Salesforce, Zoho or Bitrix24 — how do we decide?
Count the seats, count the genuine exceptions in your sales process, and be honest about whether anyone internally will own the admin work. Bitrix24 is the cheapest way to get deals, tasks, chat and telephony under one roof, and the interface is busier for it. Zoho gives you a lot of function per seat, but its modules are separate products underneath and joining them up properly takes effort. Salesforce only repays its cost past a certain complexity — real custom objects, real reporting demands — and it expects a named administrator; without one you have bought a very expensive contact list.
We've got years of leads sitting in spreadsheets. What happens to them?
They get mapped, deduplicated and imported, but the tidying is a joint job and it is usually where the project's timeline actually goes. We take your files, propose a field mapping and a written rule for what counts as a duplicate, then run a dry import into a sandbox so you can inspect your own records before anything is committed. Expect a few columns to have no home — free-text notes that three people used for three different purposes, statuses that meant one thing in 2019 and something else now. The original files stay archived and untouched, so a judgement call we get wrong is recoverable.
What do the platform licences cost on top of your fees?
You pay those directly to Salesforce, Zoho or Bitrix24. We don't resell licences and take no margin on them, so nothing in it for us if you go up a tier. Budget per user per month, billed annually for the better rate, and understand that the edition jump is where the real money hides: sandboxes, API call limits, storage and the more advanced automation are what typically force an upgrade, not headcount. The two habits worth avoiding are buying the top edition because a demo showed something you might use one day, and paying for seats belonging to people who will never sign in.
How do you get the sales team to actually use it?
Mostly by removing the reasons not to: as few mandatory fields as we can get away with, their live deals imported before day one so the system isn't an empty room, activity captured automatically from email and calls where the platform allows it, and a mobile view that works from a car park. The rest is not a software problem. If the weekly pipeline review still runs off a manager's spreadsheet or a WhatsApp update, reps will keep the spreadsheet and the CRM will quietly rot. We say that at the start, because it predicts whether a rollout sticks better than anything we configure.
Can it talk to our accounting system, our website and our support inbox?
Usually, and we try the native connector first — if something off the shelf does the job, paying us to write one is a waste of your money. Where it falls short we build and host middleware in Laravel or Node, the same work we do on our own products, so enquiries, quotes and invoices move across without anyone re-typing them. The decision that matters is which system owns which field: two-way sync sounds appealing until both sides change a customer's address on the same afternoon and something has to win. We normally make one system the master per field, log every sync, and give you a screen showing what failed instead of letting it fail quietly.