We configure, build, and migrate your CRM — then stay for 90 days post-go-live to make sure your team is actually using it. Kickoff to go-live in 6–10 weeks. Fixed fee, not hourly.
Fixed fee. Scope-dependent. No hourly billing.
We work with mid-market companies between 25 and 500 people, typically with sales teams of 5 to 80 reps. If any of the situations below sound familiar, you're in the right place.
You've been here before. Go-live happened, the partner left, and six months later your reps were working from spreadsheets again. Now there's pressure from the board to "fix the CRM" and you're not sure what fixing actually means.
The system was built by someone who is no longer here. Nobody knows why the pipeline stages are the way they are. The data is a mess. You know it needs to be rebuilt but you're not sure if you need to migrate to a new platform or just fix what you have.
You're in a growth phase, possibly post-acquisition or post-fundraise. Your PE sponsor wants clean pipeline data. Your Monday call still runs from a shared spreadsheet because your CRM numbers aren't trusted. This is not a technology problem.
You know what good looks like. You don't have the bandwidth to build it yourself. You need a partner who'll do the architecture and the build work while you stay close to the process and the reps who'll eventually use it.
The old system doesn't work anymore. You've chosen the new one. What you don't know is how to get the data across cleanly, what to keep, what to archive, and how to not lose the pipeline context that your reps have lived in for years.
At 30 people, informal systems start breaking down. You're losing deals you shouldn't be losing because there's no visibility. You know you need a CRM but the market is confusing and every vendor says theirs is the right one for you.
Between 49% and 70% of CRM implementations fail to deliver their intended value. The reasons cited consistently are the same ones year after year: poor adoption, not enough post-launch support, and systems configured for how a consultant thought the team worked rather than how they actually work.
The technology isn't the problem. HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive — they all work. The problem is what happens in the 90 days after go-live, when the partner has submitted their invoice and your reps are facing a system they weren't consulted about, can't navigate quickly, and don't yet trust.
Forrester, Merkle Group, and C5 Insight have all reported failure rates in this range. The percentage has not improved meaningfully in 20 years.
Really Simple Systems survey. This is not a training problem. It's an architecture and adoption problem.
Our own data from 60+ engagements since 2019. This is the situation we specialise in.
Reps are the primary users. When the CRM is designed to serve dashboards and forecast calls rather than make a rep's job easier, they stop using it. Managers get data they can't trust because nobody entered it.
Every stage name matters. "Proposal Sent" and "In Negotiation" look like stages — but they're not milestones that a rep can objectively evaluate. When stages are ambiguous, deals get stuck in them indefinitely and forecasting becomes guesswork.
Every CRM looks good at go-live demo. The friction reveals itself in week three, when a rep can't find the information they need in the moment they need it. Without someone watching usage data and talking to reps, that friction becomes permanent.
Moving bad data from one system to another doesn't clean it — it just makes a newer, more expensive home for the mess. Duplicate contacts, inconsistent company names, and orphaned records destroy trust in the data from day one.
One-day training events don't change behaviour. CRM adoption improves when using the system is the path of least resistance in every sales meeting, every pipeline review, every coaching conversation. That's a management behaviour change, not a training problem.
Platform-certified consultants earn referral revenue from licence sales. This is not a conspiracy — it's the standard business model. It does create a structural incentive to recommend a particular platform regardless of fit.
Go-live is not success. It is the beginning of the hardest part. If the engagement scope ends with "system handed over," the adoption failure is already baked in before a single rep logs in.
We don't do 6-month discovery phases. We move deliberately but quickly. The phases below represent a standard implementation — migration engagements add 2–4 weeks to phases two and three.
Before we configure anything, we spend one full week understanding how your sales team actually works — not how the org chart says they work. We interview reps individually, shadow pipeline reviews, audit your existing system (if any), and map every friction point in the current process. This is the work that most implementations skip. It's why most implementations fail.
"In our first call, they told us they didn't think we needed a new CRM — we needed to fix the one we had. No consultant who wants your money says that. That was the moment I decided to trust them." — COO, Manufacturing, Melbourne
Based on the audit findings, we design the CRM architecture before writing a single line of configuration. Pipeline stages, required fields, automation triggers, reporting logic, permission structures, integration architecture — everything is documented and approved by you before we build it. Changes are cheap at the blueprint stage. They're expensive post-build.
Blueprint sign-off is a formal milestone. No build work starts until you've reviewed and approved the architecture document. This protects you from scope creep and protects us from building the wrong thing.
We configure the CRM, build automations, connect integrations, migrate data (if applicable), and test everything against the blueprint. We run two testing cycles: a technical QA pass (does everything work as designed?) and a user acceptance pass (does this actually make a rep's job easier?). The second test is the one most builds skip — it's also the one that predicts adoption.
Go-live is not a handover. It's a supervised launch. We run role-specific training (reps, managers, and admins each get different sessions because their jobs are different). We're available for live support in the first two weeks. We monitor adoption data daily. We address friction points in real time — not in a two-week ticket queue.
The most dangerous week is week three. The energy of a new launch has worn off, the reps have hit their first real friction points, and the instinct to revert to spreadsheets begins. We're watching for it before you are.
This is the phase nobody else does. We stay. We monitor weekly usage data, flag reps who are slipping back to old habits, run a Day-30 check-in with the full team, and make targeted adjustments to the configuration when the data tells us something isn't working. At Day 90, we deliver an adoption report: rep-by-rep usage, pipeline stage progression data, forecast accuracy comparison, and recommendations for the next phase.
The 90-day window is the thing we're most proud of. It's also the thing we invoke our guarantee against. If adoption targets aren't met at Day 90, we come back at no cost until they are.
We hold no Salesforce, HubSpot, or other vendor certifications. We earn no referral revenue from platform sales. Our platform recommendation is based entirely on your team size, sales process complexity, technical capacity, and budget.
The most powerful and most commonly over-implemented CRM on the market. Right for companies with complex sales hierarchies, advanced reporting requirements, and dedicated admin capacity. Often wrong for companies under 150 people who don't have the internal resource to run it well.
The dominant mid-market CRM for a reason. Fast implementation, intuitive for reps, unified marketing/sales data, and lower total cost of ownership than Salesforce for most companies in the 30–250 person range. Adoption rates are consistently higher in our experience — partly platform, mostly because the UX doesn't punish non-technical users.
Purpose-built for salespeople. The simplest and most rep-friendly CRM we implement — and simplicity is not a weakness when your team is 15–60 people and your priority is adoption. If your main requirement is that reps actually use the system, Pipedrive consistently outperforms more powerful platforms.
The highest value-per-dollar CRM in the market for companies already embedded in the Zoho ecosystem. Significantly underestimated by the mid-market. If you're using Zoho Books, Zoho Desk, or Zoho Projects, the native integration arguments for Zoho CRM are genuinely compelling.
The right choice when you're already a Microsoft-first organisation with Teams, Azure, and Power BI at the centre. Native integration with the Microsoft stack is genuinely excellent. Requires significant implementation investment and ongoing admin support — similar to Salesforce in complexity but better suited to Microsoft-standard enterprises.
Built for inside sales teams where call and email volume is high and speed-of-followup is the critical metric. If your reps are on the phone 40+ times a day, Close's native calling, power dialer, and activity-first interface is designed specifically for that workflow. Underused in the AU market despite being genuinely excellent for the right team.
This is one of the most common first questions we get. Here's an honest framework. It's not exhaustive — every situation has nuance — but it covers the majority of mid-market decisions we've seen.
| Your situation | Platform we'd likely recommend | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under 80 people, first CRM, priority is adoption | Pipedrive or HubSpot Starter | Lowest admin overhead, fastest time to rep value, easiest to course-correct |
| 80–200 people, growing team, RevOps capacity emerging | HubSpot Sales Hub Professional | Scales with you, unified marketing+sales, no dedicated admin required |
| 200+ people, complex sales hierarchy, dedicated admin | Salesforce Sales Cloud | Process depth and reporting flexibility that Salesforce does better than anyone |
| Already on Microsoft Teams/Azure/Power BI | Dynamics 365 | Native integrations eliminate the most painful part of any CRM implementation |
| Inside sales, 40+ calls/day, speed is everything | Close CRM | Built for the workflow — activity-first, native dialer, fastest rep onboarding |
| Already using Zoho Books or Zoho Desk | Zoho CRM | Ecosystem integration savings outweigh any platform trade-off at this scale |
| Inheriting a bad Salesforce instance, not sure whether to fix or migrate | Depends on the audit | 70% of the time: fix. 30%: migrate. We'll tell you after the audit, not before. |
Every engagement is fixed-fee, scoped before work begins, and priced based on what your situation actually requires — not a day-rate that grows with the project. The ranges below are genuine: we have delivered engagements at the lower end and at the upper end of each.
CRM software licences are not included in our fee. We recommend you purchase them directly from the vendor — we have no referral arrangements and you'll get the same (or better) price without us in the middle. If your engagement requires custom development work beyond standard CRM configuration (custom-coded integrations, bespoke API builds, complex Apex/Salesforce development), this will be scoped and priced separately before any such work begins. We will always tell you before we start whether something is in scope or not.
Real engagements, specific numbers, honest accounts of what went wrong before us and what changed after. No sanitised client wins.
A $45M ARR B2B SaaS company in Austin had been on Salesforce for 18 months. Implementation had been handled by a Salesforce partner at a cost of $85,000. Adoption at the 12-month mark was 34% — less than a third of reps were logging activities consistently. Monday pipeline reviews still ran from a shared Google Sheet because the VP of Sales didn't trust the CRM numbers.
The root cause: the implementation had been designed around the forecast dashboards the CEO wanted, not around what a rep needed to do their job. Every activity required 8–12 fields to be filled in. Stage definitions were vague. Nobody had talked to a rep before configuring anything.
We started with a full rep audit — individual 30-minute conversations with all 22 reps. The core friction became clear immediately: reps were spending 12 minutes per deal updating Salesforce after every call, which they described as "punishment for making calls." We rebuilt the activity logging flow to require exactly three fields (outcome, next step, next date). Everything else became optional.
We redesigned pipeline stages with objective, rep-verifiable criteria for each stage transition. Rebuilt the forecast rollup from scratch. Connected Outreach via native integration so call logs appeared automatically. The entire rebuild took 6 weeks.
At Day 14, two reps had reverted to working primarily from email. We identified the specific friction point — a broken integration with their email sequencing tool that meant sequences weren't showing on the contact record. Fixed within 48 hours. Both reps returned to consistent CRM use by Day 20.
At Day 30, we ran a group session where reps could raise anything that was slowing them down. Four items. Three were configuration fixes we made the same week. One was a management behaviour change we coached the VP of Sales through: stop asking for numbers not in the CRM, full stop.
At Day 90, the pipeline review ran entirely inside Salesforce for the first time. The VP of Sales closed the Google Sheet.
The system we built is less feature-rich than what the previous partner built. It does fewer things. It does the things that matter well, and it asks less of the people using it. That tradeoff — capability for usability — is the right one for a 22-person sales team. Any consultant who tells you otherwise is probably selling you features you won't use.
"I've managed sales teams for 22 years. I've been through three CRM implementations. This was the first one where I wasn't apologising to my reps six months later. The difference was that RevOps Central stayed. They were there at week eight when two reps started slipping back to spreadsheets. They spotted it before I did."
A Melbourne-based industrial equipment distributor had been operating without a CRM since founding. Deals were tracked in a combination of Excel, a shared Outlook calendar, and the institutional memory of five senior reps who had been with the business for more than a decade. The General Manager had no pipeline visibility and could not reliably forecast revenue more than 4 weeks out.
The COO had attempted a Salesforce implementation two years prior that was abandoned before go-live when three senior reps said they would leave if the rollout proceeded. The team was deeply resistant — and with legitimate reason, given what they'd seen of Salesforce.
Our audit identified HubSpot Sales Hub Professional as the right choice. The team's sales process was straightforward (6 stages, consultative sell, no complex multi-stakeholder hierarchy). The GM needed a clean pipeline view and forecast report. The reps needed something they could update in under two minutes per deal. HubSpot delivered all three. Salesforce would have been overkill by a factor of four.
We spent the first two weeks with reps rather than in the system. Individual conversations. Shadow days. Understanding why the previous Salesforce attempt failed (it asked too much, gave nothing back, and was visibly designed for reporting rather than selling). We showed reps the prototype before building it. They shaped it. Three of the five senior reps became advocates instead of resistors.
Six-stage pipeline with objective criteria for each stage transition, written in the language the team used, not CRM vocabulary. Mobile-first design (reps visited customers on-site constantly). Automatic email logging via HubSpot Sales Extension. A single GM dashboard that showed pipeline value by stage, weighted by stage probability, with forecast accuracy comparison month-over-month. Built in 5 weeks.
82% adoption. The GM ran his first pipeline forecast in HubSpot and described it as "the first time I actually trust what I'm looking at." The five-rep resistance group had become the five most vocal advocates. One of them built a personal productivity workflow inside HubSpot that we later rolled out to the full team.
"I was sceptical. We'd been burnt twice before. What got me was that in our first call, they told us they didn't think we needed a new CRM — we needed to fix the process first. Then they came and sat with my reps for two weeks before touching the system. That's not what consultants do. That's what it should look like."
A Denver-based technology services company had outgrown Pipedrive. The marketing team had grown to 6 people running independent campaigns with no visibility into sales pipeline. There was no unified view of a contact's journey from marketing lead to closed customer. The sales team had 4 years of deal history in Pipedrive, including notes, email threads, and activity logs that were critical for account management.
Their biggest fear: losing the institutional knowledge stored in Pipedrive's note fields. Some deals had 80+ notes from over 3 years of relationship-building. This wasn't just data — it was account context that reps depended on daily.
We began with a full data audit of the Pipedrive instance: 4,200 contacts, 890 organisations, 1,400 deals (open and closed), and 28,000 notes and activity records. First step was a quality audit: 340 duplicate contacts identified and merged pre-migration. 180 contacts with no activity in 4+ years archived rather than migrated. Deal associations cleaned up — 12% had no linked contact, which would have caused orphaned records in HubSpot.
Custom field mapping between Pipedrive and HubSpot was the most complex part. Pipedrive's custom fields don't map directly to HubSpot's data model. We documented every field, its source values, and its destination equivalent. For 8 custom fields with no HubSpot equivalent, we built custom properties before migration. Notes were migrated as engagement records with original timestamps preserved — critical for account history continuity.
The migration ran overnight on a Thursday. By Friday morning, the complete 4-year deal history was available in HubSpot with all note content, timestamps, and deal associations intact. Not a single note was lost.
Beyond the data fidelity, the HubSpot build gave the marketing team full visibility into the pipeline for the first time. They could see which marketing contacts had become opportunities, which campaigns were generating deals that actually closed, and where leads were dropping out of the sales process. The first month-end report after migration included marketing attribution data that had never existed before — a direct answer to the CEO's long-standing question about which marketing channels were actually driving revenue.
"We were terrified about losing the notes. Four years of account history lives in those notes — specific conversations, commitments, context. The fact that we came out the other side with everything intact, timestamped and linked correctly, was the thing I was most relieved about. The HubSpot build was excellent, but honestly the migration confidence was what sold me."
Go-live is a milestone, not a finish line. Every CRM implementation we deliver includes a 90-day adoption window — active monitoring, weekly check-ins, targeted configuration adjustments, and rep-level coaching where needed. If adoption targets aren't being met at Day 90, we come back at no additional cost until they are.
We track our Day-90 adoption rate across every engagement we've delivered. It's the number we hold ourselves accountable to internally, and the number we think the market should use to evaluate CRM implementation partners.
We're not claiming perfection. We've delivered 5 engagements where Day-90 adoption was below our targets. In four of those, we returned and got to target by Day 120. In one, we didn't — the CEO changed the sales team structure mid-engagement and adoption effectively restarted from zero. We refunded a portion of the fee.
Talk to us about your situation →We don't sell senior and deliver junior. Every engagement is led by Rishabh or Sarah, not handed to a project coordinator after the proposal is signed.
Rishabh spent 9 years in B2B sales and sales operations roles across Austin and San Francisco before moving into CRM consulting in 2018. His sales career included three years as a Salesforce power user at a PE-backed distribution company — which is where he developed his conviction that most CRM implementations fail not because of bad technology but because of bad implementation practice.
He has led 38 CRM implementations and 14 migrations across Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. His primary focus is US mid-market clients between 30 and 350 people. He has a particular speciality in Salesforce rescue engagements — companies who've had a failed or underperforming Salesforce implementation and need to determine whether to fix or migrate.
He does not hold Salesforce, HubSpot, or any other vendor certifications. This is deliberate.
Sarah spent 7 years in B2B sales leadership and sales operations across Sydney and Melbourne before founding the Australian practice of RevOps Central in 2021. Her background spans manufacturing distribution, technology services, and professional services — the three sectors that dominate mid-market B2B sales in Australia, and the three sectors where CRM implementation challenges are most acute.
She has a specific focus on the Australian mid-market context: the talent gap for CRM admins outside Sydney and Melbourne, the different sales culture in Australian B2B (relationship-led, longer cycles, higher resistance to activity tracking than US counterparts), and the nuances of implementing US-developed CRM platforms for teams with distinctly different working patterns.
She leads all Australian engagements and jointly leads US engagements with cross-market clients. She is fluent in HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce implementations, and has particular depth in the manufacturing and distribution sectors.
Every quote below is from a real client. We've included the platform, team size, and context for each because we think those details matter when you're evaluating whether this is the right conversation for your situation.
"The pipeline stage workshop was the single most valuable 2 hours we've had as a leadership team this year. It forced us to articulate what 'qualified' actually means in our business — something we'd been arguing about for 4 years without resolution. The CRM just made the argument finally worth having."
"What convinced me was that they told us what they thought in the first call, not after we'd signed. They looked at our Salesforce setup and said 'you don't need this level of platform — you need a CRM that your team will actually use.' That kind of honesty is rare enough to be a differentiator."
"We're 28 people and I wasn't sure a consulting engagement was the right call — felt like something bigger companies did. What I got was a CRM that my team actually uses, a forecast I trust for the first time, and a GM pipeline meeting that now runs from data rather than from whoever shouts loudest."
"Three things stood out: they interviewed every rep before touching the system, they pushed back on two of my requirements because they'd seen them fail before, and they were still available at week eight when I had a question about the forecast model. That's a different relationship than what I've had with other consultants."
"I've managed sales teams for 22 years. I've been through three CRM implementations. This was the first one where I wasn't apologising to my reps six months later. The difference was that RevOps Central stayed. They were there at week eight when two reps started slipping back to spreadsheets. They spotted it before I did, had conversations with those reps, and fixed the specific friction points that were causing it. That doesn't happen with any other consultant I've ever hired."
We'd rather answer them here so the 45 minutes we spend together can go deeper than the basics.
How much does a CRM implementation cost?
⌄A standard implementation (no migration, up to 40 reps) runs $15,000–$28,000. Implementation with data migration runs $24,000–$45,000 for most mid-market scopes. Complex or multi-region engagements run $35,000–$65,000. All fees are fixed, scoped before work begins, and do not include CRM software licences (which you purchase directly from the vendor). We don't do hourly billing.
How long does a CRM implementation take?
⌄Kickoff to go-live: 6–10 weeks for a standard implementation on a platform you're new to, or rebuilding your current one. 8–14 weeks if a migration from another CRM is involved. The 90-day adoption period runs after go-live. We don't do 6-month discovery phases. If an engagement will take longer than 14 weeks, we'll tell you upfront before you sign anything.
Which CRM platforms do you implement?
⌄We implement Salesforce Sales Cloud, HubSpot Sales Hub, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Close CRM. We are platform-agnostic — we hold no vendor certifications, earn no referral revenue from platform sales, and will tell you if we think a platform isn't right for your situation, even if you've already decided you want it.
What does the 90-day adoption guarantee actually mean?
⌄We agree on specific adoption targets in the Blueprint phase — rep usage thresholds, pipeline progression rates, and forecast accuracy benchmarks. If those targets aren't met at Day 90, we return at no additional cost to diagnose and fix the specific issues causing the shortfall. We've exercised this guarantee 8 times across 60+ engagements. In 7 of those cases, we got to target. In one case, a mid-engagement team restructure meant adoption effectively restarted — we refunded part of the fee.
We've had a previous failed implementation. Should we try again?
⌄73% of our implementation clients had a previous failed attempt. If you've failed before, we start with an honest conversation about what went wrong before proposing anything. In most cases, the failure wasn't the platform — it was the process and adoption approach. We'll tell you whether we think the problem is fixable on your current platform or requires migration. If we think the engagement isn't right for us to take on, we'll tell you that too.
We're only 30 people. Is a consulting engagement worth it at our size?
⌄30 people is often the ideal size for this engagement. You're big enough that informal processes are starting to break down, but small enough that we can design the system around your specific process rather than a generic mid-market template. The scope is smaller, the timeline is faster, and adoption is often easier because we can run sessions with every rep rather than rolling out across multiple regions. Some of our most successful engagements have been with 25–40 person companies.
Do we need to have chosen a platform before talking to you?
⌄No. Platform selection is often part of our audit process. If you've already chosen and we think it's the wrong choice, we'll tell you — with our reasoning — and respect your decision if you proceed anyway. If you haven't chosen, we'll give you a recommendation based on the audit findings. We won't recommend a platform because we earn from it. We will recommend one because we think it's right for your situation.
What happens to our existing data if we're migrating?
⌄Before any migration, we run a full data audit of your source system: contacts, companies, deals, activities, custom fields, notes. We identify duplicates, junk records, and data quality issues. We clean the data before migration — not after. We document every field mapping and get your sign-off before moving anything. Notes, activity history, and deal records are preserved with original timestamps. We've never delivered a migration where data was lost. We've delivered migrations where data should have been archived rather than moved — which is a different thing, and always discussed with you first.
What questions should I ask a CRM consultant before hiring them?
⌄Five questions we'd recommend: (1) Do you hold certifications for the platform you're recommending, and do you earn referral revenue from licence sales? (2) What does your engagement scope after go-live look like — are you still available at week eight? (3) How do you measure success — what specific metrics define a successful implementation? (4) Can you tell me about an engagement that didn't go well and what you did about it? (5) Who actually does the work — the person in this call, or someone else? Any consultant who hedges on any of those questions is worth scrutinising carefully.
What's your CRM adoption rate at Day 90?
⌄Our average Day-90 rep adoption rate across all engagements is 82%. The industry benchmark from CSO Insights is 26% — meaning fewer than 40% of companies achieve 90%+ adoption. We're not perfect: we've had 5 engagements below our agreed targets at Day 90. In 4 of those, we returned and got to target. We think the willingness to be specific about this number — rather than vague about "high adoption outcomes" — is part of what makes us credible as a partner.
Do you work with both US and Australian companies?
⌄Yes. Our US practice is led by Rishabh Soni from Austin, TX, covering all US time zones. Our Australian practice is led by Sarah Rao from Sydney, covering AEST and AEDT. We have a specific Australian market focus because the mid-market CRM challenge in Australia has meaningful differences from the US context — particularly around CRM admin talent availability, sales culture, and the practical implications of choosing a US-developed platform for an Australian sales team.
What if we need an ongoing RevOps partner after the implementation?
⌄We offer an ongoing RevOps Support service — a monthly retained engagement for companies that need a continuing CRM operations partner without hiring a full-time admin. Engagements typically run $2,500–$5,000/month and cover configuration maintenance, reporting updates, new integration builds, and quarterly strategic reviews. About 40% of our implementation clients move into this arrangement after the 90-day adoption window closes. We'll discuss it if it seems relevant — we won't push it if it doesn't.
Tell us where you are. We'll tell you what we see — honestly. Even if the honest answer is that you don't need a CRM implementation right now.
No drip sequences. No sales follow-up if you don't want one.