same records.
- The CRM
- The record of each relationship and the state of each workflow.
- ERP and accounting
- Orders, invoices, inventory and payments stay where they are and sync both ways.
- Email and calendar
- Conversations and meetings attach to the account they belong to.
- Salesforce or HubSpot
- Keeps running during a pilot. Data moves only after an inventory of relationships, history, files, permissions, automation, integrations and reports.
beLoved: from new retailer to reorder
beLoved Health is a distribution company David runs. He built the system it runs on. Its architecture record documents the move away from Salesforce.
Today that system holds wholesale order history with account selection, payment locks, calculated totals and shipment summaries. It also handles quotes, reorders, inventory, locations, brands and rep routes. Retailers and reps each work through their own portal.
Lead
A new retailer is recorded once, with its locations and the rep who owns it.
Sample
The rep sends a sample from the account screen. The follow-up is scheduled, not remembered.
Order
The order is built against live inventory. Totals are calculated and payment rules are enforced.
Reorder
The retailer reorders from its own portal. The rep sees it on the account the same day.
What this does not show. This is one company's system, built and run by one of us. It is not an independent audit, and we have not published measured savings. It does not show that a custom CRM matches every Salesforce feature. It shows a sales workflow that was moved off Salesforce and is in use.
Discovery, one workflow, a pilot, then a decision
Each step produces something you keep, whether or not you continue.
Discovery call
We learn your process, your systems and what a good result looks like. You get a short written summary.
Map one workflow
A map of one valuable workflow: who does what, in which system, and where it breaks.
Scoped proposal
A fixed scope for a pilot: what gets built, for whom, how it is judged and what it costs.
Working pilot
A small group of your people use it with real data while the old system keeps running.
Your decision
You compare the pilot with the baseline and choose: stop, extend it, or plan a migration.
Migration and support
Inventory first, then a staged cutover with reconciliation and a way back. Maintenance is agreed in writing.
The questions that decide whether this is a good idea
- Who owns the code?
- You do. The code we write for you lives in your repository. Where we build on an open-source foundation, we name it and its licence before you commit.
- Who maintains it after handoff?
- That is settled before the pilot, in writing: who upgrades it, who secures it, who answers when it breaks, and what that costs each month. It can be us, your team, or both.
- Do we have to leave Salesforce?
- No. Sometimes the right answer is to configure what you have, or to build one workflow beside it and keep Salesforce as the system of record. If that is what we see, we will say so.
- What about HubSpot?
- Same approach. We look at which Hubs you use. Often the CRM can change while Marketing Hub stays exactly where it is.
- Will it connect to our ERP and accounting?
- That is most of the work. We list every integration during the inventory and test each one in the pilot, including what happens when a sync fails.
- Where does AI fit?
- Inside the workflow, with access to the right records and a person handling the exceptions. Your current CRM may offer this too. We build it where it serves the process you have.
Seven things to know before you talk to anyone about replacing a CRM
You can gather these in an afternoon. They make every later conversation shorter, with us or with anyone else.
- Who uses the CRM every week, and what each of them does in it
- Your current contract: edition, seats and renewal date
- The three workflows that matter most to revenue
- Every system the CRM sends data to or receives data from
- The reports people actually open
- Who would maintain a new system, and whether you have engineers
- What result would make you stop the project
Plain answers
- How long does a pilot take?
- It depends on the workflow and its integrations. We set the length in the proposal, after the mapping step, and not before.
- What does it cost?
- We quote a fixed scope for the pilot once the workflow is mapped. We do not publish a price list, because the scope decides the cost.
- We are a small team. Is this for us?
- It can be. A small team with one clear workflow is a good pilot. If a packaged CRM would serve you better, we will tell you.
- Can you build a new CRM when there is nothing to replace?
- Yes. The steps are the same without the migration.
Two people who have shipped software together for nearly ten years
Custom CRM Studio is a site of The Goodstack Company. There is no sales team. You talk to the people who do the work.
David
David runs beLoved Health, a distribution company, and built the system it runs on: CRM, wholesale portal, invoicing, samples and affiliate payouts. He writes the code and runs the pilots.
Vidur
Vidur is the co-founder of Goodstack and leads product and design. He designed the original Goodstack and ran the studio with David. He has experience with SOC 2 compliance, which matters the moment a system touches a customer's data.
Start with one workflow
Tell us which CRM you use, who uses it and the workflow that hurts most. We will reply with what we would look at first.