The cost of making a CRM fit never shows up on the pricing page
Companies spend about $80 billion a year on CRM licenses, and an estimated $50 to $80 billion more making those systems fit. That second bill is the one worth killing.
Companies spend about $80 billion a year on CRM licenses, according to Apps Run The World. They spend an estimated $50 to $80 billion more making those systems fit, between consultants and the admins and developers they hire. A CRM that can change itself to fit your business shrinks that cost dramatically. That's what we're building at Made In Motion.
The price that isn't on the pricing page
If you've bought a CRM, you know the pattern. You sign up, and within a week you find out the product was designed for a company that isn't yours. The pipeline stages don't match how your deals move. Half the fields don't apply, and the work your team spends most of its day on doesn't have a screen at all.
So you customize, and customizing turns out to be engineering. Someone has to understand how your business works, whether that's a partner, an admin or a sharp person on your team. That part is valuable. Turning what they know into working software is a development project, with developers to hire or borrow, a quote and a ticket queue. It gets scoped in weeks and delivered in months, and you're paying before you've closed a single extra deal.
You keep paying
The engineering bill never stops, because your business doesn't hold still. You add a product line. You change how renewals work. A new hire asks why the system doesn't track something, and the answer is that changing it means reopening the project. You have to find developer time, write up the request, get a quote and wait your turn.
Most companies quietly stop asking, and that creates a cost nobody counts at all. It's the renewals process that lives in a spreadsheet next to the CRM, the onboarding checklist only one person can find, and the report someone rebuilds by hand every Monday. Your team ends up running the business in the gaps around software you're paying for.
Why it works this way
This is basic economics. A CRM vendor sells one product to a hundred thousand companies, so the product has to be generic. That's what keeps the seat price low. Fitting it to your business is left to you, and because that work is custom engineering, it's expensive.
Some changes can't be made at all. Every customer runs on the same codebase, so the vendor only lets you change what won't break it for everyone else. When what your business needs falls outside those limits, no amount of consulting gets you there. Everyone involved is acting sensibly, and the company in the middle still gets a bad deal.
What changed
Most of what companies spend making a CRM fit pays for engineering. The judgment about how your business should run still belongs to you and the people who advise you. What changed is who does the engineering. Software agents can now add the field, build the screen and wire up the report from a plain-language request, inside your own system.
Software doesn't have to be generic anymore. You can start from how you work, have the system built around it, and keep changing it as often as your business changes.
That makes an ongoing engineering or consulting bill to update your software a relic.
That's what Made In Motion does. You tell us how you work, and your CRM is built around your answers. When something changes next quarter, you ask for the change in a chat. We deliver it the next day.
If your team keeps a spreadsheet next to your CRM, you're already paying that hidden cost. When the CRM can change itself, that spreadsheet can become part of the system for the cost of asking.
A version of this post first appeared on the Made In Motion blog.